March of the Haints

Grover and Monroe clomped through thigh-high grass toward the farm.

Cousins by blood. Brothers by friendship. Connected by adjacent plots of land. The young men had been close for as long as either could remember.

Folks knew that if you saw one, you'd likely see the other.

Tonight was no exception. 

The two had stayed at Monroe's house longer than expected. Grover joined his aunt, uncle, and cousins for supper. At the table, he mentioned some boards on his father's pack house could use mending.  

Kin helps kin. Monroe volunteered to lend a hand. The plan was for him to sleep over at Grover's house and get an early start on the repairs. 

It was dark when the boys set out—their only light, a half moon. Its soft glow was appreciated but not needed. They knew the way like they knew each other's faces.  

The air was cool. Enough weeks had passed that there was little concern of stepping on a snake. Other nightly critters would know to stay hidden or to skulk out of the way. They walked with assurance.

The pass through the field was uneventful until they saw the two other shadows approaching. 

They heard them before they saw them—the unmistakable sound of feet. 

Grover and Monroe stopped and exchanged a glance. 

"Could be your brothers," Monroe said.

"Could be. Sure would be late for Cal to be up, though," Grover said back. 

Calvin was 10. It wasn't like his parents to let the young ones stay up this late. 

"Might be some of the Beesons," Grover said. "Maybe they're hunting a raccoon." 

The Beesons were the closest neighbors that weren't family. They lived over a mile down the unincorporated unpaved road.

"Odd, they're coming this way," Grover thought to himself. "Why ain't they headed towards the woods?" He had treed the furry bandits before with his father.

Grover listened for any dogs, proof that the strangers were tracking something, but heard nothing shifting through the tall grass around them. 

The shadows continued to come. They were fifty yards away. 

"Why are they walking like that?" Monroe asked. His voice had dropped to just over a whisper.

Grover had noticed too. The two figures were walking side by side, their steps perfectly in sync.

"Looks like marching," Grover said.

They were. The two forms moved as one. Their sets of feet and knees rising at precisely the same time. 

"Should I hollar at 'em?" Monroe asked. 

Grover's answer shot out before he could stop it, "No." Something about this was making his skin crawl. 

"Get down," he said.

"What?" Monroe asked.

"I said get down," Grover said. Monroe caught urgency in his cousin's voice.

They squatted and slowly lay out on their bellies. 

The cousins waited for the figures to come closer. 

The brogan boots landed not five feet away. Grover heard the crunch they made mixed with the soft rustling of wool britches rubbing together. The sound reminded him of something being scratched. Holding his breath, he looked up to see silhouettes. They both wore coats and appeared to have caps on. Something stretched across their backs, too small and thin to be a knapsack, part of it protruding out towards their heads. 

If the moon had been full, Grover would have seen it was a rolled-up blanket.

However, his eyes needed no help identifying what the men had in their hands. Rifles. 

He looked over at Monroe. Monroe stared back. The two of them came to the same reasoning—keep quiet.

The figures never paused. They moved past the shaken boys in a matter of seconds. 

It was 20 minutes before Grover and Monroe moved. The boys remained silent, but both thought about how far they were from the safety of their farms.

They gradually stood up, turning their necks in the direction the figures had gone in. No sign of them. The darkness around them seemed less harmless than it had been before. A light breeze moved the tops of the grass, and Monroe fought the feeling that they were trapped in a sinking boat in the middle of a forbidding lake.

They began to run, reaching the farm before they found a reason to speak.

In bed, they talked about what they'd seen. Before falling asleep, the boys had begun to refer to the figures as soldiers.

Over the next few days, they told their story to family. Some listened and gave rational explanations. Could have been hunters, a few said.

Monroe would run into one of the Beesons. None of them had been out that night hunting. This didn't mean it wasn't somebody else, but if it was, it was people none of them knew. 

Other family members heard the story and said nothing. 

When they told Grandma Sarah, she had questions.

"They were marching?" she asked. 

"Yeah," said Grover. "They marched like soldiers." 

Grandma Sarah didn't say anything for a long time. She sat looking at her great-grandson—a child she didn't take to be a liar. 

Breaking the silence, she said, "What color were their clothes?"

Grover hadn't given much attention to their color. It was hard to tell in the dark. His gaze had been on the guns. 

"I dunno," he said. "Maybe gray."

Grandma Sarah nodded. "Sounds like you already know what you saw," she said.

It was years before Grover and Monroe would call what they saw that night "haints."

And years before admitting they’d come across a pair of ghost soldiers, marching to nowhere, under the light of the moon.

The Doll In the Woods

My Southern eyes took in many unusual sights when I lived in Vermont.

