The brother and sister began throwing rocks at him, so that he could not land. He bellowed at them and threatened them, but they just kept pelting him, so he couldn’t get near.
When he began to tire, he turned and swam back toward the other shore.
But the current was too strong and fast for him in his weakened state, and he was carried away and drowned.
Then the boy and girl returned home, where they were welcomed happily by their parents. The little boy was called a hero, and the tale of their terrifying adventure became well known throughout the land.
The Lovers of Dismal Swamp
(United States—Virginia)
There is a swamp in Virginia with an open stretch of water at its very heart. Some people call this Drummond’s Pond, but it’s also known as the Lake of the Dismal Swamp.
For almost two hundred years, folks say, it has been haunted by two sad ghosts. And this is their story:
The daughter of a family that had settled near the marsh contracted swamp fever. For days she lingered, while the young man who planned to marry her sat by her bedside, holding her hand tightly. By never letting go, he seemed to think that he could hang onto her life, which was slowly slipping away.
But she died and was buried on the edge of the swamp.
The young man was so grief-stricken that he refused to go to the funeral. For days he refused to eat or sleep; nor would he listen to any words of comfort. After much pleading, his family and friends convinced him to begin taking care of himself, and he did recover a measure of health. But his mind was never the same.
He began to fancy that his bride-to-be was not dead, but had merely wandered into the silent, shadowy depths of Dismal Swamp. “She’s waiting for me there,” he told his friends. “She’s hiding because she knew Death was looking for her.”
Later his family heard him mutter, “I’ll go and find her. And if Old Death comes looking for her, I’ll hide her in the hollow of a cypress tree until he goes away.”
The young man’s family feared that he might harm himself, so they kept him confined to the house and watched him day and night, to keep him from going off to look for his lost love. But one day he slipped away and ran into the swamp.
For a time he heard his father and brothers and friends calling his name as they searched for him. But he only plunged farther into the marsh. Finally the sounds of pursuit were swallowed up in the distance, and the silence of Dismal Swamp all around him was broken only by the cry of a waterbird or the splash of a frog and the persistent buzz of insects.
For days he wandered, eating berries, sleeping on hillocks of dank grass or curled in the roots of trees. His face and hands and clothes were torn by brambles; his boots were caked with mud; several times he narrowly avoided a run-in with a poisonous water snake that slithered over the wet earth.
At last he reached Drummond’s Pond late one evening. A will-o’-the-wisp hovered over the surface of the water, far out from shore.
“There she is,” he told himself. As he stared through the falling darkness at the bobbing light, he cried excitedly, “I see her! She’s standing there holding a lantern!”
Quickly he began gathering together fallen cypress boughs to fashion into a raft. When the flimsy craft was ready, he launched it onto the water, using a long tree limb stripped of its leaves to pole toward the center of the pond.
He was sure he could see his girl, floating so her feet rested lightly on the black surface of the lake, smiling at him. In her right hand she held a lantern high like a pale beacon to guide him; with her left hand she beckoned him to join her.
“I’m coming, darling!” he called and shoved the long pole even deeper into the murky depths. But his eagerness and a sudden wind that swept across the water, raising waves, undid him. The hastily built raft came apart, and he sank, splashing and crying out his love’s name into the dark water, never to rise again.
But hunters who have found themselves near Drum-mond’s Pond when the sun is setting claim to have seen a ghostly raft drifting quietly over the black waters. At the front sits the wraith of a young girl, holding a lantern that gives off pale light. Behind her is a ghastly young man, who poles them along as they vainly search for a way out of Dismal Swamp.
Boneless
(based on folklore of the Shetland Islands)
For a long time people in the Shetland Islands told stories about a creature they could only call “Boneless,” or simply, “It,” because no two people who had encountered it ever saw quite the same thing. When asked to describe it, one person said it looked like a large jellyfish, another said it was like a lump of wet, white wool, a third said it looked like a pale animal without legs, while a fourth described it as a ghastly white human body without any head. Yet for all that people often claimed it had no legs, it could move faster than a dog; some swore it could fly faster than a hawk, even without wings.
It was most often seen around Christmas time, when the nights are the longest, and goblins and other strange creatures have the greatest power to plague people.
There was a certain farm that “It” troubled every year at Yuletide. The creature would frighten the animals in the barn and make its presence known to everyone in the house, frightening the children and servants so that they huddled in terror all Christmas Eve. Sometimes the farmer or his wife would catch a glimpse of something milk-white and wet as a fishbelly pressed up against the window of the kitchen or the parlor. But it would be gone in the blink of an eye, so that neither could say for sure what he or she had seen.
As a result of this mischief, everyone was so tired and cross the next morning that Christmas Day was ruined. The inhabitants of the farmhouse spent the short day napping and dreading the early onset of night, when the thing would come to haunt them again.
One Christmas Eve, however, the farmer vowed to his wife, “I’ll not put up with this again. When ‘Boneless’ comes, I’ll chase it away for good and all.”
