Been thinkin’ about…Spooky things

The sun was low that hot autumn afternoon in late October as we finally reached the old Confederate cemetery overlooking Fayetteville, Arkansas. The hills on this side of town are as steep as the hollers are deep. Fayetteville is a grand old lady of a city, founded in 1836 here on the edges of the Boston Mountains, and she is a pretty lady, for the most part. And the cemetery is a pretty cemetery, lines of white gravestones beneath the shadow of crimson-hued maple trees. That autumn was a pretty one, even as the afternoon heat had made it feel again like summer. We are very much in the South, after all, and Fayetteville was an antebellum city, once.

The hairs on the back of my neck prickled. There is a shadow at my back, an older part of the cemetery, mostly untended, only a scattering of gravestones. The shadows are longer, darker here, trees twisted, black, gnarled. Old fox grapevines trace weird patterns, a veil dividing strange and sacred ground from the mundane just beyond — the grader ditch, a blacktop road, and handful of older, pretty suburban homes with nice lawns lie just beyond. The atmosphere here in the grove is muted, occasional sunken spaces in the root-traveled earth: sunken, unmarked graves. October, even a hot, southern October, is a time of ghosts.

This is the time of year for spooky things, for forest haunts and ghost stories and scary movies and jack o’lanterns carved by candlelight. And here in the Bible Belt, we have a prickly relationship with such things. Halloween parties get replaced with harvest festivals, or challenges to dress up as your favorite Bible character, but that can only go so far. We don’t really know what all the great heroes of the faith wore, as the biblical narrative is typically more interested in actions rather than wardrobe. Besides, there is something innately compelling about the eerie, the scary, the spooky, the things of the unknown, the things that go bump in the night. It’s the things that, in our tidy world views, we simply don’t know what to do with.

I contend that this is something of which those of an older European Christianity struggled less. Historically, we cannot argue with the stout Christian faith of our Scots-Irish forebears who settled these hills, nor question their reasons for leaving the Old Country. Religious freedom stood at the top as Protestantism has brought with it the simple idea of church Congregationalism, the belief that a family first, then a church congregation, was responsible for spiritual direction, not a bishop, not a pope, and certainly not a king of England. In 1610, talk like that was heresy and so the Scots-Irish left Europe by the thousands, landing first in Appalachia, then in the Ozarks, moving ever westward to find places where authoritarian governments would simply leave them alone, whether about their churches, or about their whiskey.

So it is well-established these “hillbillies,” Protestant hill farmers who cheered for King Billy and the Glorious Revolution of 1688, were stalwart Christians, Bible in hand, church on the hill. They were also what we now disparagingly call “superstitious.” I am fascinated by the fact that ancient Scottish funeral customs cross over directly with those of the Ozarks even as late as the 1940s, sometimes even as late as today —

Glass unexpectedly breaking is a death omen. When a loved one dies, open the windows for brief moments to allow the soul to wing towards heaven. Cover the mirrors to prevent the soul from becoming lost. Never allow cats near the body.

I think back to the short weeks before my mom passed away. Holding a thick, sturdy glass coffee cup, the glass suddenly exploded in her hands. We had to vacuum the glass shards from her hair. A good friend’s brother opened all the doors and windows at the time of their father’s death, then began sweeping the floor. Old tales of Witch Cats abound in these hills, spectral beings of great size, black cats of magical and fearful power. In the old country, these were the fairy cats, the Cat Sith, beings neither quite living nor dead, who would steal the soul of a loved one. “Never let a cat near the corpse.”

And not too long ago, I wandered the strange, pink halls of the Lemp Mansion, a haunted manor house high on the karst limestone Ozarkian bluff overlooking Soulard and downtown St. Louis. Beneath the mansion are old caverns, tunnels, passageways to the now-lost fairy realm called Cherokee Cave. And it was in this house the Lemp family met various tragic ends. The second floor calls and I answer, padding up thickly carpeted stairs and find myself on the landing surrounded by mirrors. A strange tingling in the back of my mind, a sense of unwelcome. The reflections in the mirrors are odd, and I am followed that day by the lingering sense of shadow. That night, on the other side of town, my dog wakes me, barking frantically at the mirror in the Airbnb bedroom. I come to my senses, look at by hound’s body, rigid, focused, staring directly at the mirror. I jump out of bed, remembering the lore. There is an extra blanket in the closet and a grab it, tossing it over the glass. My hound immediately relaxes. Whatever it was he was seeing can no longer peer out from the ether. The blanket remained until I checked out three days later.

Do I believe? Yes, I do. The spooky things are real and they believe in us, whether we believe in them or not.