I was in Truett-McConnell College; I must have done something bad or something. I don’t remember what, but I was laying in my bed, and I was dozing off. Anyway, I remember opening my eyes and there over my head was a hand, stretched out right over my head! Just a hand. I’m glad it wasn’t a fist! I don’t know whether it’s a blessing or a curse, but the hand was right over my head and, snap, it went out!
Now here’s one: When Dad died, you know, he was the outdoor type, farmer, hunter, and all that. Well, you know, Mother had already died, and that was probably the worst experience of my life up until that time because me and her were [crosses his fingers together] not just mother and son, we were friends. But, anyhow, I was asleep here, upstairs and in my sleep, I don’t know which came first, but I could smell the barnyard. If you ever worked around the barn, it smelled like manure or milk or whatever. And when Dad would come back from milking the cows, that’s the way he’d smell. I could just hear voices like it was regular voices, “Don’t worry; I’m all right.” Funny thing, not long after that my daughter Amy said, “I had a dream about your dad, my grandfather, and it was a good dream!” So, you know, there’s just things that hang with you.
I’m not really superstitious. I really am not! I believe in reality, but I also believe in the spirit world. Nanny Dickerson believed in what people would call magic. She had a remarkable affinity with the Cherokee beliefs. She had a lot of their medicines. She said she had no one to pass it on to. I said, “Can’t someone learn it from her?” She said, “No. It had to be someone with the right spirit.”
Nanny talked about the little people. She believed, too, that strange fires would be seen, especially along streams or swamps. She never really put a name to it. She told us kids stories that made chills run down you! Some of it was devil fire, probably. The devil was up to no good, especially in the swamps.
I shouldn’t tell this story, but a few years ago, maybe ten years ago, we had a longtime hunting club near Thompson, Georgia. Daddy had got the family started in it to keep us together. He was dead by then. Anyway, I had been hunting in along the creek, and I was all by myself. We had this old house—two-story house—out in the woods. It had been an old farmhouse, and they say a man was murdered in it. I do know it was full of rats and snakes back when we cleaned it out; we killed a couple of copperheads inside the house. One night, I was sleeping in a room and the steps came down from upstairs and came out in that room I was in. I was in a room by myself. Well, that night I hear a knock, knock, knock, and it was coming down those steps. I thought, I’ll just lay here, and when it got to the bottom steps, it quit. So I tried to go back to sleep; maybe I dozed off. Here it come again! This time I got my flashlight; when it got near the bottom steps, I shined my light and there wasn’t anything there! Here’s the clincher to this thing: The next morning I mentioned it and my brother, Dickie, he was sleeping in the room opposite of those stairs. He said, “You know, I heard that, too!” I never found out what it was. I heard it, but I didn’t see it. To this day I don’t know what caused that!
The Legend of the Deer and the Witch
~Lillie Billingsley’s “tale that my daddy told me”~
There is this other tale I can tell you about Scaly. This is a tale that my daddy told me. He told me that there was an old lady who lived not too long a-ways from us. Daddy said she was a witch, and my daddy said that she would turn herself into a deer. As the men went by to work, she’d see them coming, and she’d turn herself into a deer. And she’d be that deer coming around that field pickin’ along like a deer would, you know. So they got the guns, and they was going to shoot that deer. They went to work that morning, and she turned herself into a deer because she was a witch. I don’t know anything about witches. They shot about three shots, and when they got back home, Dad said that they talked about it. One of them said, “Now, I’ll tell you how we can do this. If it’s a deer, we’ll get it this way. We’ll put some good stuff in the gun, and we’ll get that old deer tomorrow.” And the next morning they did, and they went on to work. That next evening as they come back from work, they went by that old lady’s house. They went in and knocked on the door, and nobody come. They went on in, and she was lying in the fire. She fell in her fire and burned up. So when they shot the deer, they had killed her, too.
