A Cold Winter Night
I have never encountered a ghost; I don’t believe in ghosts. But when I was a child I remember Dad and my Uncle Loren telling ghost stories, that took the form of slow and soft-spoken exchanges between them. A typical setting could be a cold winter night when Uncle Loren and Aunt Mary, who lived nearby, had shared supper with us or perhaps had just stopped by on their way home from town. As the evening became nighttime, Mom and Aunt Mary - having cleaned up and put away everything from supper - would move to the front room to sit by the old Warm Morning brand heating stove that had been stoked with coal for the night, and kept their own company, leaving Uncle Loren and Dad sitting at the kitchen table. The younger kids were sent on to bed, while my brother John and I, probably around the ages of ten and eight years respectively, got to stay up and share the kitchen with the men. I remember that John and I would likely start out sitting beside each other on the bottom stair step that extended out from under a closed door. Behind that door a stairs led up to our cold dark unheated bedroom under the eves. We would watch and listen to Uncle Loren and Dad, while the kerosene lamp in the center of the kitchen table held and fed a nervous flame that sent constantly changing shadowy forms up the wall and across the ceiling.
Dad sat with his left elbow on the table, that hand holding the pipe he was smoking, and from time to time he scribbled on a tablet of Golden Rod brand yellow lined paper that we used for homework. Their slow unhurried conversation consisted of brief remarks and reflective pauses as they reviewed the weather, crop prospects, livestock prices, and any news from town that Uncle Loren might have picked up. Uncle Loren would lean back, balancing on the rear legs of an old straight-backed kitchen chair as he crafted a cigarette. He began this process by pouring some of the contents from a Prince Albert tobacco can onto a piece of cigarette paper that he held carefully in his other hand. He carried that Prince Albert can in a pocket of his bib overhauls; Oshkosh Bgosh probably used a Prince Albert can to size that pocket just right. With the tobacco in place, he licked along the length of one edge of the paper and then rolled the paper into a cylinder with just one hand; a marvelously dexterous feat. He then tilted the chair forward onto all four legs as he leaned in toward the flame, lifting the lamp’s glass chimney long enough to get a light, and with his sleeve wiped from the table a few loose shreds of tobacco that he noticed had missed the cigarette paper.
After several puffs, Uncle Loren tilted the chair back again and declared “I guess we ought to be going. There’s such a bright moon shining out there tonight I’ll hardly need my headlights.”
The Woman in the Willow Tree
“You’re right “, replied Dad, glancing toward John and me as he addressed Uncle Loren, “You know the moonlight tonight reminds me of how much trouble our Uncle John Nash had getting home with his horses and buggy one night years ago. It was on a night just like this. The moon was out and Uncle John was up on that same stretch of road that you travel going home. It’s where the road runs beside the creek… right near where the creek then turns and runs back a ways to the north. That big willow tree still stands there. Anyway, that night Uncle John’s horses all of a sudden reared up and began snorting and trembling and came to a complete halt right at that spot!”
“I remember him telling that,“ replied Uncle Loren, “but I thought that Uncle John might have had too much to drink. He was alone that night, wasn’t he?”
“He was,” Dad agreed. “The horses saw that woman first. Then he spotted her, dressed in a long white gown. Uncle John could see her just as clear as could be in the moonlight, sitting up there on a big limb. She was pretty high up in the tree, brushing her long blond hair. It was that ghost of a woman that spooked the horses. That woman must have looked right at them horses and made some kind of a surprise move. The horses kept rearing and snorting and then backing up. They were not about to go any further. Poor Uncle John was scared stiff himself. He had never seen anything like that ghost figure in the tree. It was all he could do to hold onto the reigns. He worked hard to keep the buggy from tipping over when the horses backed up and turned around. He had to return a quarter mile to the last corner, then a mile and a half down to the hard road, back east a mile, and finally north another mile and a half. He got home awful late that night. I don’t know if Aunt Sarah ever believed him, but he wouldn’t have made that up. And the horses didn’t go all that extra way for no good reason.”
As they recited this piece of family folklore, John and I moved from our seat on the drafty stair step to stand at the table beside Uncle Loren and absorb some of the warmth radiating from the kitchen cook stove beside the wall to our left. Moving toward warmth was the instinctive thing to do, and we could watch Dad doodling and try to ignore the shadowy figures on the ceiling. John asked Uncle Loren, “But don’t you have to go right past that tree every night? Have you ever seen anything like that?”