I watched snow fall from clouds as gray as jasper a week before Halloween.

Once, I watched a man fill a bowl with banana slices, pour heavy cream over them, and drown the whole thing in maple syrup while my blood sugar vibrated.

It was a lot to take in.

Still, that didn’t top the wildest thing I witnessed.

And it definitely wasn't the creepiest.

That belonged to the doll in the woods.

Lauren and I first spotted her on a random afternoon.

Mud season had almost ended. For the uninformed, this is the time between winter and spring, when cars slide around unpaved roads like jello on a porcelain plate.

We drove north.
We passed the local, honest automotive shop.
We blinked and missed the Friends Cemetery.

A few farmhouses dotted the road, nudging us into a stretch of woods filled with private drives marked by old last names like Isham and Zeno. Every hundred feet or so, blue sugaring lines stretched like veins from tree to tree.

We were watching the lines when we saw her.

A hundred yards up a small embankment, a doll perched on a stump.

It looked like the Raggedy Ann doll I had as a child.
The same type of toy Ed and Lorraine Warren called “Annabelle.”

I didn’t know if this plaything had a name.

I only knew she sat there, alone, in the woods.

Lauren and I locked eyes and compared goosebumps.

We talked about her for the rest of the drive.

We chose a different route home.

A couple of weeks passed, and we spotted her again.

This time, she had moved.

She sat closer to the road, propped against a tree.

Our minds churned out rational theories. The most likely one: a great gag. Probably a local hiker or resident who wanted to stir the pot and create lore for the daily front porch forum email.

We asked a few trusted souls. They said they’d seen her too.

One feller told me he spotted her during his early morning walks.

“Did you ever go up to it?” I asked.

“Nope. I saw it and kept moving.”

The curiosity of old Vermonters runs as cold as their Januarys.
Lauren and I never stopped to investigate either. Call it adapting to our surroundings.

We kept spotting her. Sometimes she sat closer, sometimes farther up the hill. The doll turned into a marker for us—she signaled when we’d left the village center or when we were almost home.

And then one day, we looked and she was gone.

Maybe a bear or another critter dragged her off.
Maybe the owner thought she needed a good cleaning.
Or maybe the gag had run its course.

I considered all of these possibilities.

Still, I silently prayed for the doll to return to the woods.

That way I'd know where she was.

We moved away from Vermont without solving the riddle.

It’s one of those stories I still think about now and then.

Usually right before I fall asleep.

Sometimes I think about reaching out to the folks I know who still live there. Ask them if the doll is still around.

But I don't.

Maybe I'm afraid of the answer I'll get.

Don't Say Her Name

When the baby was born, Addison and Maggie Savannah named her Minnie Katherine. When they discovered a tiny blemish on her foot, they nicknamed her Minnie Mole.

Southern parents have bestowed worse terms of endearment.

Minnie Mole was my Great Aunt. She came to live with my parents when her mind and memory got too bad for her to live on her own.

She moved in with little possessions. Her lifetime was filled with giving things away more than collecting.

This didn't prevent her from bringing something into the house.

Dementia is a sonuvabitch.

It came with Aunt Minnie like a fog. Descending on my parents' home, making it difficult to navigate. When I visited, my folks seemed to move more slowly through the house. Afraid of what they might bump into or trip over.

I'm not talking ottomans and end tables.

Things started out slowly. They'd catch Aunt Minnie talking to someone who wasn't there. Hear her in the den, carrying on in conversation, complete with pauses, waiting for the unseen other to respond.

"Can you believe Ted came to see me?" she'd say. He's a good man, that Ted."

We knew she worked with Ted at R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company.

We also knew he'd been dead for a decade.

Aunt Minnie not only heard things, but she saw things no one else could see.

"There's a little girl running around the house," she told my mother. "She hopped off the front porch. I wonder why she doesn't come inside?"

"I don't know, Mole. Maybe she needed to get home," my mother said.

On some days, we learned it was easier to enter Aunt Minnie's reality than for her to join ours.

The strange happenings continued.

Shadows crept along the walls. The hint of a person caught looming in the corner of an eye. A putrid smell from the washroom that couldn't be blamed on sewage backup.

"Maybe something died in the crawlspace?" I told my father one afternoon.

We checked under the house. Our search came up empty.

Odder occurrences followed.

None topped the exploding casserole dish of baked spaghetti.

It wasn't late, but the house was drifting off to sleep.

My parents were upstairs, their chins touching their chests as they finished watching The Sopranos.

My mother thought she heard the front door open, then shut.

The sequence came again. A little faster. A little harder.

Then again. This time, the door was slammed.

