BarefootPress

Southern Spirit

2007-01-07T13:14:00.001-05:00

In the South, we cherish our stories. We have a long tradition of pulling them out and showing them off like collectible commemorative NASCAR plates. We are a clannish folk, most of us a blend of Scots-Irish with a drop of German or English now and then. We may be millworkers, or Wal-Mart greeters or laid-off software designers. We maybe doctors, attorneys, or office workers. We might be the first in our family to graduate from college. We may, like my brother, be land rich and cash poor. But true Southerners have a wealth of stories that include personal family dramas and local histories. The stories are passed on like recipes for sweet potato casserole or cracklin cornbread. They are altered, added to, and passed on again. And everybody loves them. They are the true currency of Southern culture.
As a conquered region, still a country, in places, of the bleakest poverty, unemployment, and racism, we are rich in faith. For many, an inherited unquestioning Christian faith runs through our characters like salt through a country ham. What is the Bible after all but a collection of family stories? What is the resurrection but a ghost story to comfort the living? For a populace that believes in a God that intervenes daily in their doings, a belief in the supernatural is as easy as pie. A demographic that can believe anything can believe that death is not end. Those who have died continue in the stories we tell about them.
Sometimes the stories are hidden and it takes a little work to have their guardians bring them to light. But as in the Ouija, if you ask the right questions, each person becomes a mysterious oracle, a source of story and collective wisdom. Ghosts or communication from the dead are as ubiquitous and welcome as lightning bugs on a summer night.
Whether ghosts exist or not is beside the point. The people here believe that they do. They believe in relationships and conciousness that continues after the loss of life. If some ghosts are ornery and don’t come when called, won’t answer the door to strangers like me, well, why should death be any different than life? The Southerners do in death as they did in life. Just as they please.

Fall

2007-01-07T13:12:00.001-05:00

On the evening of October 15, 2006, my husband Andy and my son Duncan and I made a short jaunt to the Oberlin Village cemetery. It sits behind the YWCA and is the final resting place for freed slaves and their descendents who built and lived in the Oberlin Community in Raleigh. On the way, Duncan asked me what I was hoping to find.
“Ghosts,” I said.
“What kind?”
“Dead ones.”
I mean, how many kinds are there? It was 8:50 pm. I brought a compass, a thermometer, and a flashlight. Andy had a video camera. Duncan had his own flashlight. We crunched among the graves strewn with dried brown oak leaves. It was impossible to be quiet. We sounded like Riverdance done on cornflakes. Heat lightning pulsed silently overhead. Andy went over toward Cameron Village and Duncan and I went left toward the new condos that face Wade Avenue. We read names and dates on tombstones.
William B. Pettiford MD.
8-4-1893
1-26-1956

The compass was supposed to spin if a ghost showed up. The thermometer was to register temperature drops. The temperature was not the only thing that dropped. Acorns pinged off the headstones. I dropped into a sunken grave up to my knees.
“Son of a bitch!” I vaulted out. I was so busy reading stones I hadn’t looked at the ground. A significant number of the graves are sinking. Markers are toppled or broken. I lost the compass in someone’s plot. I decided not to hunt for it. Duncan hot footed it back to the car. For fifteen minutes, Andy and I sat on a wooden bench and were silent. We listened to the acorns and the traffic beyond the balconies of the condos. The wind stirred the oaks and magnolias. Finally, I asked,
“Well?”
“Nope.”
“Me neither.”
Duncan had the windows rolled up, the car locked, and the radio on. I decided to come again to the Oberlin Cemetery when I could see where I was going. Duncan asked if the families of dead slaves were pelting us with acorns because they didn’t want us there. I gave it serious consideration.
“I don’t think so,” I told him. “I think it’s just, you know, fall.”

I went to the Oberlin cemetery again one warm November afternoon with writer, Jill McCorkle. We found wild gourds growing around some of the graves. I discovered a tombstone with my brother’s name engraved on it. That was creepy. I wondered if we were related to any of the African American families in the Oberlin Community. What with reading Faulkner and all, I thought it not out of the question. The only vibe I got from the Oberlin cemetery visit with Jill was by an iron fence enclosing the remains of the Howard family. I had entered other fenced off family plots with no feeling other than mild interest. I did not enter the Howard sanctuary. I got a distinct impression that disapproval emanated from those inside. In all my research, it was the only time I got a sense of incipient menace. Jill did not report any feelings about them. Maybe it is because I have Howards in my own family. Maybe they had slaves way back. What Jill did see not far from the Howard compound that disturbed her was three black men’s sneakers. Two lefts and a right. They bothered me too. Why were they there? Same shoe. Size about ten and a half. Why leave them in the cemetery? Why three? Jill told me that she was digging in her back yard once and discovered a Bass Weejan. Just one. It bothered her enough that she wrote it in to a story about a woman who finds a body in her back yard. Jill said she had not personally experienced any ghosts. But, she admitted, since her father’s death she had smelled his tobacco in her car. And she has a picture of her grandmother’s porch and screen door. Behind the door, when Jill took the picture, was her grandmother. Although her grandmother was in the darkness behind the screen, Jill kept the photograph because she knew that her grandmother had been there in the dark. Lately, Jill told me, after more than twenty years, her grandmother’s face was emerging out of the darkness. She thinks the photograph will end up in another story. I will be looking for a story that includes the finding of three shoes.