His wife pleaded with him not to risk angering “It.” The thing hadn’t hurt anyone, it just gave them the frights. But if her husband made it angry, she reasoned, who knew what such an “unnatural creature” might do?
But her husband’s mind was made up. When evening came, he asked his wife to gather the children and servants in the dining room, with the curtain drawn, while he sat in the parlor, reading a Bible by the light of a candle. An axe rested against the leg of his chair.
Toward midnight, he was suddenly alarmed by a sound like a huge mass of wet meat slapped against the front door. Snatching up his Bible in one hand and his axe in the other, he yanked open the door and rushed out.
There was a pool of wetness gleaming on the doorstep in the moonlight, but nothing else. Far down the road he saw something pale like a puddle of moonlight and large as a calf, moving down the road toward the cliffs that overlooked the sea. With a shout of triumph, he chased after the thing.
Just as “It” was about to slip over a cliff and escape into the sea, the farmer shouted, “The Good Lord guide my hand!” and hurled his axe, which stuck fast in the slimy creature. After that, the thing made no movement or sound.
Not daring to go any closer on his own., the man ran back home, where he gathered his servants and persuaded them to accompany him to the spot. There “Boneless” was, like some large pudding, with the axe still sticking in it.
“What’s to be done with it now?” asked one young man.
“Bury it,” said the farmer, shaking now that the deed was done.
So the men fetched shovels and hastily began to fling earth over the carcass. None of them could tell what it looked like; as they worked to bury it, they got into arguments, because the creature looked different to each pair of eyes. Some were not sure if it was truly dead; and no one, not even the farmer himself, would go near enough to recover the axe. So the tool was buried along with “It.”
When no trace of the creature could be seen, they dug a wide trench around the mound of earth, so that neither m
an nor beast would disturb it. But in fact the people of the neighborhood never went near the spot after that.
In the spring, however, a visitor to the island, who had stopped for the night at the farmhouse, heard the story, and eagerly asked the farmer and his wife for details. Believing it only a local superstition, but curious nonetheless, the stranger went to the mound the next day. He found a part of the ditch wall had collapsed, so that it was easy enough to scramble across to the heap of earth.
Digging with his hands to find out what lay hidden in it, he suddenly saw a thick, curdled light gathering in the hollow he had scooped out. This turned suddenly to a milky mist that gathered around him, dense as a fog from the sea, but pale as if steeped in moonlight (though it was still midday).
Frightened, he backed away from the mound and hurried across the crumbling earth to the other side of the ditch.
He had just reached safety there when something rose out of the hole, rolled across the trench, and vanished into the mist in the direction of the ocean.
By the time the visitor had reached the farmhouse, the strange, milk-white mist had become an ordinary gray fog, and he had calmed down somewhat. He was sure that what he had seen was something quite natural which had just appeared unnatural because he had been more frightened by the stories of strange creatures than he wanted to admit.
“Surely what I saw was nothing more than an otter or a seal,” he said, “something that happened to be near the mound when I chanced to be there:”
But the farmer merely shook his head. “We all know there’s many kinds of life that live in the air, on the earth, or in the water. And we, poor mortals, have not the power to understand the like of some of them.”
The stranger did not get into an argument with his host, though he thought the man a superstitious bumpkin and was angry at himself for believing, even for a moment, such a story.
Two nights later the traveler, who had become somewhat lost, was hiking along a stretch of road high above a cove. He had just located the pinpoints of light that marked the village he was seeking and was heading toward it. He could hear waves breaking on the rocks far below him. Suddenly in the moonlight, he saw something long and white stretched across the road. It wasn’t fog, though it had a wet, kind of misty look to it. He couldn’t see the lights of the distant town any longer.
The whiteness began to slither toward him, as if it were alive. Without hesitating, he turned and began to run back the way he’d come. But the thing overtook him in an instant. It wrapped itself around him so that he felt like he was being smothered in a heavy, wet blanket. It was as cold as if it had been soaked in the night sea, and smelled of rotten fish.
Then he felt his waist, legs, and ankles caught in nooses like an octopus’s tentacles. His bonds glowed like ropes of moonlight, but were tough as the hardiest seaweed. They began dragging him toward the cliff edge, the ocean below, and certain death.
He tried to call for help; but he was so scared, the sound caught in his throat, as surely as if an assassin’s cord had tightened around his neck. He scrambled for a claw hold on the stony path, but his fingernails scraped and slid over the hard rocks without giving him any purchase.
Just as he felt his feet, his knees, then his thighs being yanked over the edge of the cliff—in the instant before he tumbled off into the hungry darkness—he managed to hook his left arm around a sharp outcropping of rock. He flung his right arm around it also, and hung on for dear life. From this dizzying perch, he dared to look below him.
Half of him dangled into space, lassoed by silvery ropes stretching down into the darkness, twisting together into a single cable that linked him to a luminous splotch in the waves hundreds of feet below.
The deadly ropes pulled tighter. He tightened his grip on the rock in response. He had the sickening feeling that he might be torn in two if he—or the horrible thing that had him in thrall—didn’t let go.
