“Aunt Viney,” my sister was once brave enough to ask, “why do you always sit in that rocking chair? What if someone else wants to sit in it?”
“It’s comfortable,” Aunt Viney replied. “If somebody else wants to sit in it, then it’s their bad luck. I’d come back from the grave to sit in this chair.”
She had a droll sense of humor, but it was lost on my sister. She never could figure out if Aunt Viney was joking or not, and she didn’t pursue the conversation.
Aunt Viney went home soon after the holiday was over, but we knew she’d be back to visit the next year.
“Take care of my rocking chair,” Aunt Viney always told my sister. “I’ll be back in May to rock in it while the other women fix dinner.”
The year passed. Then, a few days before the next Mother’s Day, Aunt Viney died of a fever. It seemed strange to think that there should be anything, even a fever, that Aunt Viney couldn’t conquer. Attending her funeral brought home the truth to my sister and me that she was really gone. We knew we would miss her annual visit.
Mother’s Day came, and the house was filled with the smell of good food that morning. Everyone was looking forward to celebrating the day with the traditional meal.
There were no fresh berries or greens this time, because there was no Aunt Viney to pick them. My sister and I watched the rocking chair, but it did not move.
Other things proceeded as usual. The clocks had already been set ahead one hour. Mom and Grandma had spent the morning cooking. The table was set for the midday meal, and the family all wished Mom and Grandma a Happy Mother’s Day.
“I wonder if Aunt Viney will come rock in her chair,” my sister said. “She said she’d be back.”
Everybody smiled and gathered around the table. As we ate, we glanced now and then at the rocking chair. It didn’t move. After the meal was over and the table was cleared, everyone sat back in silence, letting the pleasant feeling of a good meal dominate the room. Obviously, Aunt Viney wasn’t coming.
Then, suddenly, the silence was broken by a creaking sound. Everyone turned to look at the rocking chair, and much to our amazement, the chair had started rocking by itself! My sister was the first to speak.
“Aunt Viney’s late!” she said. “She should have been here an hour ago!”
We glanced at the clock, but it was ticking away on time.
“No, she’s on time,” Grandma said, smiling. “You know how she hated fast time. By slow time, she made it right on schedule!”
We moved away before the next Mother’s Day. We moved closer to town, and Uncle Josh was moving to a farm he had bought in Glasgow, Kentucky. Grandma was going to live with Uncle Josh. The old rocker was left behind.
We drove by the old place the summer after we had moved. The old chair was still there! We wondered how it would survive the winter. We wondered if the new owners of the old place would keep it and, if they did, whether Aunt Viney would come back to rock the next year. Would she wonder from the spirit world where the family had all gone? Or would she have any sense of time passing from where she was on the other side? We never learned the answers to those questions, but we believe that wherever she is, Aunt Viney rocks!
Lena and the Lilacs
Lonnie tells a story from his boyhood about a woman who loved lilacs.
When I was young, Mom and Dad bought a house near the Miller Fields in Adair County. It hadn’t been occupied for a year or two, but it was in good condition. A good cleaning and some paint were all it needed. My mom, Lena Brown, thought the yard also needed some flowers for color. The house demanded her attention first, though. It was early spring and she would have time later to plant some flowers.
She assigned easy chores for us children, while she and Dad tackled the more difficult things. Dad was busy with planting, while Mom cleaned the house and painted the walls. We helped by doing dishes after meals, washing windows, sweeping the floors, and cleaning up the yard.
Everyone noticed that the previous owners had dug up their favorite bushes and took them along to replant when they moved. The yard looked drab without anything growing. Mom was giving some thought to what she would like to plant. She was still undecided when something happened to influence her decision.
The first week we lived in the house, Mom began to smell the strong scent of lilacs in the kitchen. She mentioned it at supper, and we smelled it, too.
“Where’s that coming from?” Dad wanted to know.
No one had the answer. There were no lilacs in the yard, and Mom and the girls didn’t wear perfume.
“If there has to be a scent in the house,” Mom said, “I am glad it’s something nice like lilacs! I’ve always liked them. My mother always grew them in our yard.”
The smell of lilacs continued.
Mother’s Day was approaching and we were trying to think of something to get for Mom.
“How about getting her some lilac bushes to plant?” Dad suggested. “They could be a gift from all of you.”
“Perfect!” we all agreed.
Dad volunteered to pick up the lilac bushes for us when he was in town, and we surprised Mom with them on Mother’s Day morning. She was delighted!
“You couldn’t have gotten me anything I would have liked better,” she said.
We all went outside to watch and help with the planting. Mom planted them up next to the road where old bushes had been. Just as we finished, we saw a car coming down the road. It was unusual for cars to come down our road because our house was set back from the main highway, so we all were interested to see who it was.