Metaphysics With Mickey

2007-01-06T12:57:00.000-05:00

Mickey was waiting for me at the Oberlin Road Cemetery behind the YWCA when I got there. No one would ever mistake him for a Southerner. His face is not the product of hundreds of years of Scots-Irish and English ancestry. His nose is too big, his eyes too avid. He has an urban awareness of all the people in a given setting and no sense of the natural world. He once asked me if snakes pooped. “All animals poop,” I told him.
When I arrived, he was pacing slowly in the parking lot, head down, hands in his blue jean pockets. Mickey had agreed to do the Ouija board with me in the cemetery. We decided that if I was seeking ghosts, a cemetery was the perfect place to try to make contact. This particular cemetery is small, cozy, largely neglected. It was set aside for freed slaves of the Oberlin Community and their descendents. Mickey and I walked to the iron and wood bench that faces most of the graves in the cemetery. He didn’t want to weegie right away. He wanted to share therapy stories. He goes to one therapist and I go to another.
“I’ll show you mine if you show me yours,” he said, sitting on dead oak leaves on the bench. “How’d it go?”
So, I told him how it went. He had some suggestions for making my therapist better at her job. Then it was his turn. He said he had forgotten much of the session but next time he would talk for ten minutes instead and she could talk for forty minutes.
I took my sneakers and socks off. I had the idea on the way to the cemetery that being barefoot on the cemetery ground would make me a lightning rod for psychic or spectral activity. Mickey wears these kind of round-toed leather clogs. They make his feet look like paws. So cute.
“I am not taking my shoes off,” Mickey said.
“I’m not asking you to,” I told him, tucking my socks into my shoes beside the bench.
“I don’t want to walk on pine straw and sticks and stuff,” he said. Probably afraid of a snake under the leaves.
“Okay,” I said.
“I mean it,” he said in his I-mean-it voice.
“You don’t have to,” I said. “I know how you are about your feet.”
He has very soft, sensitive, pale feet. I doubt they have ever touched the ground. The therapy rehash over, I walked back to my car and retrieved the Ouija board I bought the night before from Kay-Bee Toys at Cary Towne Center. It was not the one I remembered from slumber parties. That one was printed on a board designed to look like birds eye maple and came with a planchette—the triangle that scooted around the board and pointed to letters, numbers, yes, no, and good-bye. The millennial version is black ink (same graphics) on a glow in the dark board with a glow in the dark “magnifying reader”. Mickey undid the shrinkwrapped box and put the little plastic feet in the reader. We balanced the board on our knees. He sat side-saddle on the bench and I sat in semi-lotus so my knees would be about level with his. We were out of practice.
Mickey placed his fingertips on the wide end of the reader and I placed mine on the pointed tip. In between was the round plastic magnifier with a rod like a skinny icicle to show exactly what letter was being indicated. We settled in to see what would happen. Now me, my experience has always been that you ask the board questions. It says right on the box “Mysterious Oracle”. But the reader took off on its own. That is, if Mickey wasn’t cheating and I don’t think he ever would. The reader zoomed around and stopped at one letter, then another, and finally stopped altogether. The message? “MGRDN”. We looked at each other.
“My garden?” Mickey guessed.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m going to ask a question I asked when I was a kid.
“Okay.”
“Are there spirits here?”
The reader swished toward me, then swooped up, then over, then down.
“3” was under the magnifier. Which was good because how would we get any kind of answer without spirits?
“Can I speak to James Holeman Kennedy,” I asked. “Please?”
The reader whipped around and shot off the board. Uh oh. James Holeman Kennedy is my cousin Jim who died about 8 years ago at 48. My Aunt Teeny misses him something fierce and says that, unlike me who dreams of dead folk all the time, she has never deamt about him and it would mean so much to her to see him again even in a dream. I was going to ask Jim to please get in touch with his mother. But the spirits who were present did not seem to like the idea.
“I think I pissed it off,” I said to Mickey. I was hoping this was not the end of our contact with the spirit world.
We paused a moment, then Mickey closed his eyes and asked, “Are you mad at us?”
“YES.”
“Bummer,” I said.
“Can we get back in your good graces?” Mickey asked.
The reader skated around in loops then stopped at “U”.
“It wants you to ask the questions, I think,” I said. “It’s a probably woman.”
Mickey took a deep breath and lifted his head in thought. He bent his head and closed his eyes again.
“Will some of Jane’s problems ever be solved?” Mickey asked.
I decided to close my eyes too. Obviously Mickey knew better what to do than I did. The triangle did not move. We waited. It floated to “F” then to “W”. It did not move again.
“Maybe our spirit can’t spell?” Mickey smiled.
“Shhhhhh.” I was afraid he would make it mad this time. FW. FW. “Frank and Wendy?” I suggested naming my brother and sister-in-law. Maybe they would give me some good advice.
Mickey shrugged and nodded to indicate it was better than any FW he could come up with. An oak leaf drifted down and ponked me on the side of the head and then landed on the Ouija board. Mickey laughed. He squeezed his eyes shut.
“Did you do that on purpose?” he asked our communicator.
“YES.”
He laughed.
“Whyn’t you ask something about your own self?” I said. “Ask about your life, why don’t you?”
“Will I ever be happy?” Mickey asked the Mysterious Oracle. Mickey’s mother’s near dying words to him were, “Try to be happy, can you not?” He has been on a quest for happiness ever since. He seems to think it is a destination you can arrive at and settle down in. But there is some essential grit in Mickey’s makeup that prevents him, even when he is briefly happy, from trusting it, never mind settling down and living there. But I am not a Mysterious Oracle. So I closed my eyes and only opened them when it was necessary to keep my fingertips in contact with the reader because the plastic triangle acted like a Spirograph on speed, and it was all I could do to hang on. Finally the magnifier showed the letters “G” and “O”. GO.
“GO?” said Mickey. His dark eyebrows met his white hair. “GO?” He didn’t seem to get the answer. Later, I asked my daughter Phoebe what she made of GO.
“Go be happy and stop worrying about it,” said Phoebe. “Jeez, how hard is that?”
At the time Mickey decided that to ask if the Oberlin Cemetery was “the best place for this.”
The board said, “N”.
“No,” we concluded.
“Where then?” asked Mickey. “My office?”
“N.”
“Where?” asked Mickey.
The reader fizzed around. “U,” it said. “NO.”
Mickey looked at me.
“It means you know, I think. You know where the best place is.”
Mickey shook his head. He did not think he knew.
“Could you clarify?” he asked the Ouija. He’s very polite, Mickey is.
The triangle did not move. Did not move. Then.
“CW6”
“An address?” I asked my friend. He shook his head.
He said, “Can’t wait?”
I said, “Country Western?”
We waited some more.
“A8.”
Mickey considered.
“Are you playing with us?”
Whoosh.
“YES.”
Mickey nodded.
“Are you,” he questioned, “a Southern ghost?”
Instantly, we were answered.
“YES.”
Then the triangle skimmed to the bottom of the board.
“GOOD-BYE.”
“I think we are done for today, dude,” I told Mickey. It was about 3:30. We talked a little more and it began to sprinkle. Mickey and I walked back to our cars and said good-bye to each other. I had wanted to contact a doctor who was buried in the cemetery. Mickey and I will try again, this week I hope and maybe I can contact the doctor then. If not, I will ask the spirit its name or initials. I will not ask to speak to cousin Jim. Mickey can speak to one of his dead people. Maybe that will make him happy.

