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.