When it comes to matters of the supernatural, my beliefs are limited to what I have seen, and so far I have seen nothing. However, one night in the fall of 1969 almost changed everything.
My brother, Jerry and I, and brothers David and Mike Swan, had just wrapped up another evening of guitar playing at our house, just outside of Marion. It was one of those warm nights with clouds racing past the moon, and leaves tumbling across the road like varmints in the darkness.
The old two-story house up the road had been abandoned for years. It was probably built before 1900 and was well beyond repair, and was sometimes used to store hay on the ground floor. The upstairs was a bit of a mystery, one we were eager to solve.
We headed up the road with an old miners lantern that Grandma Johnson had given me. It shined a dim but steady light in the autumn wind.
The front porch planks had given way to the weather. Seeing the exposed floor joists as an obstacle, we went around to the back of the house. The back porch was not much better, but did afford passage. The old screen door was hanging by the top hinge only and had to be lifted and set aside. Nobody wanted to be first and just as certain, nobody wanted to be last, but we all wanted to be within the light of the lantern. Together, we stepped inside.
The first room had been the kitchen with its old linoleum floor and buckling cabinets. Each step sent mice running. We made our way through three rooms and advanced to the stairway at the front of the house. The stairway, just inside the front door, went half way up the flight to a landing where the stairs turned full about and continued unseen to the second floor. Moonlight shown through a window at the landing, just beyond the range of the lantern. The shadowy fingers of a tree limb reached across the wall by the stairs. We hesitated as the wind gave movement to the specter.
Bravery can be cultivated by the company one keeps, and the more company one keeps, the braver one gets. Besides, we had a lantern, so we started up the stairs.
At that moment, the lantern flickered and dimmed. We quickly backed down the stairs as the light steadied and brightened. Panic gave way to humor as we joked about the other guy’s wild-eyed reaction, never admitting for one minute that anyone was scared. We gathered our collective nerve and marched up toward the landing.
Suddenly, the lantern went out as if snuffed by some phantom’s breath. Now, the first was last and the last was first, and whoever it was that was screaming seemed to be right on my heels. We tore through the house, crashing into obstacles that didn’t seem to be there before, but nothing short of a solid wall was going to keep us from that back door.
We burst through the screen door, shattering the one remaining hinge, and sending the door flying. Once out, I could see that everyone else was in front of me. I wasn’t about to look back to see what was behind me. We didn’t stop until we got to the front yard of our house.
Later that night I relit the lantern, which burned without waiver, as it did on many occasion since.
The old house was finally razed in the Summer of 2008, but the old lantern’s failure on the stairway will remain one of this life’s little mysteries.
I think it’s safe to say that most everybody is afraid of something to some degree, and it really doesn’t have to be a genuinely threatening thing or situation. It bothers us and that’s really all that matters.
Though darkness in itself may hold no demons, those other things that make us shiver and run can become many times more intense in the dead of night.
One particular night I was suddenly awakened from a deep sleep by the sound of a Weed eater passing near my head. At first I thought I might have been dreaming, but there it was again. As if tethered on a string and rotating around the room, something was making low passes above the bed. I pulled the sheet over my head and froze. Then a thud and a couple of bounces brought silence.
I hesitated briefly then threw back the covers and jumped to the center of the room. I pulled the string on the ceiling light and began scanning the room to find the invader. Searching the area of the suspected crash site, I found nothing. I flipped the sheets back from the bed to make sure that I would be sleeping alone, then pulled the light and got back into bed. Whatever it was, it was still there.
It was a warm summer night and a slight breeze came through the screened windows. But I felt the chill of fright as my hair stood on end and I tried to convince myself that nothing dangerous could have gotten in through the screens or closed door. By the time I had eliminated every entry but the chimney over the grate, the visitor was roaring around the room again. I knew at that point that it was not a bat, it was not a bird, and that I was not going to stay in that room with it.
Again, the phantom crashed, a little closer this time I thought, as it tumbled across the floor. I rolled from the bed and pulled the light back on. After a brief search, I knelt down and looked under the wrought iron bed.
There, against the back wall I saw movement. Thinking that I may have a bird after all, I pulled the foot end of the bed back from the wall and flopped across the bed to take a look.
My skin began to crawl as I watched this two and a half inch near-mechanical black army tank of a creature elbowing it’s way through the usual under-bed-debris. It stopped for a moment flipping up two panels on it’s back exposing wings big enough for FAA markings. I held my breath and thought “uh-oh.”
I became airborne about the same time as the bug. He continued zooming the room as I flew off the front porch.