Candy Land

2007-01-05T12:38:00.000-05:00

Last year on Thanksgiving I visited my parents’ grave at Oakwood Cemetery for the first time since my mother’s funeral in February of 1987. There was still snow in patches on the ground a week after Valentine’s Day and it was the first time I had ever seen my father’s grave although he was buried just after Thanksgiving in 1964.
Today I went again, intending to make it a yearly pilgrimage of sorts. I have visited half a dozen cemeteries lately to do research for a school project. In rural areas I found that silk and plastic floral arrangements dominate the remembrances of the living for the dead. A close second is plastic resin or cement garden ornaments in the shapes of bunnies and angels. Flags are stuck by the headstones here and there. There are tiny pilgrims in black hats and buckle shoes, mylar balloon bouquets and at one site, homemade mobiles constructed from wire clothes hangers and plastic bead ornaments. However, Oakwood is in Raleigh, the capital city, and most survivors of the residents would consider such offerings tacky. I did not know what kind of gesture I should make to my parents, what I should bring to the clod and sod potluck. Plus I am broke and can’t go get mums or something from the Food Lion.
“What do you think of silk flowers on a grave?” I asked my friend Lucy. “They look okay when they’re new, but they look really pitiful when they’ve been out in the weather for awhile.”
“I think they look like the tokens of white trash,” Lucy said.
“Ouch. That was harsh,” I said. “Maybe bulbs?”
“I don’t think they let you do that at Oakwood,” Lucy said. “Or we’d see lots of graves blooming in the spring.”
So I was kind of stuck because I happen to have a silk poinsettia in the closet from last Christmas I could take over there. And I happen to have some freesia bulbs in the refrigerator I never got around to planting this fall. My parents have a polished granite stone that reads, “KING” resting on a lush hill of trimmed Bermuda grass. I could drag my St. Francis birdfeeder over there but it would look as out of place as a lawn jockey. I could leave a stone as I do when I visit my friend Stuart in the Jewish cemetery next door but I thought it would just confuse my parents who were Episcopalians. I decided on birdseed. I had a third of a bag of Kroger Wild Bird Food. I would sprinkle some around their grave and maybe throw a handful on my friend Becky who died last year and is also at Oakwood. It’s good enough to pitch at brides and grooms, it’ll do fine for the deceased.
My husband Andy has had some kind of bronchitis for 3 days and said he was not up to visiting dead relatives. Duncan, my son, said he would come and keep me company. We turned left onto Person St. at the Krispy Kreme and took a right. I was talking on the cell phone to my friend Mickey. I asked directions to the cemetery and he told me. Duncan and I were walking up hill toward Chapel Circle where my parents are when Mickey called me again. “What?” I said. “I just want to make sure you got there,” he told me. “I know how you drive.” He’s right, but I just said we made it, thanks, good-bye.

