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.
Monday, January 1, 2007
Sunday, December 31, 2006
Obits
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.
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.
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