A short time later when it crashed again, I crept back into the house and covered it with a coffee can but couldn’t bring myself to attempt to scoop it up. I tried to sleep but kept hearing the can being pushed across the floor. Eventually, I set my shoe on the can and tried to get some sleep.
I don’t recall what became of the night visitor in the morning though I am certain that he was somehow evicted.
It had been a long night for both of us. He had been trapped in a small round room reeking of coffee, living the nightmare that he might never get out, while I lay awake listening, desperately afraid that he would.
Despite popular belief, fishing is not entirely about fish. Fishing is about the experience or in my case, the perceived experience. Some days I can catch about as many fish while casting in my own back yard. I can live with that, as long as I don’t lose too many lures.
State records being removed from my expectations, I took a day off and headed for the lake. In Suwanee I made a stop at one of the local bait shops to get my annual fishing license and an essential chocolate cupcake.
A drive-by census of my regular fishing spots ended me up below Kentucky Dam with the snaggers and the bucket packers. The Fish and Wildlife man was standing at the top of the steps leading down to the water so I asked him as I approached if he was checking fishing licenses. I had just invested $15 dollars for my orange card, the least he could have done was look at it.
But, “No,” he said, “I’m doing a survey on krill, I may want to talk to you when you come back up.” I said “Okay,” and continued down the steps.
“Krill?” I thought, looking at my 6 pound test line, “Isn’t that something that whales eat?”
I’d heard the name and probably seen the fish but I was among seasoned fisherman and this was not the time or the place to show your ignorance. I figured I’d look it up when I got home and then I could pretend I knew it all along.
I made my way down the long stairway to the waterline where it was more-or-less elbow-to-elbow fishing. I have a real problem with #8 treble hooks whizzing by my ear so I moved some seventy-five feet down stream from the nearest snagger and laid claim to a small group of semi-flat-topped rocks.
I flipped a brand new green and orange spinner out into the swirling waters and almost immediately the line back lashed on the real. The lure sank to the bottom as I untangled the mess. This was the death sentence for the lure as I snapped off the line.
I sat down on the least pointed rock I could find, not recently painted by water birds, and replaced the line on the real.
While everyone else fished and the wildlife man did his survey, I inventoried my tackle box, and found that all of last years’ empty bait packages were still there. The white jigs I had bought in September were now orange having rusted in the bottom of the box. They would have been handy right then, but I tied on yet another brand new spinner bait and continued casting for half an hour or so, with barely a bite.
Following a cast, I pulled up the slack and felt stiff resistance at the other end. It was heavy, I estimated probably 500 pounds of trophy limestone. I was about to select something from my list of disgruntled outbursts, when it began to swim off with my lure.
This fish showed no excitement, but had every indication of something large, as if I’d hooked a pick-up truck slowly backing out of my driveway. I held my ground as it headed back upstream toward the snaggers.
The seldom heard drag brake released a length of line making that little noise that tells everyone else, “Hey, look at this!” I glanced up to see at least a couple of other guys who had stopped fishing to watch the action. I assumed my best “American Sportsman” stance as I took in some line imagining wild surface action and slow motion camera shots. It was my show now and there would be no commercial breaks.
But the fish changed it’s mind and went deep again and straight out in front of me. Again the drag buzzed as he took the line from the reel. I felt a little like the dog who chases cars; now that I got one, what am I going to do with it?
Again, I took up the line, and again he came closer to the surface. It occurred to me at that point that the lure was only a 1/16 ounce spinner, and I marveled at the stresses that it was under…
Instantly the line went slack and then gave a slight tug. I raised the rod up quickly and reeled to maintain the hook set, when out of the water popped this four inch stripper dangling from the end of my two inch spinner bate. If ever I wanted a fish to fall off the hook, this was it. I thought about the snaggers and turned to block their view of “Nemo” as I removed the hooks and dropped the fish back into the water.
I made a couple more casts and decided to leave. The Fish and Wildlife man had already left so I was relieved that my vast knowledge of krill would not be put to the test.
I opted to forgo the stairway some hundred feet away and headed straight up the steep rip-rap. It’s always farther up than it is down so I was really out of breath when I got to the top, where a lady in the parking lot asked me, “Did you have any luck?”
“Yes ma’am, I did”, I gasped. “I got all of the way…back up here… without having a heart attack.”
“Well, that’s something!”, she laughed. “At least your not bragging about some fish that got away.” She was obviously a fisherman’s wife.
Later, sitting on the porch bench at the bait shop, I turned up a cold bottle of grape soda while out-of-town anglers fueled up their bass boats and rearranged their coolers. These guys were seriously into losing lures, I thought, as I flipped through a complimentary sport fishing guide, covertly searching for krill.