Thanksgiving day was cold and wet and raw but today was sunny t-shirt weather with a Faberge blue sky. Good cemetery weather. It being about 3 in the afternoon, the sun was gilding the stones and warming the bark of cedar and magnolia trees. Mockingbirds bopped around doing whatever mockingbirds do. Squirrels snacked on acorns. Duncan tried to decipher memorial verses from 1889 and 1906. He took a picture of the Moore family plot. It has a pedestal with a bust of some guy who looks like a dyspeptic George Washington. There is a Queen Anne roof over his head. Mr. Dude was apparently quite the statesman and soldier. Rich, too from the looks of his monument. He is just as dead as Charles “Snooky” Stafford down the slope a ways under a simple marker that looks like a marble toaster. Two women powerwalked past us.
“What she does,” said the woman in pink and Teva sandals, “is she makes them all come to the table and eat dinner together every night. That’s how she does.”
The other woman with the dark pageboy smiled at me and shook her head in disbelief at how she did. I think they lived in the neighborhood and used the paved Candy Land layout of Oakwood for an exercise circuit. Hell, it would motivate me to get my blood pressure down. Dogs are not allowed in the cemetery.
Last year when Andy and I came, I found the headstone of a man who went down with his ship during the San Francisco earthquake. That’s style.
“I’m going to have a decorated tombstone,” Duncan told me. “I was thinking of gay guys, too.”
My daughter Phoebe told me she was going to have a headstone with gold glittery flecks and dancing gay men etched in it. We were waiting for our takeout Moo Goo Gai Pan at the Beansprout.
“Why?” I asked her.
“I’m going to be dead. I’m not going to be depressed, too.”
“Oh,” I said. “How are you going to make them look like gay men?”
“High heels,” she said. She works at costume shop.
I could picture it.
“Maybe Bubbles, too,” Duncan said, shuffling toward the Poyners and the Daniels’. Bubbles, not like in soap bubbles. At the gated entrance to Oakwood Duncan told me a joke he made up himself. Here it is:
“When you were a kid, did you blow Bubbles?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, get ready because he’s back in town.” Duncan is 14.
Nasty. I laughed anyway.
“Duncan, I am your mother,” I reminded him.
He tossed his hair out of his face and grinned at me.

Back on the hill I found my parents. They face West toward downtown and beyond that, toward my house in Ridgewood. I reached in the plastic bag and slung some millet and sunflower seeds on lip of the headstone. A little on the top.
“Duncan,” I called.
He was trying to read a verse from Thessalonians with his fingers.
“Come over here and throw some seeds on your grandparents.”
“Okay.” He tossed some and then looked at me like, now what?
I had been kind of hoping he would be moved in some way, it being his first time there. But he never knew them. If Duncan had been moved, I was sure it would move me. As it was, my parents’ marker might as well have said “Road Construction Next 4 Miles.” As it was, I felt nothing. I didn’t feel anything last year either. I got no vibe at all from my folks.
On the other hand, for the past three weeks off and on I have smelled my mother’s face powder in my bedroom. After she first died, my brother asked her for a sign. He had a handheld Radio Shack electronic slot machine. My mother loved Las Vegas. “Give me a sign, Ma. Let me know if you’re okay.” He pushed the button and hit the jackpot. “Good enough,” he said. He has never been to the cemetery.
“Well,” I said. Duncan was already headed down to the car. “See you later, Ma,” I said, just in case she was there and my bandwidth didn’t reach that station. “Bye, Daddy.”
Duncan and I climbed up another hill and found my friend Becky and her husband Jimmy. They got some seeds too. Walking back to the car I saw a big headstone that said, “Holeman,” my mother’s maiden name. Sure enough, there was my grandfather, his first wife, who died in the flu epidemic in 1917, and his second wife, my grandmother who committed suicide by turning on the gas oven. My grandfather died in 1928 of pernicious anemia. Nowadays they’d just give him B-12. Eleven feet away I found my fifth grade teacher. I wished I’d had some Kroger Wild Bird Food left to toss in respect. I stood for a moment, but Duncan was in the car waiting.

We pulled out of the stone arch and iron gate and headed toward what I hoped was the way home. Mickey was at the movies and I had to find my own way back.
“So, Dunc, what do you think?”
“I think you should get me some doughnuts.” He stuck his head out of the window and inhaled. We would pass right by it.
“Why should I?” I said.
“Because,” he said, “I’m Duncan.”
And he was right.

Soul Train

2007-01-04T14:05:00.000-05:00

The Subway sandwich shop in downtown Fayetteville by the railroad tracks is reported to be haunted by a man in an orange shirt. He appears day or night. No one knows who he is. Was. I had high hopes for a ghost who likes fast food and follows a flexible schedule. It was the cusp of night when we arrived. The restaurant was housed in the old brick train depot. It was closed. I took pictures in the murky light. Andy loves trains, so he prowled around the tracks and scoped other buildings. I waited for the Man in Orange to turn up. What I saw instead was a guy with a bicycle hauling some kind of wood slatted wagon. He was pedaling across the street back toward the center of downtown. He wore a silk paisley scarf tied on his head like a pirate and a lush black and grey beard parted in the middle.
“Hey!” I called to him, trotting into the street, “Hey! Can I talk to you for a minute?”
He pulled over and stopped.
“What’s that?” I pointed to the thing on his bike.
“That’s a chuck wagon,” he said.
“What’s a chuck wagon?” So far as I knew it was a brand of canned dog food.
“It’s a chuck wagon.”
Oh.
“You around here much?”
“Yeah.”
“You seen the ghost that’s supposed to be down here?”
He tilted his head. Longish grey and black hair curled around the scarf. He was probably about 35.
“Zoggy?” he guessed
“Who?” I asked.
“Zoggy. A Green Beret. You know. Zoggy.”
“Is he a ghost?”
Chuck Wagon Man grinned at me. “They’re all ghosts.”
We stood side by side thinking about that.
“Whose your host?” he asked me suddenly.
“What?” I said.
“Who. Cares. For. Your. Soul?” he said slowly.
“God?” I ventured.
“Jesus?” he sounded excited. “You mean Jesus?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Your soul is the part of you that can re-invent itself biologically,” he informed me, moving his hands in a circle to illustrate the workings of biology. He was wearing rag wool fingerless gloves. I looked at him more closely. He was not wearing an orange shirt.
“I’m Jane,” I said, offering my hand to shake.
He took my hand and gave it a firm shake. “Robert David Lee.”
“Like General Lee?” I asked. I knew General Lee’s middle name was Ewell.
“Absolutely,” he smiled his pirate smile at me again. He mounted his bike and waved at me as he pedaled into the dark.
Andy showed up. “See anything?”
“Um, yeah. Kind of,” I said. “Did you see a guy on a bike?”
“Uh uh,” Andy said. “Ghost?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. But something….different.”
We got in the car and drove up Hay Street. A neon sign on a tall office building burned the message SELF HELP. Another mystery.