The car drove slowly by, and then stopped, backed up, and stopped again. A young woman got out and walked, smiling, toward us. She introduced herself as someone who used to live in our house.
“My mother loved this house,” she said. “We had to move away because my father got a good job elsewhere and couldn’t afford to turn it town. My mother grew lilacs along the road. She dug them up and took them with us when we moved. She planted lilacs on Mother’s Day last year. She always missed this place, though, and wished that she could come back for a visit.”
“That would have been nice,” Mom said.
“My mother died a few weeks ago,” the young woman said. “I am down here visiting some relatives and I thought I’d drive by the old place one more time. When I saw you planting lilacs, I had to stop. Mother would have been so happy to know that lilacs are growing here again!”
“I think she knows,” Mom told her. She told the visitor how we had smelled lilacs ever since we moved in, and how that had influenced our choice of what to plant.
The young lady was pleased to hear the story. She thanked us, said good-bye, and drove away.
We went back inside the house, and, to our amazement, the scent of lilacs had vanished! We never smelled lilacs in the house again, but we always enjoyed their scent along the road.
Mom always felt that the visitor’s mother did come back to the house one last time. She made her presence known by the scent of lilacs and gave us the idea of planting them in our yard. Once she had done that, she was content to move on.
Memorial Day
Memorial Day typically marks the beginning of the summer season. A U.S. federal holiday for remembering the men and women who died in service to our country, it is celebrated on the last Monday of May. Originally called Decoration Day, the holiday was established after the Civil War to honor those who had died in that war, but by the twentieth century Memorial Day had become a celebration to honor all Americans who died in military service.
General John Logan officially proclaimed the day a holiday on May 5, 1868; it was first observed on May 30, 1868.
Celebration of the day usually took the form of a family reunion, especially for those who lived in the mountains or rural areas. Families came together to clear family graveyards and decorate the graves of loved ones with flowers. Very often people attend a religious service and enjoy a potluck meal of the traditional “dinner on the ground,�
�� eaten picnic style.
Nowadays, some use Memorial Day to honor all dead, not just soldiers who died.
Some of the best ghost stories are about battlefields and those who fought and died for us.
Remembering the Dead
A friend once read one of our books and said, “Goodness! There are so many dead people in it!”
Of course she was right. The books we write are about ghosts, and there can’t be ghosts without dead people.
We don’t mean to be morbid. We remember the dead with respect, and we try to determine how they connect with the living. It is comforting to us to find evidence that death is only a change to another form, and that we live forever.
Roberta’s Grandma Simpson probably influenced her attitude about ghosts more than anybody. To Grandma Simpson, ghosts were a natural part of life. She acknowledged their presence, but went on about her daily routine unruffled if she encountered one.
Roberta remembers one story she heard about her grandmother and Memorial Day and tells it this way.
One Memorial Day, Grandma Simpson set out early to walk to church and put flowers on the graves of family and friends before too many people gathered in the graveyard. She had a basketful of flowers and little time to place them on the graves, because she was expecting company and had to get back home to cook dinner.
She left her children of various ages (my dad included) home alone, as most people did in those days. She knew they would be all right because the older ones were responsible for taking care of the younger ones.
She walked down the lane from her house, turned onto the one-lane dirt road at the cherry tree, and walked toward the two-lane road where the cemetery was located.
It was a warm May morning, and Grandma Simpson was enjoying the fresh air. At one point, the dirt road ran between two high banks. As she reached that point, the warm air suddenly turned cold. She saw someone approaching her. As he came nearer, she saw it was a soldier in a Yankee Civil War uniform.
She climbed the bank on her side of the road and watched as he walked by. He looked straight ahead and gave no indication that he was aware of her in any way. After he passed, she climbed down and looked to see where he had gone, but he had completely vanished from sight.
Grandma Simpson went on to the cemetery and put her flowers on the graves as she had planned. When she got home, she told what she had seen.
“Why didn’t you follow him?” asked my dad. “How did you know he wasn’t coming here?”
“He was a ghost soldier in a different time,” she said. “He crossed over into our time somehow. I knew no ghost soldier had any business coming here. Besides, I had to get on with my errand and get home to cook dinner.”
“What do you think his business was?” asked her son.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I guess maybe all this Decoration Day activity stirred him up.”
That was her attitude. She moved on to other things, and so did the children. No paranormal experience was going to interfere with her daily plans.
One thing that her children could count on in her daily plans was having them make several trips each day to carry fresh water from a large, cold spring under the hill in back of the house. Grandma Simpson loved a fresh drink of water. The water bucket was left by the kitchen door with a dipper or a hollowed gourd in it so everybody could help themselves.
All the children got a spooky feeling when they went near that spring. It was out of sight of the house and was surrounded by many trees, making the whole area cool and dark. The spring was always covered by shadows.