I’ve just finished doing nothing in my shop as I stand here on my back door step and hurl a flat rock to the South, where on a good day with a strong North wind, it leaves the city of Princeton and lands just over into the county. This evening’s breeze has just delivered the pungent greeting card of an old familiar acquaintance.
A month earlier I had made myself a small campfire near my workshop and was standing, admiring my outdoorsmanship at having a fire without smoke. It was dark, but not so dark that I couldn’t see the black and white visitor creeping up from behind my shop. We saw each other at about the same time, so as he broke left behind my fire, I went right to the porch of my shop. I looked back to see him standing where I had been, mesmerized in the light of my fire. He waited for a minute then disappeared under my lawnmower shed.
This had not been my only close encounter of the worst kind. We had met before on a different evening where he had also retreated underneath the shed. This, to me, established his residency, which was total unacceptable, so to quote Daffy Duck, “Of course, you know, this means war”.
I deployed the latest chemical warfare around the shed designed to voluntarily repel “Pepe Le Pew” but was disappointed to see one night that he had brought home a date. This escalated the situation beyond the realm of negotiation as I seeded the area with moth balls thinking that skunks would eat them, get sick and go away. After a few days, it was clear that sanctions were not going to get results.
I toyed with the idea of using my shop vac to inject smoke under the shed from some smoldering sawdust. In this daylight raid, I would need to plug the holes under the shed after they were smoked out. This close proximity wreaked with the possibility of a counter attack by the skunks, so the mission was scrubbed.
I’ve decided to surround the enemy in their headquarters, sealing up the gaps between building and ground, leaving a single exit hole through a small wooden box having a one-way flapper door. This way they will be locked out during the night when they go out on the town.
This is the plan anyway, lined up behind checking the rain gauge, filling the bird feeder and my favorite, semi-snoozing in the porch rocker while holding a glass of tea.
Otherwise, life’s good on the dotted line, the boundary between town and country. Standing here like emperor of all that I survey, I reason that if you have to live in a town, there’s still a lot to be said for living on the edge.
Waving a fly swatter about, with a cigarette dancing on her lip, Hazel waded into another tale. She was more likely to conjure up the memoirs of witches or the details of some local haunting than to just tell what happened last week. Many a tale was told to make me walk faster at night past a rustle in a cornfield or a shadow by an old house. Of course, I knew the stories were subject to some exaggeration, but I never let that slow me down.
In 1975 she was an older lady, but by no means elderly, drawing upon her days as a young girl in the late 1930’s. The conversation had apparently wandered close to one of her favorite fields of memory, and she was ready to jump the fence.
In 1937 the Ohio River left it’s banks and went window-shopping on Broadway in downtown Paducah. The Cumberland was not to be outdone. Homes and farms all along the river were swallowed up in a cold swirling ruin. High water in the bottomland was slow to go down, but eventually the floodwaters receded, and when they did, a legend rose out of the water.
A local farmer noticed that in one of many low spots where the waters had pooled, what appeared to be the roof of a brown bus was beginning to emerge. It was not uncommon to find all manner of debris washed up after a flood but this bus had a two-foot long fin sticking out of it. The farmer and his neighbor made attempts to row out to the object but were turned back as it began to churn the waters.
As the water slowly dropped, it revealed a creature some forty feet long and about eight feet across, easily the biggest catfish anyone had ever seen. It had eyes as big as a softball and black as the night. The mouth was wide enough to swallow a man and was the marvel of young boys who prodded with sticks only to see it bite them off. On one occasion a man standing by its tail was knocked flat when the fish flinched.
Word travels fast in small towns and before long people were coming from miles around to see the spectacle. The farmer, being unable thus far to work the field, found himself busy entertaining and visiting with the many onlookers. He erected long tables for the food that many of his neighbors were bringing. He basked in his newfound notoriety. People joked with him saying,” You ought to sell tickets!“ But he refused saying that he rarely had visitors and was content to enjoy it.
Eventually word reached an eastern city from which two men came offering to purchase the fish for a large sum of money. Again he refused.
As the days passed the fish slowly died, as did the novelty along with it. Soon all the visitors were gone and it was nearing time to break the field for planting. But now he had a problem. In as much as a small dead fish has a big odor, a huge dead fish is absolutely intolerable, and his neighbors let him know it. The two men from the big city were no longer interested in the purchase and furthermore refused the fish as a gift.
In the end, the farmer and his unfortunate sons had to saw up the carcass and haul the fish off in chunks.
I must have been grinning in obvious disbelief when Hazel leaned back and said.” It’s the truth!” She pointed her finger at my nose and frowned. “If you don’t believe me you can go ask…” and reeled off several names of people I knew. I think she and I both knew I wasn’t going to ask any of them to bear witness to any such fish story.