“You may not believe this, but they say …”
~Numerous Rabun legends from several people~
Legends are recurring stories told to be true. They begin, probably, as personal-experience narratives or anecdotes about people known to the teller. As they spread from the source, they take on the character of a legend. Sometimes the truth is stretched, but the stretch is not emphasized. For a legend to survive, it must be interesting, memorable, and believable. Printing legends can be touchy business. Some people are offended that we refer to their true story as a legend; others are skeptical of anything less than documented fact. Believe them or not, legends are important. They educate us, they entertain us, they validate our culture, and they contribute to our sense of community.
These legends are perhaps the most intriguing of all the narratives we have collected. There are many people who believe them even though they defy the laws of physical science, but the laws of science never bind legends. They instead are bound only by human imagination and human need. It is satisfying to believe that the unexplainable might be possible.
—Julie Roane and George Reynolds
Light in the Cemetery
Lynn Phillips told us, “My grandmother Allah Ramey told this legend to me about when she was a girl. Grandma Rhodes is my great-great-grandmother, Allah’s grandmother. To get from Grandma Rhodes’s house to Tom Roane’s place you had to go past the cemetery where the floating lights was. Garnet Williams was a friend of Grandma and Grandpa Rhodes.”
I’s just spending the night at Grandma Rhodes’s. Whenever Garnet Williams come up to see us one night and whenever he got ready to leave, I don’t know, I guess he’s afraid that he would see that light. So we stood on the porch, and Grandpa went to bed. Garnet went out towards the cemetery. Grandpa said, “Now, if y’all want to see that light in the cemetery, it’s out there.” And we went out on the porch just to look. He came to that branch that turns up to Maude Fisher’s and right there it [the light] went up. It was just as bright as any car light you’ve ever seen. You could see the shadow of the leaves all up and down the porch. Garnet, he’s scared to death, but he knowed he had to go home. So Grandma Rhodes said, “Garnet, why if you see anything, why, holler when you get out there.” Garnet said that he would. He got down nearly to the cemetery and said, “I don’t see nothing, Mrs. Rhodes,” and we just went back in the house. And boy, when that happened, the light come down the bank on Garnet, and boy, he just run till he got home, and he run again’ the door. Mrs. Williams said, “What’n the world’s the matter?” She said he just run out o’ breath.
But it won’t cross through water, though; it won’t cross the branch. It just went as far as Tom Roane’s. Mama lived there for years and she never did see it, but Gertrude did. It was a big light and there was a little one behind it. One night Virge Burton had blood poison, and they sent the Fisher boys down that road. That light got after them, and they come back to Grandma Rhodes’s to call the doctor. They saw it as they went on, but they never saw it no more. Oh, they say a bunch of people seen that light. Papa said it was a mineral light. But it looked scary.
One night, Ernest was a-comin’ to Grandma Rhodes’s to get his hair cut. He’s gonna ride down there and put his horse in a stable and stay till the next morning and go on back home. When he come over the top of the hill at Tom Rich’s, why he seen that light coming out of the cemetery. He thought it was the Greens fox huntin’. So he got up there even with the cemetery, and that mare started jumpin’ up and down and wouldn’t go no further. Ernest turned and went back down to Tom Rich’s to get Fred Henry to come back with him. Ernest had nothing to drink or nothin’, but they never seen it as they come back.
Papa said it was some kind of mineral in the ground and when it got damp, why, it looked like a light.
PLATE 48 Abandoned homesites are fertile ground for the growth of spooky tales.
The Witch’s Grave
A student in our school told the folklore class about the witch’s grave.
Where Lake Burton is now, there used to be the town of Burton, and to build the lake they had to move the whole town. There was churches and graveyards and things, so they had to dig up the graveyards and move all of the bodies to another graveyard. Redo ’em, you know, re-dig ’em. And a lot of people who knew people there, that were buried there, had kinfolks there, really protested. And they left some of the graves—it was a family graveyard plot, you know, family plot up above it. And they’d said that there’s a witch there, and that every time you go, you’ll find new flowers on the grave ’cause somebody keeps puttin’ new flowers on the grave, but nobody knows who it is. And they say that you can go up there anytime, and they’ll be flowers on the grave, and that weird things grew on it. Somebody went up there and tried to make it stop growing, whatever it was, and it wouldn’t; it kept coming back. I don’t know what it was, but they say that the woman that’s buried is a witch.
