Happy Hallowe'en

Three of my favorite real life ghost stories.

As some of y’all know, I became involved with and later bought a 150 acre Tennessee farm in 1969 when I was nineteen years old and I held that farm tight for 51 years until I moved here to the high slopes of Jicarita’s Hidden Valley. During that time, I had three experiences in my deep holler home where I actually saw ghosts, all three times in my upstairs bedroom and always when I was on the edge of falling asleep. I also had an encounter with the ghost of Miz Bet Kelley, that farm’s nine decade matron and my guardian angel, who tried her best to keep me out of trouble back in late August of 2002 by shouting in my ear “Tent Boy (her nickname for me), go pull all your cannabis plants!!” while I rocked in my front porch swing, the day before I was raided by two federal helicopters and ten ground troops. So sorry I didn’t heed her warning. (Never again, Miz Bet, never again).

I’ll save those stories for another Halloween. This early morning, I’ll share three other stories of real life encounters with ghosts, two of them in the holler and the third between my Dad and his recently deceased Dad. I hope you enjoy.

Oh, and before I forget ... Boo!!

A hot summer day in 1972 that suddenly turned much colder

My first ex-wife Lillian, my Dutchess or “Dutchie”, and I were still thawing out from our post-college year in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin, teaching junior high and high school kids more than they really wanted to know. We’d moved back down South just for the summer, or so we thought. Living in a tent on the farm where three creeks met and sometimes in what was to become my shacky home alone.

It was prolly around three in the afternoon, hot but not meltingly so, and I was working out in the garden, clothed only in boots and a headband, while Dutchie tried to nap away a small headache. She was lying on the stove room floor on the mattress we placed there to stay cool. And she had almost, almost dropped off to sleep when ... well ...

I heard her even before I saw her as Dutchie slammed the cabin’s screen door. She walked fast, skipped and then ran right past me, her eyes wide, her hair standing straight up on end. I chased her up the driveway and finally got her to slow down as she shook and shivered with goosebumps visible on her arms while I stood there, all garden-hot sweat and warm.

“I was finally relaxing”, Dutchie said, “and it felt like I might fall asleep. I was lying there on my right side, with two pillows holding my head. Then, all of a slow sudden, I felt a long breath blow cold on my neck. And then someone I knew just wasn’t you whispered slowly in my ear:

‘Get. out. of. my. house.’”

Dark o’ night? Dark o’ night? My Tennessee deep holler’s ghosts never needed no steenkin’ dark o’ night to breathe cold on anyone’s unsuspecting neck.

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Four Kelley kids in a feather bed, hearing empty rocking chairs creak and moan

This photo is of Miz Kelley’s house, in the shadows of late afternoon. Overgrown with honeysuckle, a yard strewn with uprooted trees, (though for what reason I know not), the main cabin house stood level, with a ramrod roofline to prove it, until the farm’s new owners bulldozed it after I left. (So sorry they did that.)

Over the years, Miz Kelly raised lots of kids and grandkids in that house, her own nine and some by others, as her now-dead husband Bud had been raised there, the youngest of twelve and the only boy, the only son of Bullhead Kelly. When I first came to the holler, Miz Kelly was in her early 80s and caring for four grandkids, her youngest (Jack) and his bride Cricket’s brood, while the parents did some real time in the Maury county jail for public drunkenness and trying often to shoot each other.

In any event, it was the summer and the holler stayed light late. But Miz Kelly still insisted her grandkids wash up at the spring and then crawl up into their homemade feather bed to rest up for tomorrow, whether they were tired or not. As the four kids lay there in the dusk, trying to find and to settle into their own small spaces on that bed, (Winfred, the only boy, told me later), they heard a sound .... a faint but steady sound, the sound of two rocking chairs on the front porch swaying slowly back and forth, creaking themselves and the porch boards.

“Well, Granny didn’t have no dogs or cats”, Winfred said when he told me this the next day. “and we knew it wasn’t Granny, ‘cause she was already in bed too. So we stood it as long as we could stand, with Sissy poking me to do ... somethin’...! So I finally called out in the dark to Granny to ask her just who or what was out there, rocking on the porch. She didn’t say anything, Tent Boy, for a while. But then she answered, in a whisper:

“‘Oh, go on children, go on to sleep. That’s just Aunt Sadie and Aunt Mae, your Papaw’s oldest spinster sisters. They sometimes come and stay a while, then take a while to feel settled enough to rest ... some nights ... so they just like to sit out there, rocking, slow and steady ... in the dark.’”

Boo. Really.

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The gift of wisdom and new life from a recently covered grave

My Dad was a no-nonsense physician and scientist. He was also a scholar whose interests were so broad and deep, whose capacity for hard work so unlimited, that when he went on stage to receive his MA at Mississippi State (before entering med school at the University of Tennessee in Memphis), he learned that he had earned two.

After med school, Dad returned to Possum Town with his spouse and burgeoning brood to assume his own Dad’s medical practice. But my grandfather (nicknamed “Doc”) was as restless as the rest of our family and so his retirement lasted only a few months.

Both my Dad and Doc were tireless healers who always came when they were called to the bedside of any sick person, regardless of their race or economic circumstance. As a result, both were revered by both the Black and White communities in Possum Town, Mississippi. They were also among the last physicians there to do house calls at any time of the day or night.

When Doc died unexpectedly of a stroke, my Dad folded Doc’s many patients into his own large case load. That is why, when Dad received a call in the middle of the night that one of Doc’s poor Black sharecropper patients was in labor, he dressed, grabbed his medical bag and headed out into the dark Black Prairie, alone.

When he arrived at the sharecropper shack lit only by kerosene lamps, Dad learned that the delivery would be difficult. The mother was in considerable pain and in a panic because this childbirth was unlike any she had experienced. Dad quickly discovered that the baby was in a breech position, making a home delivery almost impossible. But the woman could not be moved for fear that he might lose both the mother and child and he knew an ambulance was too far away even if he could find a phone within a mile of that shack.

Dad labored for long minutes, trying to massage the woman’s stomach to move the baby into position. But the woman’s extreme pain and her blood-curdling screams had her muscles so tight that nothing was working. The terror was contagious and the woman’s family and neighbors assembled there in the shack began to take up her keening cries.

Just when all seemed lost, the struggling woman sat upright, her eyes bulging out of her head. At that moment, when the end appeared near, the woman looked over my Dad’s shoulder and ... smiled. Then she relaxed and lay back down. Her body lost all its tension and, in less than a minute, my Dad was able to reposition the baby and deliver him into the world.

In the joyful aftermath, as my Dad was washing up in a pan of cold water that was brought for him from the well, he glanced over at the smiling woman, cradling her new baby, and said: “Hattie, you had me worried there for a few minutes.”

Hattie looked up, smiled and said: “Young Doctor Ellis (the name that Black folk gave my Dad), I was mighty worried too. I’ve never hurt that bad before. But just when I reckoned that me and my baby were about to meet Jesus, I saw Old Doctor Ellis standing right behind you, looking over your shoulder and smiling. I knew right then that everything was gonna be alright.”

And it was. And it is.

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Happy Hallowe’en. Give thanks for all the good ghosts in your life. The ones who are always right behind you, looking over your shoulder and smiling. Ready to lend a hand. (As for me, thanks Miz Bet and Dad, for always being there.)