“Oh, sweet Lord,” he prayed—
—and felt the thing loosen its grasp, just a little. He recalled how the farmer had used a Bible and a prayer to help defeat the thing once. A prayer, a prayer, he told himself, I need a prayer.
But in his fright, he could remember nothing except a prayer he had said as a child:
“Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep;
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord—”
At the second mention of “the Lord,” the loops of moonlight loosened, then dropped away.
Looking below, he saw ribbons of light coiling down, hitting the churning waves with a sizzle like a candle flame extinguished in a saucer of water.
For an instant, circles of cold fire spread outward, one after the other like ripples in a pond. Then all the light was gone. There was only the empty black surf pounding below him.
Painfully he climbed back onto the road, where he lay for a long time, just catching his breath.
When he reached the town, the traveler was too shaken to do anything more than ask when the earliest boat was leaving for the mainland. He left the next day for London, never to return to Shetland.
The Death Waltz
(United States—New Mexico)
In 1851, when New Mexico was still a territory and had not yet become a state, Fort Union was built ninety miles northeast of Santa Fe, to protect people from Apache Indian raids. The fort helped keep the trails open, so that huge, red-wheeled freight wagons, pulled by teams of mules or yokes of oxen, could bring hardware, calico, and other goods to Santa Fe, while taking furs, hides, and Mexican mules and burros back to St. Louis, Missouri.
Fort Union was the only spot for miles around where an effort was made to keep up the appearances of gracious social life, such as was found east of the Missouri River. There were a number of very beautiful young ladies attached to the post, and the most attractive of them all was Elizabeth Bidwell, the sister-in-law of Captain Moore. She had recently come to Fort Union to stay with her sister, the captain’s wife, because their parents were dead, and the maiden aunt who had raised Elizabeth had become ill.
Young Elizabeth enjoyed the excitement that came from living on an outpost where the threat of an Indian attack lurked always in the background. She was doubly delighted by the attentions the young officers paid to her, since there were few women who were both pretty and unmarried in that wild country.
One lieutenant named Frank Sutter, recently transferred from the east, was especially attracted to Elizabeth’s charms. He devoted himself to winning her hand, in spite of the other handsome officers who buzzed around her like bees discovering the sweetest blossom in a garden.
Frank Sutter’s experience with the world was not large enough so that he could tell whether a woman was responding seriously to his attentions or was merely flirting with him. He would walk with Elizabeth in the afternoon, when the sunny, clear air would turn in the blink of an eye to heavy rain that sent them scurrying for cover—then disappeared as quickly as it had begun to fall. They would sit together in the evening, watching the sky turn red, pink, orange, and yellow to the west, while the mountains to the east of the fort turned dark, purple, mysterious.
At such times, Frank would talk to Elizabeth about many things—but he didn’t dare tell the young woman, whose hand rested lightly on his arm, just what he felt for her.
Elizabeth laughed, and fanned herself, and complained about the heat, and chattered on about how bored she was growing with life at Fort Union and how eager she was to return to Missouri and the social life there. Such talk cut Lieutenant Sutter to the quick, but he never let his pain show.
Then one day, messengers came racing to the fort with news of a series of Apache raids. Captain Moore ordered a detachment of troops to chase and punish the guilty Indians. Lieutenant Sutter was put in command of the expedition.
The night before they were to set out, however, he called on Elizabeth Bidwell. Drawing her to a private corner of the porch, he dropped to his knee
and said, “Elizabeth, if you didn’t guess it before, I’m telling you now: I’m in love with, you.”
She smiled at him, then turned her head away and patted her heart. Finally she said, “Why, Lieutenant Sutter, I’m overwhelmed by the honor you’re giving me.”
“And do you have some affection for me?”
“You don’t even have to ask,” she replied, blushing.
“Then, Miss Bidwell, will you do me the honor of marrying me when I return?”
He was the handsomest young officer in Fort Union, and his prospects: were excellent. Elizabeth answered without thought or hesitation, “Of course I will.”
“But, if the fortunes of war deprive me of life—”
“Hush!” she said, “Don’t-even think such a thing! If you should fail to return, I swear I will never marry another.”
“Then,” he said, rising to his feet and kissing her hand, “you can be assured nobody else will have you. I will come back and make my claim.”
The lieutenant and his troops departed the next morning. On the evening of their second day on patrol, they overtook the band of Apaches that had gone on the warpath. In the heat of battle, Frank Sutter became separated from the rest of his men. When the dust had settled and the Indians had scattered into the dusk, the troops searched vainly for the young lieutenant, but he had vanished. When they could turn up no trace of him, they returned to Fort Union and reported him missing in action.
Other people at the fort noted (not very kindly) that Elizabeth Bidwell, Frank Sutter’s bride-elect, grieved very little for the missing bridegroom-to-be. And it came as no great surprise to anyone when she announced her intention of marrying a man recently arrived from the East, who would take her back to St. Louis with him.
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