He said, “Mommy, are you in the bed?” And she said, “Yeah.” Said, “What’s the matter?” He said, “Well, I thought that was you a-sittin’ out there on the banister.” Said, “There’s this woman sittin’ out there where you’ve got that quilt spread across the banisters.” And she said, “No, I’ve not been out.” And she got up and they both went out on the porch, and it wadn’t there anymore. He said it looked just like Momma sittin’ there with her apron on. The moon was kindly shining, and he couldn’t tell how she was dressed, but…
And another time, when they didn’t anybody live in the house, there was some men a-comin’ up the road from way down on a place they called Persimmon. They was a-ridin’ around this little crooked road, and it was gettin’ just nearly dusky dark, and they seen a woman a-sittin’ out there on the fence. They said when they got up close to her, why she got up and went towards the house. She had on a black dress trimmed in pink, and she sit down on the porch, and they rode on by and she was still sittin’ on the porch, but they wadn’t nobody lived there and hadn’t been in a pretty good long time.
“Our cemetery is haunted. Did you know it?”
~Louise Tabor relates a tale for Halloween~
This story was told at Halloween. It could have been fiction, or it could have been true. A lot of tales had been told of a big man, with a hook on one side instead of an arm, who scared young people parked on a mountain called Lover’s Leap. One or two had been killed. One night a couple was parked up there. All at once the girl screamed and said, “Get me away from here!” The boy didn’t stop to ask questions but started the motor and zoomed away. When they reached the girl’s home, she got out of the car and looked at the door. There was a hook grasping the latch that opened the door, and the door was scratched.
A woman told me this. She was part Indian and lived on the reservation when she was first married. She lived near an old Indian burial ground, and people told her that it was dangerous to live there. They assured her that spirits lived there. She was young and unafraid, and one night she sat up until late and her husband was already asleep. She was nervous for some reason and put off going to bed. She watched the moon come up. Finally, she decided to go to bed, and when she undressed and got into bed, she was careful not to awaken her husband. She laid down on the edge of the bed on her back, and when her eyes became accustomed to the darkness, she looked around the room and the moonlight made it bright. Out of the corner of her eye she glimpsed movement and turned her head and saw a man standing beside her with an arm upraised, and in his hand was a large knife that glittered in the moonlight. The scream she loosed raised her husband from the bed. As he was levitated, he grabbed her by the arm and dragged her out of the house. There was no sign of the man in the house, but they would not go back in there. They went and stayed with some of the family, and the next day when the sun was shining, the man went back and loaded the household goods on a borrowed wagon and moved them away from there.
My aunt Ellie lived in a house that was supposed to be haunted. By what, they knew not, because they had heard nothing. One night all the family went to church, except Aunt Ellie. She didn’t feel like going. She was sitting in the living room, sewing, and she heard a noise on the stairs. “Now, that’s probably the ghost,” she thought. She wasn’t afraid, but when the noise continued she became interested. It was a drag, and then a bump that sounded like someone on crutches. As it drew nearer the bottom of the stairs, Aunt Ellie grew more unsure of her courage. She couldn’t just sit there. The thing would be in there with her in a minute or two. She jumped up, and, carrying a lamp, she hurried to the bottom of the stairs. There she saw a great rat dragging an ear of popcorn down the stairs. It wasn’t told whether she was afraid of rats or not!
PLATE 46 “Did you ever see a ghost? Oh, yeah! I saw one.” Louise Tabor
My grandpa told us one time about a cemetery just up the hill above their house where all of our relatives are buried. There was a path through the cemetery that was used as a shortcut to the house below. Grandpa said, “Our cemetery is haunted. Did you know it?” He continued, “You know when cousin Jed died? Well, the grave had been dug and left open that evening. Just about dark, a storm cloud came up, and I carried a load of board over there to cover it and keep the rain out. When I had the shelter set up, it began to rain, hard. I stepped down in the grave to keep dry. I heard somebody coming down the path lickety-split. I knew it was Wash Gibbey, on his way home. I stuck my head up out of the grave and said, ‘Come in out of the rain, Wash.’ I’ve never heard a man run as fast in my life! When Wash reached home he knocked the door down and was unable to talk for the longest time. Now he has been telling everyone that dead people up there called to him to come in!”
Mrs. Tabor wrote a book titled What Tales Are These? that contains many of the ghost stories she heard growing up. These stories have been told as true and are all said to have happened in the Appalachian region. Here is an example:
Did you ever see a ghost? Oh, yeah! I saw one. I was hurrying along a trail I had traveled a thousand times. The moon was almost down, and there before me was this big white thing. It looked like a woman in a wedding dress. I said, “Howdy do,” and it just stood there. I said it again a time or two, and it said nothing. Finally, I said, “If you don’t speak, I’m gonna run right through you.” It stood there! I took a long run and go and landed in a big Spanish needle bush. It had grown to that size since I was last on that trail. It had been covered with needles, and it took me a week to get them all out of my clothes.