Then Aunt Minnie screamed. "You get out of here! You leave them alone!"

My mother got up. From the top of the staircase, she could see Aunt Minnie. Dressed in her pajamas, her hair in curlers, she stood like a sentinel. Her hand on the doorknob.

"Mole, honey, is everything alright?" my mother asked.

Aunt Minnie turned and looked up. She was crying.

"She's trying to get in," she said. "She's trying to hurt y'all. I ain't gonna let her." Her voice rose, and the tears came again.

When my mother reached her, she was shaking. They walked over to a couch and sat down.

"Who was trying to hurt us?" my mother asked.

Aunt Minnie named a deceased sister. A woman who had been known to kick a hornet's nest for pleasure. She'd been credited for inciting riffs in a family that didn't need any more. In life, she was known for her cold temperament. In death, her tombstone sat on a plot of land that the sun never appeared to reach.

"Nobody's here, honey," my mother said. "If they were, they're gone now."

Aunt Minnie wouldn't let it go. She kept insisting that the dead were trying to get into the house.

"I know it's her," she said. "I saw her."

She repeated her name.

That's when they heard an explosion in the kitchen.

Earlier that evening, my father had made baked spaghetti. He did this once a week, lining a 9x13 casserole dish with noodles, sauce, and cheese.

The leftovers had been sitting to cool on the stove.

At the sound, my father flew down the steps and walked into a storm of glass and marinara.

The contents of the Pyrex were everywhere. All over the oven, plastered on the fridge, and filling the sink.

The walls mimicked the infamous Amityville house - soaked red.

My father started cleaning. In the other room, Aunt Minnie whispered to my mother, "She did it. She's mad. She's always been hateful."

An hour later, the kitchen looked less like a murder scene, and my mother took Aunt Minnie upstairs to sleep with her.

It was a while before they closed their eyes.

Twenty years later, my parents would redo their kitchen. They would ditch the laminate hunter green countertops for marble. The cabinets were upgraded with soft-close hinges.

Until that time, my father would find random specks of tomato sauce on the popcorn ceiling. Proof it all really happened.

Afterward, every time we ate spaghetti, the incidents of that night would come out like a prized bottle of spirits. Forking pasta in our mouths, we'd retell the tale.

"Lord, what a mess," my mother would say.

"I never heard of a dish breaking like that," my sister added.

"You really think it was a ghost? You really think it was..."

"Shhhhhhhh," my mother said. "Don't say her name. Don't bring whatever that was back on us."

Aunt Minne is gone now.

My father, too.

Like them, the stains of that long-ago night only exist in memory.

Yet, sometimes I wonder. Did my mother or father mistakenly turn a burner on and forget? Or maybe Aunt Minnie Mole walked into the kitchen, saw the spaghetti, and thought she'd heat some up. Given her state, this was possible.

When I tell this story, I never voice this. I don't think it would do any good.

And to this day, for reasons I can't fully explain, I still won't say the sister's name.

I don't imagine I ever will.

The Place Felt Wrong

In the evenings, my grandfather would pull out a lawn chair and sit under the stars.

Many times, others would join him. Sometimes this was family. More often, it was a group of men my grandmother referred to as "your granddaddy's cronies."

While heat lightning flashed overhead, they would sip Pepsi from glass bottles. Every now and then, something with more bite got passed around.

The stories would start immediately.

In pursuit of lighting bugs, I would come close to their loose circle. Stopping long enough to catch the beginning or tail end of some yarn.

A few of the stories stayed with me - including one about my grandfather and a hanged man.

He told this story the same way he'd tell you the price of chicken feed—matter-of-factly.

It was late Fall in the Carolinas. Thanksgiving had passed, but Christmas hadn't arrived. Like all farmers, Calvin "Bun" Stigall had risen early. Clocking in before the rooster was mandatory, especially if he planned to rabbit hunt.

He did the necessary chores. Feed and water the cows, goats, and chickens. The lot of Beagles heard him moving around. Their low and long baying started before he even let them out. They were crated and tossed in the back of the pickup truck.

He wasn't going far, but a few miles is still a few miles on foot. He'd received permission to hunt on someone else's land the week before. He decided to take the fellow tobacco farmer up on his offer.

Bun knew it was a big property. Lots of woods. Several pastures. He believed a stream or creek ran through it. The dogs would get worked. He hoped a few rabbits would too.

When he arrived, he noticed the sun was taking longer to peak out.

"Rain," he said out loud. "Maybe it will hold off."

The Beagles were buzzing. Excited to run and explore new smells. They bolted, moving like small sharks through the tall pasture grass. Bun grabbed his .22 rifle and gave chase.