“You know,” exclaimed Uncle Loren, “on nights like this I admit that I keep my eyes on the road going past that stretch where that ghost of a woman sat in that tree. I can pretty much tell which limb it was too, in the daylight, but I don’t ever look that way at night going past. I have no reason to want to see something like that, even when I’m driving in my Plymouth.”
Aunt Mary called from the front room, “Loren, are you ready to go?“ But before he could answer, I pleaded with Uncle Loren and Dad, “Can you tell us another story about spooky things that happened on nights like this?” We heard no other stirrings from Mom and Aunt Mary who were still in the front room, so we hoped that meant they were going to stay a little longer.
The Giant Dog Between the Twin Bridges
Uncle Loren glanced at Dad, who looked across at John and me and then down to his pad of paper. Dad paused in his doodling, which had consisted of nothing more than repeatedly writing his signature, John C. Smith. The “C” stood for Clarence. He again started sketching and switched to another subject; “I remember another incident that related to horses late at night. It happened up north of Austin’s farm just before you get to the New Salem road. This happened between what was called the twin bridges, the ones about a mile apart.”
Uncle Loren balanced back onto the rear legs of the old kitchen chair and replied “Are you talking about that giant dog? Do you remember who the rider on the horse was that night? It had to be Marty Austin. He was the one who swore that he would remember that giant ghost of a dog forever. Plus there had been another rider, Gene Pennock, who saw and felt and smelled the same thing as Marty. This particular night was so dark Marty had to let the horse just slowly feel his way.”
Dad continued, “As I remember Marty telling it, when he rode past the first bridge he felt the presence of something walking beside him. The strange thing was that his horse didn’t seem to notice. The thing was an animal as big as his horse, and it let out a low growl that sounded like a dog. Marty could just make out that dog, trotting along beside his horse at the same gait. He believed at that moment that it was a real dog and was surprised that his horse didn’t seem a bit spooked by it. Marty said it had the stench of death on it. It was so big he could have reached over and touched it without reaching down. When Marty sent his horse into a trot, which his horse didn’t want to do it was so dark, the giant dog ran faster and kept pace. About halfway between the bridges he heard a plop that sounded like saddlebags dropping onto the ground. At that moment the dog disappeared!
Marty described this strange occurrence to the men at the pool hall the next Saturday night. One man, Gene Pennock, had had a similar experience. He claimed that the same thing happened to him, although he was going in the opposite direction. A large animal, as big as his horse but with long shaggy hair like a dog, with a terrible smell, had appeared and walked alongside his horse. It too stayed in stride with the horse no matter how fast or slow the horse’s speed. Sure enough about halfway between the twin bridges, he heard a loud ‘plop‘. Gene thought it sounded like a body falling to the ground, and with that the dog disappeared. The stories were exactly the same!”
Uncle Loren continued when Dad paused, asking; “Hadn’t a riderless horse trotted into town a couple of weeks before? The horse belonged to Fred Manker, who hadn’t been seen lately, and neither had his dog! His friends feared that some robbers might have ambushed him in the vicinity of the twin bridges. So the next day a group of men went to the midpoint between the twin bridges where the sounds were heard. They saw some old horse tracks and also discovered a set of bloody saddlebags with Fred Manker’s initials. Then they found the remains of what was probably his dog. And sure enough there was a shallow grave back in the woods, covered with brush, where they found the body of Fred Manker!”
“And” explained Dad, “they never did have a clue who might have committed the murder. The dog’s ghost must have taken on the shape of that big dog that brought people to the spot where the crime was committed. No one ever traveled that stretch of road alone at night again between the twin bridges .” John and I shivered at the thought that such an animal might appear some night from the woods behind our barn as we raced against darkness to finish our chores. In our imaginations we were still riding alongside a giant dog that had the smell of death on it. We assumed that the smell of death was like the stench of a decomposing pig or chicken that we might come across unexpectedly from time to time around the barns, or the odor of some other dead animal in the pasture or the woods.
