Marshall McClung
Telling scary ghost stories was a form of entertainment for early rural families and might also have served as a behavior tool for rowdy children.
Some of the stories might not have been about ghosts, but scary just the same.
Apparently ghosts – and whatever else roams around at night – have been around for a long time. An old Scottish prayer from 1800 asks the Lord for deliverance from ghouls, ghosts, long-legged beasts and things that go bump in the night.
Many of our old-timers were experts in making ghost stories seem real. My wife Linda said that when she was a little girl, her grandfather Robert “Bob” Anderson could make the stories seem so real that she would be so scared that she would have to be carried to the car. She was afraid that if she was walking, something would grab her and carry her off into the night.
On long, cold winter nights before any of the entertainment items we have today, telling scary stories was a family tradition. Usually there was at least one such story teller somewhere in the kinfolks.
It didn’t take much to fuel the imaginations of young children. The wind rattling the door latch or a loose window pane was some wild beast trying to get inside and devour them. Thumps on the front porch made by the family dog became the steps of someone back from the dead.
In time, some of the mysteries were solved. The ghost of an 11-year-old girl that stood at night by the cemetery where she was buried was actually a tree stump about her height that contained foxfire – which glows at night.
The ghost that would run after you at a certain spot on a lonely road turned out to be someone’s large, white, very-friendly dog that liked to run and play.
But what about those other ones that no one has an answer for?
* The ghost of a soldier at Santeetlah Dam that frightened grown men away;
* A man named Stanley who appears from a cemetery near the Calderwood Power Facility;
* A face of an Indian chief appears on the face of a rock cliff. A man fell dead at one of the appearances;
* At the Rhymer’s Ferry powerhouse, a former employee who had died reappeared as a much younger man;
* On Cochran’s Creek, what today is termed as a “domestic” occurred many years ago. The wife who was pregnant was shot and killed by her husband, who then took his own life. The tragic scene which took place around noon was witnessed by their young daughter. The house burned to the ground shortly after the tragedy. Farmers working in their fields began hearing a baby cry where the house once stood.
This unnerved them so that they began making a point to be out of the field before noon.
Marshall McClung is the historical columnist for The Graham Star. He can be reached via email, mcclungs@email.com.