Coffin Hollow and Other Ghost Tales (12 page)

Faith Harris was a young woman when her family bought the house and moved in against the warnings of the people who lived nearby. They said no one had been able to live in the house any length of time since the woman's death, and the last family who lived there had moved out after only a week.

Since the suicide, no one had slept in the room from which the woman had leaped, but it was said that she haunted that part of the house and made nightly visits there. People claimed to have seen her walking the grounds in her white dress.

Faith wouldn't believe such stories and took the bedroom as her own. Preparing for bed the first night she raised the window, and as she did, she saw a white figure walking slowly up the path towards the house. She laughed to herself, thinking it must be one of the family coming home, and went to bed.

The next morning when she did not come downstairs for breakfast, and everyone had called her several times, her sister went up to get her. When she entered the room, there was Faith, lying half on and half off the bed, her face beaten black and blue, and her body bruised all over. The room was a shambles.

When she was able to talk, Faith told of the voice she had heard as she lay between sleeping and waking the night before. Someone was shaking her and saying, “Get up! Get out! Here, take it; it's money!”

Thinking it was one of her sisters playing a practical joke, she sleepily pushed the hands away and said, “Oh, get away and let me sleep!”

And the next thing she knew, she felt a terrible pain, and then another, on her face again and again, until nothing seemed to matter except sleep and unconsciousness.

53: The Old Gray Mare Conquers the Unknown

Block Stanley was as sturdy a man as his name implied. He built his life on the motto that all work and no play was the only way to build a good farm. His one weakness was the love of coon hunting. His greatest pleasure was to take his mare Old Nellie and his dogs out at night to tree a coon. No one else would take a horse on a coon hunt, but Block was by no means an ordinary man.

One night in the late fall, when the bare trees lifted their black branches toward the yellow moon, he decided to join a few neighbors in their favorite pastime. Joined in the companionship of drink and good humor, they sat around the campfire until dawn. As the first light of dawn crept over the hill, the dogs jumped a coon. They cornered it in the field adjoining the Madison graveyard. The condition of this field had long aroused speculation: no one grazed cattle or mowed the field, and yet it was always green and looked as if the grass had been freshly cut. Although Block was aware of certain tales about the field told by the superstitious townspeople, he disregarded them with the aplomb of an individualist. He was convinced that there was some logical explanation. While the others stood in indecision, Block went into the field after the coon.

Suddenly the men heard a scream and observed Block suspended in the air without visible means of support. As immobile as statues, the men remained in fixed positions, and Block called to his old mare for help. The horse that he had left standing nearby went to him without hesitation. Grabbing hold of the saddle, he ordered her to get him out of that field. It was as if dozens of people were holding him back; the mare pulled with all her might and yet was barely able to move him. Finally, after struggling for about two hundred feet, Block suddenly dropped to the ground. He lay prone, as a cold breeze rippled through the tattered shreds of his shirt and trousers.

The stunned and speechless men helped him back to the flickering fire. Afraid to venture forth without the safety of daylight, they sat until the pink dawn erased all shadows. Looking for an explanation, the men went into the field to see if there had been barbed wire that could have grabbed or held him in such a manner, but there was absolutely nothing. Block swore that something or someone had tried to pull him into the great unknown.

Needless to say, he never went hunting near the cemetery again.

54: The Haunted House of Shell Creek

In Maryland, near Shell Creek, there is a very mysterious house. This old yellow-brick structure is supposed to have been a slave jail at one time; in the cellar there are cells, some of which still enclose the remains of former inhabitants. People living nearby have heard mournful cries, and some have claimed to have heard chains rattling and to have seen lights in the house at various times. But these unusual happenings are not the only haunts of the house. There is one more.

During the 1800s a very wealthy southern gentleman bought the house. He had a lovely daughter and had arranged for her to marry into an equally wealthy family upon her eighteenth birthday.

By her eighteenth birthday, however, she had met and fallen in love with a young man from a comparatively poor family. Her father was so upset by this that he sealed her in a cell he had built in the wall. She had with her a red handkerchief her lover had given her, and she is supposed to have died clutching it in her hand.

Every night at midnight she walks, looking for her lost love. She walks along the bank of the creek and at one point drops her handkerchief, which is to be picked up by her lover.

One evening a young girl happened to be passing the house shortly after midnight when the figure of a lady caught her eye. The woman wore a long white gown and carried in her hand a red handkerchief. As she walked along, the handkerchief dropped from her hand.

The young girl picked it up to give to the owner, but the handkerchief vanished, right in her hand, and as she turned toward the lady, she disappeared also.

55: The Light in Mother's Room

On the bank of Little Buffalo Creek near Rowlesburg was a small farm belonging to a widow named Sanders. She had four grown sons who had land and families of their own.

Old Mrs. Sanders died in 1927, and according to some of the neighbors, her will provided that her goods should be divided equally among her four sons. But her sons could not agree on the exact division of the property.

One night when the argument was especially violent, the youngest, Dave, noticed a strange light coming from the upper hall. He immediately went upstairs to investigate. Upon entering the hall, he found that the light was coming from his mother's room. When he pushed open the door, the corner where his mother's rocking chair stood was flooded with a bright vibrating light. His cries brought his brothers to the room, stopping the argument, and as they watched in silence, the light slowly faded.

The next night the argument started again, and as before, the strange light came pouring down the stairs. The brothers decided that it must be reflecting from something outside. They turned off all the lights and rushed out of the house to see, but the night was starless and pitch black; there was not a thing that could cause a reflection. As the brothers watched from outside, the light slowly dimmed and vanished.