The White Rabbit
“The sighting of a ghost in the form of an animal happened several times back in those days,” continued Dad. We could see that Dad had sketched the figure of a dog. “I remember a story about some folks from St. Louis hunting rabbits and quail on a farm west of us. They would see a large white rabbit that always seemed to dodge their bullets. They could swear they hit it but it just keep on running. It always escaped into the same pile of brush at the corner of a field next to some woods.”
“Was this in our woods behind the barn?” I asked, hoping for assurance that the answer was no.
“He means the woods that belonged to Benny Whitmeyer, the mail carrier.” explained Uncle Loren. “The hunters would shoot at the rabbit and it would disappear into that same brush pile. This happened again and again all that fall. They decided it just couldn’t be their bad shooting, so out of curiosity they followed the rabbit to the pile of brush where they intended to chase it out and get a good shot at it once and for all. That’s when they discovered that the brush was covering a well. They removed the brush and when they could see down into the well they discovered the skeleton of a person in the shallow water at the bottom.”
“That’s right.” said Dad, “The person was never identified and there was no way to know if a crime had been committed. But the fact that there was a ghost in the form of a white rabbit probably meant that the person was not ever going to be at rest until their skeleton was found and given a proper burial. There is a grave at the cemetery west of town that some say was the final resting place of that person, but there is no name on the marker.”
The Haunted House on the Hill
Dad laid down the pencil and paused to re-light his pipe Then he murmured in a low voice to Uncle Loren, “Remember Bob Gerard who died a few years back? And the night when the color of his hair changed? It happened when he took a dare to stay in that haunted house that used to stand on the hill north of Aberdeen School.”
You mean where we go to school?” asked John worriedly; he must not have heard this story before.
“Yes“, said Dad, “you can see the place where the house used to sit if you look up to the north along the fence line from the school yard, but the lane that used to go up there is long gone. There is nothing left of the house either, except for some parts of the foundation.”
“That‘s right,” agreed Uncle Loren, “I go past Aberdeen School all the time on the way to my forty acres just past there. The only sign there was ever a house up on that hill is a growth of trees. They’re old trees now, that used to border the yard. The house must have been torn down shortly after Bob Gerard took that dare. His friends had recited all the stories about spirits that roamed through the house. It had been abandoned many years before. Probably because most of the family that had lived there also died there of some mysterious ailment. It was the family of a hired man that worked for old John Kane. By coincidence, John Kane had bought that house and land from a fellow who then left Pike County. He traveled out west after his family all died in that house too, of some kind of a disease.”
Dad picked up the story, “No one really knew who or why spirits occupied the house. Who knows how those stories get started. But it seemed to be common knowledge that the old abandoned house was haunted by ghosts that belonged to one or both of the families. John Kane’s hired man left with the house still furnished. One upstairs room had a bed that several children died in; no one knew exactly how. There was also a table and some chairs in the kitchen and a couch in the front room. It was covered with a sheet that they say hid some blood stains.”
“Anyway,” said Uncle Loren, “the problem was that Bob Gerard laughed at the stories about the place being haunted, so his friends challenged him to stay there by himself some night. They bet him he’d never be able to stay all night long because he’d get to meet the ghosts before the sun came up! In fact that was the bet they made with Bob; if he could stay from sunset till sunrise they would pay him 20 dollars. On the other hand, if he flew the house before dawn then he would owe them all a round of drinks at Doyle’s Tavern. The men stayed down by the road that night, inside Aberdeen School, and took turns staying awake to make sure Bob stayed put. Bob took some sandwiches and half a bottle of Old Crow whisky with him to the house about 6:00 pm as the autumn darkness fell.
Bob told them later that he consumed the sandwiches and liquor quicker than he intended. So he climbed the stairs while there was just enough light to see to get into bed, and promptly passed out. Several hours went by when something woke him. It was a presence that he sensed but couldn’t see. The room seemed to be filled with something that caused the air to be heavy and hard to breathe. The temperature had dropped, and he then felt the presence of spirits.”