The Big Shadow
One night, as a result of boredom, Julie Roane took a hike with her family. I think she might think twice before doing this again!
Last summer my dad, my uncle, and a bunch of us kids got together and were going on a nighttime hike. We didn’t leave until about twelve o’clock that night. We walked the lines of our property, and when we were coming back down, we came by the pond over behind the Negro graveyard. We heard a big gushing sound. There was a big shadow of a big bird on the ground, but when we looked up nothing was there.
The Car That Rolls on Level Ground
Frank Miller wonders if you have ever parked your car on level ground and had something strange like this happen.
There’s a place somewheres, I don’t know where at, where you can park your car at night, and when you cut your lights off, something comes around and pecks at your windshield. You can put your emergency brake on or anything, and your car will roll from a level place. It scares you, too, they say, but it’s never happened to me.
The Tale of the Haunted House
Billy Joe Stiles tell us about the ghost in Clayton. Or was it really a ghost?
Just outside of Clayton there’s this old house that’s been abandoned for several years, covered up with kudzu. This house is supposed to have ghosts in it or haunted or something like that. You can hear chains rattling at certain times of night.
One morning a man got up, found out that he didn’t have any flour for breakfast, so his dear wife sent him out to town to get a fifty-pound sack of flour. So it was kinda drizzling and one of those mornings he didn’t much want to be out. So he put on his big slicker coat, walked to town, and got fifty pounds and put an old piece of cloth or something on it, a rag of some kind to keep it dry. And as he started back home, he had to walk by this haunted house. It was one of those mornings. His old lantern had gone out, so he was stumbling up the road to get home. His wife was patiently waiting at home to make biscuits. He looked across the road, and he saw a fellow coming by; it was his neighbor, John. Well, being a good neighbor, he hollered out, “Hey, John.” Well, John was very scary and very superstitious. He had heard that this house was haunted. Here John peeped across the fog and saw a big black thing with no head, and John broke to a run; as he run, his neighbor kept hollering, “Hey, come back here, John; help me, John.” The more the ghost (supposed to be the ghost) hollered, the faster John ran.
As time went by, this fellow didn’t say a word. One morning he was out in town talking to John about the tale of the haunted house, about seven o’clock in the morning when he started for work. Now this is the way, a lot of ways, tales got started. All that ghost was, was John’s neighbor trying to be kind to him. He never did convince John that that house was not haunted and wasn’t full of black ghosts.
The Faucet That Drips Blood
Helen Craig tells us about a house on Hellcat Creek that she once lived in. She said it dripped blood from the faucets.
There was this couple and they got in a fight, and his wife killed him and, now, like late at midnight, you can go in there and turn the faucet on and it drips blood. It was in Mountain City on Hellcat Road, but they tore it down. I’m not sure that it would really happen because I never got up and tried it.
The Ghost at Wall’s Mill
Ricky Justus tells us about the old ghost house at Wall’s Mill. He said his grandparents lived in this house.
Well, my grandpa and grandma, back in the thirties, lived in the old ghost house down at Wall’s Mill. They gave it the name “ghost house” on account of there was a man killed hisself in the bedroom of the house. My grandma said after they moved into there, she went in to find an old patched quilt or something to cover up with, for it was in the wintertime, and it was cold as blue blazes. She said she went in there, and blood was just all over the walls and floors, and what was left of that old bed was rotten and falling all to pieces.
That night, my uncle and aunt, Ump and Grace, and one or two of their younguns had to spend the night. I forgot the reason. They spent the night and slept beside the bed where my grandpa and grandma slept. They made them a pallet on the floor beside the bed and slept there. Along over in the morning about two or three o’clock, gettin’ up toward daylight, they heard a racket that sounded just like a man walking around in bare feet—sock feet, you know, on those rough pine floors and them boards a-crackin’.