Bluff

2007-01-03T12:50:00.000-05:00

Shadowlands Haunted Places Index indicates that Old Bluff Church in Dunn, North Carolina is haunted. It says:
In about the 1820’s on Halloween day this church was having a sermon and the preacher flipped out and killed everyone in there and now if you go to the church and read the big stone memorial and walk up to the doors and read the sign and do what it tells you to then you will see a man with a lantern and he will wave you on.

Well, I could hardly wait. I sucked down some tea and watched signs for sheriff’s candidates and fish frys speed past. We found Old Bluff Church down a dirt and gravel road in a grove of trees with a cemetery out front. A sign by the drive said, “Old Bluff Presbyterian Church Org 1758.” It sure enough looked old. It was a two storey white frame building with a federal looking roof. The building featured a roofed porch with two sets of steps and railings. It looked kind of like a big house that had been turned into a community center or bank. Dusk was coming on and the church looked like it might indeed be a founding member of the Amityville Chamber of Commerce even as a bank. I looked at the stone memorial “dedicated to the memory of the pastors of Bluff Presbyterian Church. The Reverends.” A list of former pastors followed. It stopped with Angus R. McQueen’s tenure, which ended 1920. The shepherd that wigged out and slaughtered the sheep must have been Allan McDougland (1810-1844). The church looked like it was cared for and still holding services. Having read the big stone monument, I walked up the steps and read the sign afixed next to the door. It stated “Old Bluff Presbyterian Church on National Register C. 1855”. Okay, so I read the sign. I waited for Allan with his bad self to show up with a lantern. It was getting dark, after all. But Allan was busy elsewhere, or the job of church sexton had been outsourced to the Philippines, because no one showed up. With a lantern or otherwise.
As long as we were there, I decided to check out the cemetery. First, it seemed unusual to have the cemetery in front of the church. It might give the faithful a jolt on the way to the service to be reminded of their mortality. Then again, it might, in fact, be just what they needed to pay attention to the words of Nahum or Jeremiah. Many, many of the graves had silk or rayon flower arrangements. Several had Dollar Tree yard ornaments. A few had American flags. The citizens of the Coats area gave their creativity free rein in the venue of mortuary objets d’art. At least two people had photographs of themselves with bad hair and 1970s leisure wear attached to their tombstones. Reason enough to haunt whoever had done that to them. I stood by each of their graves and tried to get a vibe. The vibe I got was one of affectionate resignation. After all, I reasoned, they’d had 30 years to come to terms with it. Even in the October twilight there was so much color and personality to the cemetery, it was purt near festive. The only thing spooky about it was the pervasive sentimental sediment that covered the entire area. While I was pondering the uses of plastic resin (which never biodegrades) for spiritual, psychological comfort, a train of people on horseback came up the path that led from in front of the church into the woods off to the west. Men and women, children in colorful clothes and real Stetsons. The man leading the group asked me if they were disturbing me. Not at all. I concluded that the cemetery was a vital part of the community. A subterranean subdivision with few home decoration covenants. Had the residents been laid to rest in Cary, NC, I felt their memorials would be as uniform and bland as the markers at Arlington. I decided that Southerners who pass their dead kinfolk every Sunday morning, and probably every Wednesday night at choir practice, maintain a strong relationship with their MeeMaws and Aunt Biddys and children who died in car accidents or post-natal ICU. I got no sense of haunting from the church building itself. Strolling through the cemetery was like crashing somebody elses’ family reunion or a church Homecoming. It was a good feeling. Can ghosts inspire comfort and affection as well as fear? Yes. If there were ghosts in this place they had overpowered Allan McDougland, the blaster pastor, with their home-grown ‘mater mojo.
Another Old Bluff Presbyterian Church was located in town. We went to see it, just in case. It looked like White Memorial Presbyterian Church in Raleigh where I went to kindergarten. Sort of a sanitary, generic post WWII edifice, proud to be lacking in any character. I circumnavigated the building in one direction, Andy moved in the other. We met back up in front.
“Anything?” He asked me.
“Nah,” I said. It was getting cold. I stuffed my hands in my pockets. “You?”
He shook his head.
Back in the car, I said, “How close is Fayetteville. I kind of like to check out the Subway ghost.”
“Done,” he said.

Aversboro Battlefield

2007-01-02T20:01:00.000-05:00

Andy, having studied the map, aimed us at Aversboro Battlefield. I can’t find the information that led me to go there, except that zerotime.com suggests that places where violent deaths have occurred are excellent ghost hunting sites. We cruised over Bumpass Creek and more fields. I saw a machine harvesting cotton, ripping it from the stalks and mashing it into a fiber brick bigger than a mini-van. Historical markers commemorating a private home used as a Confederate hospital during the Battle of Aversboro, March 15 & 16 stuck up alongside the highway like signs leading to a yard sale. Off by McGruder Rd. we found the battlefield. I was sad to discover that the gift shop had closed for the day. I remembered that the teeth of dead soldiers who had fought against Napolean were hot souvenirs used in the dentures of living patriots. I doubted I could find Union or Confederate molars for sale in the gift shop, but I could have bought a Confederate flag or a miniature cannon. I thought about how tragedy is transformed into merchandise. I told my brother of my daughter’s field trip to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. “What do they sell in the gift shop?” he asked me, “Ashtrays?” Ouch.
A seasonal sign announced a Ghost Tour, “a living history event” on Oct 28 & 29th. That sounded pretty good. To our right was the old carriage house. To the left, the battlefield. Straight ahead were some sheds or outbuildings. Beyond them were woods and blackberry brambles. On the side of the gift shop was a sign:

WARNING
These Premises Protected by
Audio and Video Systems.
Taping in Progress

That was bad news for me because I had already consumed one half gallon of sweet tea. I had to pee. I did not want to be audio and video taped doing it in the blackberries at the edge of the battlefield. I figured peeing in the scrub would be, in effect, an historical re-enactment but I didn’t have the proper costume. I minced over to one of the sheds. Darned if it wasn’t an historically accurate privy erected by the local Sons of Confederate Veterans. My dead relatives from Granville County fought in the Confederate army so I am a daughter of the Confederacy. I sent a heartfelt thanks out to the sons who kept me from shaming my people on tape and picking up chiggers.
Much revived, I continued toward the battlefield proper. At the edge of the field I stepped down a minute grassy ledge on to the closely mowed fescue and dandelions. A wooden footbridge labeled “Creepy Creek” led to the site of the calamity. I hoped it was for the Halloween program and not some version of Confederate kitsch. The creepiest thing about it was that there was no water in the ditch under the footbridge. I walked toward the middle of the field. Behind me was what I guessed was a tobacco patch behind a twisted wire and wood fence. Tobacco is related to morning glories, I think, and morning glory like blooms wound through the fence and field.The location of the Battle of Aversboro looked like the fields where my kids used to play soccer. I closed my eyes and said softly, “Okay. If there are any ghosts here, show me a sign please.” I waited. I heard blue jays beyond the field in the trees. A lot of people don’t like them, but I was called “Jaybird” as a child, so I like them. They are pretty and spunky. I heard a dog barking in the subdivision that I could not quite see on the other side of the trees. That was all I heard. Andy was taking pictures of the stables and the gift shop.
I moved back and leaned on the tobacco fence. “Help me out here,” I said to the grass. “If there are spirits here, let me know somehow, please.” This time, I kept my eyes open. The fence and the footbridge made the air smell of creosote. I scanned myself for chills or goosebumps or images in my peripheral vision. Nothing. I stayed still and listened again. I heard a boy singing and playing an acoustic guitar. Just in my range of hearing. I couldn’t make out the tune or the words but it was not a hymn or dirge. More of a James Taylor-y feel to it. But then it was gone.
I said, “Thank you” just in case it was a manifestation. I gazed again at the field. It was a field alright. Why would the Yankees want it? And in this part of rural North Carolina what could they have accomplished? There was probably even less on the outskirts of Erwin, NC a hundred years ago. I wondered what some kid from Boston thought about tobacco country. I thought maybe a soldier from Ohio might see Carolina farms and feel a bit homesick. I remembered how young the soldiers tended to be toward the end of the Civil War. Some of them 14 or 15, my son’s age. I wondered how I would feel if my son had died in a battle and the scene of his death was like this battlefield. Especially if my side lost the war.
It was time to go. I took some pictures since my ghost research on the internet included the admonition to take pictures because sometimes apparitions appear on the photograph that the observer didn’t see.
Within spitting distance of the battlefield was the battlefield cemetery and a “Civil War Era Cabin” that had been the home of slaves. It was a log cabin with new mortar relocated from the Lebanon Plantation. You couldn’t go in. It resembled the cabin President Andrew Jackson was born in that was relocated to the Mordecai House grounds in Raleigh. The Civil War cemetery was small and well-kept. Inside a fence of iron pikes stood a plinth dedicated “In memory of our Confederate dead who fell upon that day”. Nearby a fresh heirloom Jenny Duval rose leaned in a bud vase. The gesture of a descendent of a family represented in the battle, I guessed. A woman, too, I figured. A bud vase didn’t seem like a masculine choice. If I had lost my young son in a battle down the road a piece, I would be glad that someone was taking care of the graves or at least stones dedicated to the soldiers. There were other markers that read “6 dead” or “4 dead”. I had never seen such a thing. Better than not even being counted among the lost, but it definitely put the counted in the footnotes of the Book of the Dead. I liked the cemetery better than the battlefield because it looked like something. Even if the slave cabin came from somewhere else it was a visual aid. Then, too, the rose made me think that someone remembered that the Battle of Aversboro wasn’t about selling plastic swords and corn husk dolls. I thought that I could honor my dead relatives from Granville County for defending their homes and family without seeming to come out in favor of slavery. I remembered that some great-great uncle lost a finger in the war and stuck his handprint in red paint on the wall by the front door to the Homeplace so that no one in the family would forget the war. Then he went back to farming.