“That’s when Bob really got scared.” said Dad, “There wasn’t a single sound, but Bob suddenly felt the sheet he had pulled over himself being slowly drawn down to uncover him. Something or somebody was dragging his sheet off! When the top edge of the sheet reached his knees he worked up the courage to reach down and yank the sheet away from whatever had been pulling on it. He held the edge of the sheet tightly at his neck. The presence of spirits in the room seemed to disappear after this. But Bob could not go back to sleep. He was determined to win his bet and knew his friends expected him to come running out at any minute. Then after a couple of hours, still deep in the middle of the night, Bob sensed the return of the same oppressive air. He again felt like something was in the room. He had loosened his grip on the sheets, and sure enough the same thing began to happen! The sheets were again being pulled down at a slow steady pace until they reached his knees. This time he jerked on the sheets with as much strength as he could. The sheets came loose from the bottom of the bed and bunched up under his chin. He lay there exposed to whatever ghosts were ready to attack him, but nothing moved or made a sound. He straightened the sheets and this same thing happened once more. Finally Bob was aware that the first early morning daylight had arrived, so he sprang from the bed. He then realized that he had been fully dressed through the whole episode, so with no hesitation he dashed down the stairs and out of the house!
The men who had stood watch all night were ready to enjoy the joke on Bob and collect their bet, since the sun had not came up yet. But they stopped in silent shock when they saw Bob. His hair had turned totally white overnight! When they heard his story about the movements of his sheets they stopped short of accusing him of making it all up, as they stared at his white hair. So the bet was called a draw. The only lasting result of that night was that Bob never seemed himself after that. He was never able to hold a job and began to drink heavily and his head of white hair reminded everyone in town of his experience.
Jack and Kip’s Narrow Escape
Dad walked softly across the kitchen floor and threw another shovel of coal into the cook stove, and glanced into the front room to see that Mom and Aunt Mary were still visiting by that stove. As he returned to the table Dad selected four apples from a wicker basket on the sideboard of the yellow metal cabinet by the door to the back porch, polished one on his sleeve and rolled it across the table to Uncle Loren. He placed the others in front of John and me and started pealing his apple with a knife from his pocket. He removed the peal with a slow steady rotation of the apple in his left hand as the peal played out over the blade of his knife in a single long thin continuous red ribbon. Uncle Loren just bit into his without any preparation other than to spin it once to check for bad spots. John and I followed Uncle Loren’s example. This probably meant they were through smoking for the night, but we hoped they could still conjure up one more ghost story. This time they shifted to another scary but supposedly true story involving real people, not ghosts.
Dad began “Well, you know these stories about horses and dogs and a bed, remind me of that narrow escape from murder that Uncle John Nash’s friend had. I remember his name was Jack Daniels. Everybody joked about his name, but the truth was that he never drank hardly at all. But one night, not clear like tonight, but stormy, Jack was traveling on horseback and had his dog Kip with him. Kip was mean and powerful, a cross between a bull terrier and a hound. Jack was traveling down through Calhoun county trying to find the ferry across the Illinois river near the town called Pearl. A sudden storm came up so he stopped at a house that had a sign out front that claimed to be a Tavern and Lodging place. When he knocked on the door it was opened by a heavy-set man with a reddish grey beard and a patch over one eye. The man had a wild look in his good eye as he stared at Jack. Jack asked him if the sign was right - that he could find a meal and a bed for the night so he could wait until morning to continue his journey. The man looked at the dog nervously and said “OK, you are at the right place, but that dog can’t come in; he has to stay with your horse in the barn.”
Uncle Loren continued, “Jack’s dog seemed to sense that the man didn’t like him. Kip snarled and bared his fangs and the hair raised on the back of his neck as if to say, this place is dangerous; let’s get out of here. But Jack reluctantly agreed to let the tavern owner lock Kip in the barn with his horse. Kip growled at being parted from his master; Jack usually kept him right at his side. Soon the horse and Kip were settled into the barn with some oats for the horse to eat. The man offered some kind of raw meat to Kip that he refused to eat, and with that the man led Jack into the house.
The meal served by the man’s wife was just passable. Jack was the only traveler present so the three of them sat at the table together. They talked about Jack’s reason for being out on such a night. The hosts offered little information about their tavern and lodging except to say that it provided them with some extra income. Since they had a couple of rooms upstairs they took in travelers, but they hadn’t expected any one out on a night like this. Finally the tavern owner offered Jack some liquor, probably moonshine.
In the meantime the wife went upstairs to prepare the room for Jack. The woman kept her face down and acted sullen, almost angry as she went upstairs, carrying a set of clean sheets in her apron. When she came down later Jack asked if he could go on to bed. The man looked at his wife who shot him a glance that Jack didn’t understand but made him feel uneasy. The storm had let up a bit, so Jack decided the sooner he got some sleep the earlier he could leave in the morning. No need to stay for breakfast, which they hadn’t mentioned offering anyway.”