“If you believe in spirits at all, like I do …”
~Bob Justus talks about the “little people”~
I got to looking, and you know, this theme of the “little people” is worldwide. Now, almost every culture and every age, they believed in little people. Isn’t that strange? They call them fairies or elves or banshees. The Cherokees believed in them, and I’ve got a bunch of stuff down here on Indian culture; some of my relatives, like me, are part Cherokee. I’ve got a lot of information from them, and so, everywhere, all these tribes had a belief in little people. I don’t know about you, but I’ve lived a lot in the woods. I love the woods and streams. I’ve met this little lady talking about little people, and here’s what I wrote:
In the Days When Mighty Falls
In the days when mighty falls
Roared downward into Tallulah Gorge
Little people in granite halls
Wrought works of art with blazing forge.
In rock castles under the mount
They lived and loved thru the ages,
With tunnels and caves beyond count
In the gorge where the flow rages.
Rare would men of the outer world
Ever get to see the little folks
Who lurked by pools where water swirled,
Wearing nigh invisible cloaks.
The Indians knew and felt great fear
When the sounds of hammers rang out
From the deep caverns far and near,
And oft was heard a distant shout.
A dam was built across the flow
And the roaring falls grew mute,
Then the little folks had to go
Taking their hammer and flute.
They say when the river flows
Freely thru the roaring gorge
Once more will sound the hammer blows
And bright will glow the hot forge.
Will the flow roar in the new park
And the little folk live again
Like dancing shadows in the dark
And voices singing in the wind?
When the settlers first came into this part of the country, they heard these tales about little people from the Indians. The little people lived in the gorge, and they were afraid of them. They were suspicious, and so there were no Indian villages right on the gorge. There was one slightly north of there in Rabun County, Georgia.
Talking about the Indians and their belief in
little people in the gorge, they believed in these little people, not just in the gorge, but that there were different types of little people. One type lived up in the hills of the Blue Ridge Mountains; then there were these that lived in the gorge, and they had caves hewed out under the falls. You know, it’s a lot like the stories I’ve read about the trolls from Europe that dug caverns, mines under the mountains. So when settlers came to America, they heard the same stories about little people. I wonder sometimes if people, no matter what race or background they come from, handed down stories, whether there were little people at one time. It’s often been discussed. Maybe the great flood that the Bible talks about killed them off, but they claim they have not found bones that prove there were such little people; anyway, I imagined what it was like when the first settlers got to the falls, and this is what I wrote:
We can only speculate of untold years when Indians stood on high ledges and viewed with awe the raging river below and whispered stories to their children of the little people who lived in great caves under the falls.
Now, this is a legend I have heard about the gorge. When the first settlers, in the early 1800s, came to the falls, the Cherokees told them one of their oldest legends. There was a race of little people who lived all about in that region, but especially had their homes in the nooks and crannies of the great gorge overlooking the falls. Many, many moons ago a party of Cherokee hunters happened into that region and were never heard from again. A group of medicine men went to look for them and found a great fissure in the earth inhabited by a race of little people, who dwelt in the crevices of the rocks under the waterfalls. In trying to hold a conference with these little people, the medicine men found them shrieking and making menacing motions. Sensing that these little people were enemies, the Cherokees thereafter kept away from the falls as much as possible. According to another version of the legend of the little people, which was heard as early as 1819, there was a cave in the side of the precipice to which a marauding tribe of little people retreated and disappeared when they stole Cherokee women and children.
Cherokees feared the place. A few years later this Indian tradition was heard by white men and recorded, so this is actually passed on from the mouth of the Indians, dealing with the same rock house or cave. Its entrance was the door to the “happy hunting ground,” for Indians who entered there never returned. Therefore, the Indians never hunted again in that vicinity, and they noted that the eagles raised their young in that cave.
The Indians are not the only ones that have built up legends about Tallulah Falls, Georgia, ’cause the white man came along and let his imagination play upon it, too. So when the white settlers first came into the Tallulah River country, a man and his children, working in the fields, were murdered by a party of Indians from the west, who were fighting the Cherokees. The widow, who escaped, bided her time for revenge. Years later these same hostile Indians came looking for the Cherokees. Under the pretense of showing them the way, she led them unsuspecting over a cliff into the raging waters of Tallulah Falls, and as the last one disappeared, she threw up her hands and with a shriek of fiendish laughter exclaimed, “It’s finished; I have my revenge,” sprang over the fearful ledge, and followed her victims.
Years ago, when Billy Long and I camped and explored the gorge, we explored the whole thing, from the bridge all the way down to the lake. Now, listen, at night you better be prepared ’cause we heard sounds like rolling bowling balls echoing. It reminded me of the story “Rip Van Winkle.”
During the night rocks would fall, I mean really fall, and strange sounds came out of that river, like a knocking noise or almost like bells. I was out in this river, and I said to these two guys, the Reed brothers, “Do you hear voices down here?” One brother said, “No, are you nuts or something?” I said, “Well you just listen. You’ll hear whispers and echoes and bells and all kinds of things.” After a while he came back and said, “I wish you hadn’t told me that; I began to hear those voices!” It was funny!