Since Grandma Simpson had no refrigerator, the shadows made the spring a good place to keep butter and milk cool. Grandpa Simpson had made a little “box” springhouse to put the milk and butter in so animals could not get to them.
Trees and shadows are not good for the imagination of a little kid going alone to get a bucket of water. My father and his siblings all agreed that they felt like something was watching them when they would go there, so they would fill their buckets and hurry up the hill so fast that they would sometimes spill some of the water. They tried not to spill any, though, for of course that usually meant another trip to the spring.
One day Grandpa Simpson came to visit. He and Grandma were separated, but he came to see the children. They were sitting around, talking and catching up since his last visit. They happened to mention to him about the creepy feeling they had of being watched at the spring.
“Could be the ghost of a soldier who was killed there,” he told them.
That caught their interest.
“A soldier was killed at our spring?” they asked. “How did it happen?”
“I was told that a handful of Yankees and Rebels came up on each other at the spring back during the Civil War,” he said.
“You mean a battle was fought at our spring?” asked Dad.
“It was more of a skirmish,” Grandpa Simpson explained. “One Yankee soldier was killed before the others rode away.”
Dad remembered the Yankee soldier Grandma Simpson saw on the road and figured that was the explanation. The dead soldier must have been trying to get back to his comrades.
With a story to put to the spooky feeling, the children weren’t so frightened after that, but they always felt a little sad.
Memorial Day Riders
Lonnie has a story about ghost riders in the Smith Woods.
The Smith Woods in Adair County was the most mysterious place I ever lived. When I moved there as a boy with my parents, much of the 1,200 acres of trees had already been reduced to make way for houses. There was, however, still enough left to contain all the mystery I could explore.
My mother made sure that my brothers and sisters and I didn’t venture into the heart of the woods.
“There are all kinds of stories about this place,” she warned us. “There are sights and sounds that cannot be explained. There’s no telling what is back there, so you all must stay close to home.”
This only made me want to go back into the woods more than ever, but Mom was usually on the lookout and put an end to my plans.
We picked up bits and pieces of tales about things that happened in the woods. We didn’t have any way of proving if the information was true or not, but we did know truly that people were afraid of those woods because they had encountered things they could not explain.
On Memorial Day, we followed the local custom of getting dressed up and taking flowers to the graves of the soldiers who had died for our country. It was a day to socialize with the living and to remember the dead.
While my mom and dad were chatting with other people who had come to the graveyard at the edge of the woods for the same reason we had come, I struck up a conversation with an old man who was visiting one of the graves.
“Have you lived here all your life?” I asked him.
“Yes,” he answered. “I was born and raised here and I guess I’ll die here.”
“Did anything scary ever happen to you in these woods?” I continued.
“Oh, yes, lots of things,” he said.
“What was the scariest thing?” I wanted to know.
“I guess I’d have to say it was what happened on a Memorial Day when I was about your age,” he said. “I had heard about a Civil War skirmish back in the woods, and lots of men were killed. The story was that the rebels were ambushed. Yankee soldiers came riding through the woods and attacked! They say that you can hear the footbeats of the horses to this very day.
“I was warned that I should stay away on Memorial Day night,” the old man continued, “but I sneaked into the woods anyway. I guess I didn’t really believe I’d see anything, but I waited a little while to see for certain. I really don’t know how much time had passed, but I was beginning to wish I hadn’t come so far.
“I decided to go on back home when it suddenly felt like everything around me changed. I was not alone. Men were sleeping a little beyond me on the ground. Then I heard the sound of hoofbeats th
undering toward me! I heard yelling and shots fired, and after a moment of panic, I made myself turn and run for home without looking back.”
“Did you ever go back again?” I asked.
“Not on your life!” he said, shaking his head. “To this day, I can feel those hoofbeats shaking the earth as they passed me by. They come riding through the woods every Memorial Day night, but I will never go back to see them. I wouldn’t advise you to go either, Sonny! I honestly believe that I went back in time, and if I hadn’t run away, I would have been shot or trampled to death.”
The old man walked slowly away through the graveyard, shaking his head, and I went home with my family.
That night at supper, I told the story the old man had told me.
“You’d better not be thinking of going to those woods to see if it’s true,” my mom said.
“Yes, son,” said my dad. “It looks like a cloud is coming up, so I want you children inside.”
After we had gone to bed, I opened my window and sat listening to the far-off thunder. Then I heard another sound. It sounded exactly like riders deep in the woods.
The thunder got closer and drowned out the hoofbeats. The breeze coming through my window was warm, but I shivered. Were ghost riders riding deep within the Smith Woods? Or was it only the rumble of thunder I heard? I would never know, and to tell you the truth, I have to admit that I was glad deep down that my mom and dad wouldn’t let me go out that night!
Haunted Holidays Page 5