Dad picked up the story; “The way I heard it, when Jack went up the stairs he walked right into the bedroom selected for him. The door to the room beyond was locked. He held his candlestick high to survey the room. The bed was freshly made but there was a very faint odor of decay that disturbed him. He looked at he floor and noticed a trace of what looked like blood on the throw rug beside the bed. He knelt down quietly and looked under the bed and froze in fear at what he saw. There was a body of a man pushed in under the bed out of sight. He was clearly dead, from a deep wound to the head, probably the result of an axe blow. The woman must have hidden the body under the bed when she straightened the room. Jack remembered seeing a double bladed axe beside the fireplace but had assumed it was just a tool used to split firewood.
Jack knew that he had to escape somehow but if he went down and confronted them he might be killed on the spot. He had nothing to defend himself with if attacked by the large man. So he quietly slid the corpse out from under the bed and placed it back into the bed. Then he covered it up so the wound wouldn’t show. He crawled under the bed and lay there shivering and waiting. The hours passed until sometime after midnight he heard the sounds of the man and woman creeping up the stairs. They paused every step to make sure they didn’t wake Jack, and assumed he was sound asleep. Jack hoped that they would commit their horrible crime a second time on the corpse thinking it was him, and return down the stairs while he hid and could escape when they went to sleep.”
After a pause while John and I held our breath, Uncle Loren continued in a low deliberate voice, “When Jack heard their stealthy creeping up the stairs, he tried not to tremble. Jack saw a faint shadow, cast by a hooded candle the woman was holding. He could tell that the man had reached the bedside. Jack had placed the sheet to cover the corpse’s head and hoped they would make out the outline of the dead body’s head as Jack’s. The axe descended with a terrible sickening thud as it split the head of the corpse a second time. But the man froze in place. From the faint light of the candle he noticed that the body did not flinch or jerk spontaneously in response to the blow. He yelled out to his wife ‘He’s not in the bed!’
With that, Jack swung his legs out with a burst of energy and kicked the man off his feet and lunged out from under the bed as the man dropped the bloody axe. Jack was about to deliver another kick to the man when the woman blew out the candle just as the man found the handle of the axe again. With Jack helpless in the total darkness, trying to drop down behind the bed again, the woman struck a match to relight the candle.”
Uncle Loren paused and he and Dad just sat there for what seemed like an eternity. Then Dad continued, “At that moment, Jack heard a loud bang from downstairs, as the back door was slammed open. The noise carried right up the stairs as Jack’s dog Kip plunged into the room and went right for the killer’s throat. The man screamed as he dropped the axe. Jack heard the snap of the man’s neck as Kip stood over the man and shook the life out of him. In the meantime the woman ran toward the stairs. But with one leap Kip knocked her down. The candle went flying across the room and the sheets on the bed were aflame. Kip’s jaws broke the woman’s neck as the flames began to consume the whole upstairs. With that, Jack and Kip ran down the stairs as the house rapidly became enveloped in flames. By the time Jack had saddled his horse and started racing down the road with Kip running beside him, he could look back and witness the whole house on fire. The evil place was completely destroyed by the time Jack was out of sight. With the first faint light of dawn arriving, Jack realized that the storm had passed. Evidently Jack’s dog had began digging underneath the barn door from the moment the men had left for the house earlier in the evening, and freed himself just in time to rescue Jack.”
Off to Bed
Aunt Mary and Mom appeared in thee kitchen and mom said “Have you been filling these boy’s heads with all those awful stories? They won’t be able to get to sleep tonight!” scolded Mom. Uncle Loren responded with a mischievous smile, “they will be all right as long as their sheets don’t move.”
John and I grinned but gave no response: we were still scared of the dark space at the top of the stairs. “We’ll leave the door open until you are in bed,” said Mom, “but then the door has to be closed to keep more cold from coming downstairs. We’ll bank the stove here in the kitchen so there will be a warm space in front of it when you come down in the morning… so off to bed with you,” giving us a brief hug and a slap on our britches, as we turned to face that dreadful upstairs bedroom filled with unseen spirits. With that another night of delightfully horrible ghost stories had passed that we still remember these many years later