At times in the night, Billy Long and I would hear rumbling sounds like stones rolling in potholes in the riverbed. Sometimes stones, loosened on the heights above, fell into the gorge. See, they heat in the day, then when night comes, they cool off and it loosens those stones. That’s why there’s rocks as big as cars down there, that came off the cliffs. Even these little stones will hurt you or even kill you. So if you ever stay down there, stay away from the edge of the cliff. Anyway, we went on down … I can imagine the Indians hearing things like we experienced, like those rocks being thrown at us, or that rumbling that’s kind of strange. Where did that echo or rumble come from? What caused it? It did sound like something in caves. No wonder the Indians felt this way.
The Cherokees were greatly impressed, if not frightened, by the falls, and they readily developed their myths about this gigantic display of nature, leading them rarely to hunt or fish there. One of their myths clothed the falls in a sort of mystic, supernatural atmosphere with a Rip Van Winkle tinge. It seems that once upon a time, two beautiful Indian maidens mysteriously appeared at a Cherokee dance in a town near the head of the Chattahoochee River. Dancing until the morning sun, they had greatly infatuated one of the young warriors. They promised to come back seven days later, and when they returned to their home, he accompanied them. On the journey, he passed through several supernatural adventures in which water and grass was confused as one being the other. They finally arrived at a cave in the high gorge towering over the Tallulah Falls. There certain mysterious formalities and rituals took place in which turtles, snakes, and a brother to the two Indian maidens played a part. The warrior showed great fear, whereupon the maidens’ brother, staring at him, warned him never to talk about this experience and called him a coward. Then it was as if lightning flashed from his eyes and struck the young man, and a terrible clash of thunder stretched him senseless. When at last he came to himself again, he was standing with his feet in the water and both hands grasping a laurel bush that grew out from the bank. There was no trace of the cave or the “thunder people,” but he was alone in the forest. He made his way out and finally reached his own settlement but found that he had been gone so long that people thought him dead, although to him it seemed only the day after the dance. His friends questioned him closely and forgetting the warning, he told the story; so in seven days he dies, for none can come back from the underworld and tell it and live.
I’ll tell you someone who told me about the little folks was Ronald Vandiver. I used to sit with him; I would go to his home, and he would tell about it. They lived in granite halls; these little people lived in granite halls, and they had forges. They were miners. They had apparently magic powers; for instance, very few people could see them. Now, I don’t know about you, but I’ve been in certain special places, and I feel almost a chill come over me in places, and I’ll see movement out of the corner of my eye, and I’ll look and there’s nothing there. And these voices, it’s amazing! I’ve heard voices and I look around; I’m not kidding you about this, but, at night, I don’t know about you, but I’ve had someone say, “Bob …” and I’d wake up and look around and of course no one is there.
I’m a student of the Bible. I love the Bible. Some stories about the little people come from the angels, and angels I firmly believe work all around us; I really do. The Bible says that they’ll appear in the form of a person, and I’ve had some strange encounters with certain people at certain times. Like when I was nearly killed in Vietnam and I was saved, if it wasn’t an angel that was working through them, I don’t know what it was. But here’s the thing, going back to the little people. Rarely would men of the outer world, that’s us, our world, ever get to see the little folks. One reason for that it is told, you see, they really live basically in a world within our world; it’s co-joining with our world. I’ve never heard of the little people having anything to do with the big people. They did everything they could to avoid them. They had the ability, I think, to jump from this world to another.
I was up in Cherokee, North Carolina, and I was talking to the head of the Cherokee museum, and we got to talking about the Cherokees. To them, spirits were everywhere. We talked about how they lived in certain places like where two streams met, and why they did certain things like they did, and why even though they killed game, like I have, they would always give thanks to the Great Spirit. Always had the spirits in their mind and, to me, I think—and this is just my takeoff on this—but sometimes where people get the idea of little people, I think they can be sincere ’cause I’ve felt strange things. Anyway, I believe that these spirits are real, too; one thing is the angels, and there are also evil spirits.
If you believe in spirits at all, like I do, the Bible talks about that, although I don’t think that spirits can really bother you. I believe you’ve got safeguards, not letting evil spirits bother you, ’cause the Bible gives you safeguards. I was going to tell you about what I saw: I was coming back from this hunt all by myself one day down along the creek. There was swamps and I’d stayed all day down there. Late in the evening, the sun is about to sink down, and I’m walking into the site of this old house there. There’s a porch and I’m on the old road that went around the front of the house. Coming out of the woods there, I noticed there was a bluish haze and the sun was focusing in there slanting down, and I thought, “That looks like blue smoke.” I looked; I got my first view of the house as I turned the corner. I shouldn’t tell this [laughs], but just for an instance there, there was two rocking chairs sitting on that porch. There was an old man sitting in one, and an old woman sitting in the other, side by side. There was a young fellow like a teenager, and a girl standing beside them. I had that vision, or whatever, of that young man leaning over the old man’s shoulder and pointing right at me and like that [snaps his fingers], all that I saw was a pile of stove wood! That’s not the only time I thought I saw a vision.
The Foxfire 45th Anniversary Book Page 23