Salvage

2007-01-01T15:31:00.000-05:00

To research reports of Southern ghosts I went online and discovered the websites for Shadowlands (shadowlands.net) and HauntedNC (hauntednc.com). Shadowlands has listings of reported ghost sites sorted by state and country. Hauntednc is a local nonprofit research group that investigates past and present reports of hauntings, poltergeists and paranormal activity. I met members of Hauntednc’s staff while touring the Halloween event at the Mordecai House in Raleigh. In spite of follow up, I have not been able to interview anyone with the organization. I also contacted the Rhine Center, but the director declined to be interviewed because the Rhine Center focuses more on ESP and telekinesis. That kind of thing. A friend has an aunt in Southport, NC whose old house features a ghost. Ultimately, the aunt decided not to be interviewed about her spectral guest out of sensitivity to the woman’s family who still reside in the Southport area. The Southport ghost is as real and as worthy of respect and courtesy to my friend’s aunt as my friend is herself. The barricade of politeness on the spook’s behalf struck me as quintessentially Southern. Dr. MacKethan asserted one evening in the Southern Writers class, “If you’re Southern, you can believe anything.” That being true, I was open to possibility of spirits.
So, informed and inspired by listings and directions available on the Shadowlands website, Andy and I set off on a cool, sunny Sunday to find what we could find at the haunted auto salvage yard, the Aversboro Civil War battlefield, Old Bluff Church, and the haunted Subway Restaurant in Fayetteville. It was October 15th, 2006. In preparation we stopped by the Bojangles on Western Boulevard in Raleigh to pick up two half gallons of sweet tea. Ghost hunting is thirsty work and you can never have enough caffeine. We drove into Garner and onto 401 South. We stopped at Staples to pick up spiral notebooks because you must take notes on these things and not trust to memory.
Soon we found ourselves driving past fields where the cotton bolls were no higher than my knee. We cruised by homes with satellite dishes---the old kind, big as wading pools, single-wide mobile homes with redwood decks and my favorite sign: Cocks for Sale, Pullet. There were fields of corn, dried brown and crisp, peach orchards, and roadside crosses, where I assume people died in car accidents on this two lane road. Andy pointed out a sign that said,
“Please drive
Slow death
In family”
“That’s what we all want, isn’t it?” Andy asked me. “A slow death. Very slow.” Andy was driving. I could get lost in a locked room.
We drove over Terrible Creek, past Angier, not far from Ennis Road. We found ourselves by the Coats Cemetery. Under the Loblolly pines people were watching a $3,000 brushed chrome casket descend into a grave. Men in suits and two women in church clothes stood nearby as a backhoe pushed red dirt over the coffin. Easels with floral arrangements were placed out of the way on their skinny legs. A Rose & Graham funeral home canopy covered the site. I pondered what kind of people stuck around to see their kin tucked in for the dirt nap. I don’t think I could do it. I took some pictures (from a respectful distance) to ponder later and we hit the road again. Just past the Primitive Free Will Baptist Church we turned right and found the Dorman Auto Salvage and Repair shop on Erwin Chapel Road between Dunn and Coats. According to the Shadowlands website, around 12:30 pm every night you can hear the voices of children singing “ring around the rosey,” a gruesome enough song if you consider its antecedents. The website doesn’t say who the children are or if they are kids who died in automobile accidents. We were there about 12:30 or so in the morning, not at midnight. Andy and I do not ramble about the countryside in the middle of the night. We are too old for that. I figured if the auto salvage yard was actually haunted we would get a vibe, a sense, a creepy feeling about it in the daytime. The wrecked autos were behind a house where, I guess the Dormans live. No one came to the door when I knocked but a visitor had left a Big Lots bag of snap beans on the porch. Also on the porch was a water bottle, a shop apron and a ball cap. Someone had taken a break from work but they were not inside the house. They were not out in the acre or two of dead cars, vans, and trucks either. On the other side of the road, a cotton field stretched as far as I could see. A gravel road led beside the fence that enclosed wrecked and rusting metal. I ambled down the path, noting brown and orange butterflies, wood nymphs. I could hear crows off to the north. Queen Anne’s lace and pokeweed grew in the grassy strip in front of the wood and wire fence. Andy stayed in the car studying the road atlas. I walked a little further and saw small birds I couldn’t name dart in and out of the occasional pine tree. It seemed to me that birds and animals avoid areas that are haunted. Maybe the critters fled at night when the ghost-children sang. Or maybe the ghost-children were, unlike many reported spooks, benevolent and welcoming. I stopped and studied the empty vehicles. Nova. Vega. Pinto. Oy. I was being haunted by the husks of bad car purchases past. Pacer. Whew. Yugo. No way. Someone else could be dogged by those two turkeys. I saw nothing but faded paint and cracked glass. But the haunting was supposed to be auditory. I closed my eyes and listened. A grasshopper buzzed in the weeds. I heard the faint sound of a marching band and a crowd cheering. A ghostly tailgate party. I stood a long time. A wisp of slide trombone. A tiny tremor of drumming. Indistinct voices, but not just the voices of children. That’s what I heard. I had not heard it when I was back at the house so I knew I was not hearing the Dorman’s radio or television. I did not get a chill or feel I was being watched. On the contrary. I wanted to go into the auto graveyard to explore and play. I was enticed by the wreckage and wanted to learn the mystery of each crumpled fender and shattered windshield. I wanted to touch the cars and say a prayer for who ever had been in them when they were squashed like Dixie cups.
I thought probably what I heard was a football game playing loudly from some neighbor’s house. Some neighbor a quarter of a mile away or more. But maybe not. I scouted around the other side of the house found a couple of folding chairs outside the workshop where maybe the Dormans sit of an afternoon and shell peanuts or snap beans and keep each other company. I joined Andy back at the car. He looked up.
“Any ghosts?”
I shrugged. “I dunno,” I told him.