So I took it for what it was: A tall tale conjured up in the warmth of a potbelly stove. I enjoyed the yarn as well as her corn dodgers and apple turnovers.
Years later, I relayed the story to another more elderly lady, and noticed that she kept nodding as if to verify the “facts” as I told them. When I finished, she sipped her coffee and smiled knowingly.
“Well, I never did get to go see it”, she said, as she pushed up her glasses. “But I know several who did. They say it was quite a sight.”
My thoughts travel back to the late 1950’s to the little
town of Tolu, Kentucky, where my Granny, Lil Morris lived.
We were all much younger then and times were so much
simpler. Entertainment was the real world and there was
plenty of it to go around. Life in a very small town can be
dull for visiting Grandchildren, but Sunday afternoon at
Granny’s had its little rewards.
One coveted chore was collecting eggs from the hen house.
Being “first” meant a lot in those days as we raced out the
back door with a tattered basket lined with cloth. At our
young age there was something magic about finding eggs in
an otherwise empty hollow of straw.
Now, a sitting hen was a different story. Looking into the
cold emotionless eyes of a chicken, I was convinced that any
thoughts it might have about me would be pure evil. I
always passed this one by. But my older brother, Jerry
always seemed to get there first, braving dirt daubers and
cobwebs. Then right about the time that I entered the
doorway, feeling relatively safe, he would spook the hen off
the nest and I had to run for my life! It’s no wonder the
door stayed in disrepair.
Adjacent to the hen house was Granny’s washhouse.
Although she had a new washing machine in the basement,
she could still be seen running clothes through the old
wringer. The washhouse air was thick with the smell of lye
soap and mothballs. Anyone stepping onto the old porch
was sure to hear small critters inside scurrying to their
dark hideouts. Granny was always good to us, and we loved
her, but I sometimes felt, as a five-year-old might, that this
was the place where spells were cast, and I would not
venture there alone.
Granny saved everything from used Christmas wrapping paper
to rain. Granny’s back porch and cistern top were covered
with a wide array of metal pans, tubs and buckets. During a
slow steady shower, the sound of a marimba band could be
heard through the open windows of Granny’s kitchen.
When we washed up for dinner, likely as not, we used a
white enameled wash pan full of rainwater.
Sunday dinner at Granny’s would meet you at the front
door with the smell of cream style corn, chicken and
dumplings, and homemade apple pie with it’s dough lattice
sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon. Being a large family
we gathered chairs from throughout the house and
squeezed in around the table. The youngest one would
usually sit on a yellow metal stepstool that was Granny’s
helper, as she wasn’t very tall. At one time or another, each
of us kids had eaten from the pewter infant’s plate that my
Dad used as a child. Granny rarely cooked a large amount
of any one dish, but rather a wide variety in many small
dishes, and always lemonade or Iced tea.
Houses in the area all seemed to be linked by a maze of
deeply worn footpaths. These were the products of careful
treading as the older residents were often seen breaking
stride to keep a footfall within the bare spots.
The path leading to the post office, which was also a private
residence, meandered onto a rolling walkway of old red bricks
trimmed with moss which were cool under little bare feet. As
children we sometimes spent a week at a time with Granny and would
delight in sending a letter home, although Marion was less than
twenty miles away. Often Granny would get a letter from
an acquaintance, exchanging a recipe, a comment on the
weather or a recitation of how a stranger was somehow a
distant relative.
The old store in the two-story brick building was a favorite
of mine. It seemed more like a gathering place than a
business. My Dad would buy us an Orange Crush or a
Grape Nehi from the slide top drink box. Licorice and hard
candy were kept in glass vending jars along an
age-darkened counter. I enjoyed cavorting with the locals,
sitting on wooden pop crates stood on end. But you had
to watch your step lest you stepped where someone spat.
Summer nights always came with the dove’s song, as a thin veil
of fog would creep into nearby fields. There, an old tractor might
putter home along a fencerow amongst freshly baled hay,
leaving lightning bugs to keep an all night vigil. One could
hear a back porch conversation somewhere near bouts in
soft voices that chimed in the evening calm. An old
speckled hound, seen briefly in patches of moonlight
through great oaks, slowly would make his way to some
familiar porch.
At Granny’s, bedtime came early. I would lay awake
watching the curtain sheers perform their slow dance on
night breezes. Tucked deep into the feather bed, I slept to
the cadence of the old cuckoo clock in the living room, and
the occasional tap of night bugs on the window screen.
These are the times that are tucked away in the fruit jars of
my memories, like preserves of the moments, to taste again
and remember.