Most of the morning was uneventful. The dogs had tracked at least one lucky rabbit. Bun had fired and missed. This had been near a tree line and closer to the property owner's homestead than he would have liked. He could see the house a ways off, and several other buildings: sheds, a pack house. Bare fields stretched out in all directions—a looming barn sat near the edge of the one closest to him.

It's what he ran for when the bottom fell out and the rain had come.

Inside, grey light seeped through the boards. Bun looked around and noticed a pile of tobacco sticks stacked in the corner. On the dirt floor sat attachments for the owner's tractor. Some tools hung on the wall with the help of large rusted nails. The familiar was all around him, including the smell of hay and earth.

Glancing up, he saw the beams where the golden leaves were cured.

That's where the man hanged himself.

The thought hit Bun like a clap of thunder. Several years ago, the oldest son of the farmer whose land he was standing on was found in the barn.

Up there. Right above his head.

"I don't know, but let me tell you, it all started to feel wrong in there," he said.

Bun listened as the steady rain pelted the metal roof, but heard something else.

It sounded like someone breathing—gasping for air.

He looked around, but couldn't pinpoint the sound.

That's when he sensed someone behind him. He whirled to find nothing there, but the sensation remained.

Somebody, something, was bearing down on him, breathing on his neck. It didn't only hear it, but could feel it.

"It was hot," my grandfather said. "Was no breeze. It was damn cold that morning."

"What was it then?" a cronie asked

Bun shifted in his chair. "I didn't stick around to find out. I got the hell out of there."

The rain was still falling when he left the barn. He gathered his hounds, leaving wet and rabbitless.

Bun Stigall didn't talk about ghosts or haints, didn't believe in them.

Maybe so—but I never heard him say he hunted that land again, and I know he stayed out of that barn.

I figure he felt it was already occupied.

The Stranger Who Walked Out of Nowhere

Long before a Seattle coffee company's Pumpkin Spice Latte claimed the start of Fall, when autumn's kiss was on the most subtle of breezes, I began collecting ghost stories.

I'd find them on library shelves—local authors, local haunts.

I'd find them in the pages of R.L. Stine's "Fear Street" and "Goosebumps" series.

In elementary school, I checked out Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark so much that it concerned the school's librarian.

"You sure you don't wanna read something else?" she said.

"I like the pictures," I said back.

She gave me a worried look and stamped the borrowing card on the back sleeve. Every so often, I'd return it on time.

The best stories I heard were told to me by family, delivered inside an old North Carolina farmhouse built after the Civil War—about a place and time where the mystery of death was common.

Through those hand-me-down tales, I came to discover we had a haunted heritage. Haints. A witch. Sounds that came from nowhere. Balls of matchless fire burned and swooped around the land we called home.

And then there was the disappearing man.

His name was Arvil. He married great-great aunt Gertie. In my family, he was called Uncle Ar.

All stories about him always ended the same way - Ar keeled over and died while helping tend tobacco in the summer of '39.

Kinfolk shared that part at supper tables.

What happened afterwards was shared when I spent the night with my great aunts Emmie and Minnie. Lying in bed, they'd tell me what they saw.

In the words of Ruth Reichl, "Everything here is true, but it might not be entirely factual".

The family gathered outside. Children played in the yard. The adults indulged in the day's happenings in chairs and on porch swings. This ritual occurred without a prompt or prayer.

That's when they saw a man walking up the lengthy dirt driveway.

He'd come out of nowhere.

It was hard to tell who he was. The distance was at least two hundred yards.

What they could make out was that it was a white man in a suit. He moved easily, almost as if he had walked the road before.

The children yelled out to him first.

The man said nothing and kept walking toward them.

Even in what some describe as a more hospitable time, a stranger is a stranger to a child. The smaller kids began to creep back toward the porch in search of their Momma's skirt tail or Daddy's pants leg.

The grown-ups looked at one another. It wasn't uncommon to have someone drop by, but that evening, they weren't expecting company.

Great grandpaw Addison was about to hollar out when the peculiar man turned and headed into the tobacco field facing the house.

They watched as he stepped between the large leaves, rising on the rows like he was walking on small waves.

He walked until he didn't.

"He just stood there," Aunt Minnie said. 'He stood there, and then he looked up."

With all eyes on him, the man no one knew gazed to the heavens.

"And then he was gone," she said. "We couldn't see him. Poppa and others went down to look, thought maybe he fell. But there weren't nothing there. It had rained the day before, but there were no footprints."

The family talked for days afterwards. Years later, the story was still on their tongues.

Each time it ended with, "That man disappeared in the same field where Ar died."

No one ever said it was Uncle Ar.

They didn't have to.