Obits

2006-12-31T18:52:00.000-05:00

Years ago, when my children were small, I took a part time job at The News & Observer in Obituaries. Most obituaries came by way of funeral homes who got the information from the families of the deceased and then called or faxed us in our little cubbies downtown in the Classifieds. Sometimes a family member would call and dictate an obit that included not only when the person was born and had died, but also the year they accepted Christ as their personal saviour, their hobbies, pets, causes, educational degrees, and make, model, and year of their car or motorcycle. Blurry photographs of the dearly departed would be faxed or couriered from the funeral home. These tributes cost money. A simple death notice was free, but anything more than public record accrued a fee. Some survivors complained that the Daniels family, publishers of the paper, were making a profit off of death. They considered it in poor taste. But it is the mission of newspapers to peddle misery for profit and the manager of Obits felt that if the survivors weren’t too proud to make money off the demise of a loved one, we shouldn’t be either.

Working in Obits tends to make you see everyone in terms of their pathology. A long period of children dying or breast cancer victims makes it so you take on an actuarial outlook on life. I developed a horror of kicking the bucket and being listed in the paper under “Other Deaths”. If there is anything more diminishing than being listed as an addendum in the Obits, I can’t think what it is.

The strangest thing about the Obituary page as I typed it then and as I read it now was the placement of greetings of the living to the dead. These sentiments are often wishes for a happy birthday or a remembrance of the death date. They frequently feature Christ-awful poems. I recently emailed my friend Mickey who is wise and inclined to be more generous toward people than I am.

“Do the dead read the N&O?” I asked him, trying to get a handle on the psychology of people who pay the paper to print such stuff.

“It’s possible,” he emailed back, “That in ten years the dead will be the only people reading newspapers.” Neatly side-stepping any useful answer.

I suppose it is just as likely that dead folk read the paper as it is that Saint Jude does. Letters to Saint Jude appear now and then in the Classifieds. Kind of a pulp paper novena, I suppose. Truthfully, although I am baffled by the logic of journalistic communications with the communion of saints, I am equally charmed by the sweet faith it implies. Do people in New Jersey wish the dead a happy birthday in the North Jersey Herald Press? Do residents of Idaho pray to St. Jude in the Idaho Statesman? Maybe. But I’d be willing to bet it happens more often in the papers of the South. If there is a part of the country where those on the Other Side are likely to skim the Classifieds and death notices the way the living scan the wedding announcements and drunk driving arrests it is the portion of the country below the Mason-Dixon line. The Veil is thinner. And God is a direct participant in every aspect of life. “Bidden or unbidden,” as the sign over Carl Jung’s office translates, “God is present.” I discovered that even people who adamantly disavow a belief in God, can be equally insistent on an afterlife and a continuing conciousness after death.
A true Southerner to my way of thinking, Christian or otherwise, has an innate respect for Mystery. In a primarily agrarian society, seasons are tracked, weather studied, the character and habits of insects a matter of intense scrutiny. Even with the demise of the small farm, the advances in harvesting and sorting technologies, genetic modifications and chemical enhancements, a culture based on living things instead of manufacturing and machines cannot escape the ultimate knowledge that life is a mystery. That powerful secret is at the core of every seed, is in the egg of every turkey, and the maturing zygote of the hog is as much a source of wonder as is man himself. A man or woman can make a machine. They cannot make a sweet potato, chick, or pig.
People whose lives and economy depend on the natural world realize, not always happily, that they are only stewards. This is humbling. Humility before the works of creation and death is a necessary component of a character open to the other ways in which Mystery manifests itself. This humility is not restricted to Southerners, but it is abundant here, as common as the pigeons on the statues of Confederate soldiers. Additionally, as a conquered, invaded people Southerners sit uncomfortably astride the fence of pride and shame. As a region whose present and future have been troubled for over a hundred years, an emphasis on the past, particularly a better, imagined past combines with a tribal mindset, and pervasive religious sensibility to foster a belief in ghosts, poltergeists, psychic phenomena, and spiritual imprinting. I came to believe as I talked to people about communication with spirits, the experience of the supernatural, and the impact of the dead on the phenomenal world that Southerners need the dead. Theirs or someone elses’. Most of the battles of the Civil War took place in the South and the dead of both sides are as much a part of the land as the cicadas that burrow in the red clay.
I also realized that few of my friends could be considered true Southerners by my lights. Even my husband who has lived here over thirty years is a Hoosier from Northern Indiana and occasionally pronounces words in a way that makes me wince. Southerners by my reckoning have to have been born or at least reared in the South and ideally their parents and grandparents were also. True Southerners spent childhood summers outdoors mostly barefoot, attended schools without air conditioning, and spent countless hot nights flipping their pillows over to get some relief from the cool side. They are the recipients and practicioners of oral local history, eaters of barbeque and banana pudding. You know who their people are because you are probably related to them yourself. I am a true Southerner, but the only other genuine Southerner who went ghost hunting with me was Jill McCorkle, a native of Lumberton, North Carolina and a writer. My son, Duncan, might be considered Southern at least on my side. Being naturally gullible, superstitious and courteous, he came with me on two cemetery visits. Everyone else who helped me in my research was a transplant except for a friend’s aunt in Southport, North Carolina who would not be interviewed. Andy is from Indiana, Mickey is from New York, Beth is from Manhattan, Elaine is from Nigeria, and Tom is from Connecticut. I’m not sure where Dr. Balaban is from, but not hereabouts. Elaine’s family is from South Carolina and she says she can “pass” for Southern, but it is her childhood in Nigeria that prompted her to tell me one August afternoon that the dead were all about us in her yard. My friends do tend to be English major types. My husband teaches theatre. I can’t prove it, but I’m inclined to believe that a segment of the population who believes poetry is important and literature essential have a head start on the willing suspension of disbelief and an intrinsic affinity for all evidence of the spiritual in the realm of the concrete. These are the people who helped me in my search for Southern ghosts and the Southern attitude toward them.