On two more occasions when the Sanders brothers met to “discuss” their mother's will, the light appeared. The last time, they became brave enough to poke the offending corner with a broomstick, and then with their hands. But nothing was there.

Dave Sanders told his brothers that the light was caused by their consciences, and they decided he was right. They knew they were behaving badly by arguing, and they thought that they had all imagined the light.

But that explanation was shattered the next day when a neighbor stopped in for coffee and asked the brothers why they burned so many lights in their mother's room at night. He said he could see the light from his cabin, and it looked almost as if the room was on fire.

The will was settled quickly and quietly, in the way the boys thought would have made their mother happy. The strange, vibrating light was never seen again.

56: The Lynchers

Many years ago, around the turn of the century, there lived in the easternmost part of Taylor County a bachelor who operated what was then considered a very large orchard. (Evidently it wasn't the size of orchards we know today, for he was the sole worker.) The townsfolk were all leery of the old gentleman and would never venture near his farm. All the apples he sold were carted into town — by him.

One fall a new family moved into the area and bought a farm adjoining the old bachelor's property. There was a little boy in the family, and one evening he climbed over the fence and sneaked into the orchard. Like most boys he was quite active, and he began to climb the trees and run and play — until he noticed the old man coming toward him. Not knowing what the townsfolk suspected, he approached the man and started to talk to him.

The old man turned out to be quite friendly, and the two became close friends as time went on.

One day as the boy played in the old man's trees he fell to the ground and died instantly from a broken neck. When the townsfolk found how the boy had died, they immediately suspected the old man of foul play. A lynching party composed of nine men was organized, and they hanged the old man from one of the apple trees in his orchard.

That winter a terrible freeze killed every tree in the entire orchard except the one on which the old man had been hanged. It developed into one of the most bountiful fruit bearers ever seen in the area. This lone tree bore as many apples as all the other trees had, put together. The orchard was sold to another farmer, who harvested the apples and sold them in the nearby community.

Eight of the men who had composed the lynching party were among the buyers. These eight died very mysteriously and unexpectedly. Later on, investigation showed that they had all eaten fruit from the old man's tree. It seemed quite strange, since no one else was poisoned.

The ninth man had refused to eat the apples. He thought he had broken the curse.

The following spring another tree in the orchard came to life and began to turn green with leaves. It looked as though it would also bear fruit. The ninth man from the lynching party happened to be going along the road by the farm. When he saw another tree bearing a lone apple, he got off his horse and picked it.

It had been so long since he had eaten an apple that he couldn't help being tempted to taste it. He died when his teeth pierced the skin.

Neither tree bore fruit again. It appears that they had completed their task, though they continued to live on for years. One was the tree from which the old man was hanged; the other, the tree from which the boy fell to his death.

57: The Cline House

The Cline house was an old farmhouse on Lost River, about two miles outside of Mathias, West Virginia. A peddler was killed in one of the upstairs bedrooms of the place, and people were afraid to move in afterwards because the peddler had said with his dying breath that he would come back and kill anyone who lived there.

The house had long been labeled a haunted house when John and Mary Smith moved into it on the first day of summer. One morning, about a week after the Smiths had moved into the house, Mary was sitting on the porch with a basket of eggs she had just gathered when she heard a strange noise at the upstairs window. It was a weird, sniffing noise, and when she looked at the window she didn't see anyone or anything that could have caused it. This puzzled her, but she soon forgot it.

That night after Mary and John went to bed there were noises in the next room. Someone or something that had been feeling along the wall and moaning suddenly fell to the floor with a loud scream. John got out of bed and ran into the next room. At first glance, the room seemed completely empty, but when he took a second look, he noticed there was something red on the floor and several large claw marks down the wall. He stood there startled, because this was the room in which the peddler was murdered. He decided not to tell Mary anything about it, since she had slept through it all, and he went back to bed.

There was a staircase that ran from the room in which the peddler was killed down to the porch. The door at the bottom of this staircase opened onto the porch, but it could never be kept closed. The Smiths tried locking it and just about every other means of keeping it shut, but nothing worked. Finally they nailed it shut.

John and Mary were eating supper out on the porch one warm evening, when all of a sudden they heard something come rolling down the steps. All the nails popped out of the door and a large burlap bag rolled out on the floor and then disappeared.

John told his neighbors about this, and they told him the story of how the murderers dumped the peddler into a large burlap bag and tried to bury the body before someone found it. They warned him to move out of the house as soon as possible, but he decided to stay as long as nothing else happened.

Sometime later a couple of the Smiths' neighbors went to check on them, since they hadn't heard from them for two weeks. When they arrived at the house, the first thing they noticed was that three burlap bags were lying on the porch. One was empty, but the other two had something in them. When they looked into the two full bags, they were shocked to find the dead bodies of Mary and John, cut up and stuffed into the bags.

No one else ever occupied the house again because it burned to the ground a few days later.

58: The Seated Lady

A favorite tale of the old people in Jane Lew, West Virginia, had its setting in a long-forgotten cemetery in the area. Among the gravestones there had been a remarkable one of marble — a statue of a seated lady with outstretched hands. The woman for whom the statue had been erected had died of a broken heart when her fiancé married another woman.

Years later, the young people of the community started a club. As new members joined the organization, an initiation was required. Each new member had to spend one night sitting in the statue's lap.

All went well until one very dark, moonless night. At the appointed time, a young girl stole from her home and hastened to the cemetery. There she cautiously made her way through the tombstones to the seated lady. Trembling, she sat in the marble lap. Although she did not know it, this girl had more reason to be frightened than others. She happened to be a direct descendant of the traitorous fiancé.