Grandma said along about crack of daylight, they heard a man saying, “I want my house.” She believes it and it woke Uncle Ump up, too—that man walking around pecking on the walls saying, “I want my house,” and so Uncle Ump said, “Ah, if you wait till morning, I’ll give the d——thing to you.”
Bloodstains That Won’t Go Away
We collected this legend about a father who killed his son because of the way he treated his mother.
I’ve heard this story a many of times. Well, you know over there where Tom Brown and Tee-bone lives? That man shot his boy because he had been drinking and been jumping on his mama. His daddy finally got tired of it and just shot him. The boy was eighteen years old. He shot him on the porch of that old store building, and right there, every time it rains, there will be a thing come up like oil. You know how oil comes up in rain and beads? Blood comes up where that boy lay and died, but that one up there at Franklin, they never did find out who killed that woman. They could paint and sandpaper the walls and everything, but they said that blood just comes up in spots—just like it come plumb through the boards.
The Mysterious Man
Bessie Stancil tells us about a mysterious man who was walking out of the graveyard.
This old man was going by the graveyard one night, and he was going alone. This here man came on down to the road. He looked, and then he went walking up to the side of his wagon. He had a basket on this arm and a head in the basket.
The Headless Woman
Lisa Lovell, a folklore student, heard this legend from Terry Benfield, who heard it from someone else.
I heard there was a headless woman in Roane Cemetery. At certain times of the year, she would come around and ask people for a pail of water from their well.
Glassy Mountain Ghost
How would you like to be looking up on a mountain some night and see a light come gliding off? Ricky Hopkins actually saw this.
There used to be a boy that would fly off the mountain on a glider. He was killed out in Utah. On a full moon you can see a light up on the cliffs. About twelve o’clock or twelve thirty you can see a light fly off the mountain, and a 360 kite will land in the field down below there. Sometimes if he doesn’t land there, it just keeps going till it’s out of sight. I have seen the kite flying and the light, but it didn’t scare me because I didn’t know what it was. The last time I saw it wa
s about the middle of last fall. He makes a screaming and squawking sound, but I don’t know what it hollers like. When we saw it, we were supposed to have been coon hunting; me and these two friends of mine was up there. We were about polluted, ya know, but we don’t think our eyes was playin’ tricks on us.
Monster Catfish
One of our teachers told us about the catfish that are down in Fontana Lake. Word is that they are as big as a motorboat.
What I heard was that, see, there was a crack in the dam, and they had skin divers to go down and check it. And when they went down, they came back immediately. They said there was catfish down there the size of boats, motorboats, and that they wouldn’t go back down again. You know, that’s what I’ve heard and that’s what several people have told me. I don’t know. It may not be the truth.
One time I hung something at Fontana Lake; I don’t know what it was, could have been a turtle, mud turtle, or something because we were in the boat. We were anchored out in the lake, and I was fishing. All of a sudden, then, the whole boat started moving with the anchor on it! I ain’t kidding you; you can ask the guy I was with; he was there. He couldn’t believe it. And the whole boat just started moving; then, all of a sudden—pong—he broke my line. I thought I was hung all that time until it started moving. That’s about twenty-eight miles from the dam. You know, at the dam, I don’t know the exact figures, I think from the top of the dam to the bottom it’s eight hundred feet, but usually it’s about halfway up—the water—so you know it’s like four hundred feet or something like that. Myself, I can believe it because you know if there’s that much water, that depth, there could be fish that big. If there’s one that big at the end where we were fishing, there could just as well be one at the dam that large, or larger than that (that’s what I’m saying). I know one thing, they keep the dam closed. You know, it’s a road that goes across, and every time I’ve been over there it’s been closed. And I don’t know if it’s because of the catfish that they can’t get the crack fixed.
The Foxfire 45th Anniversary Book Page 24