Sitting Up with the Dead, page 34
John said, “Well what am I supposed to do?” The old Devil said, “You just wait here.” And he went back and he opened up his old fiery furnace, and he reached way in the back of that furnace and he got this hot burning coal outta there. And he took it and he stuck it out the gate, and said, “Here, Wicked John, you take this burning hot coal, and you go off, and you find your own Hell. Start your own Hell.”
So, to this very day, in the Appalachian Mountains, Smokey Mountains, up in Eastern Kentucky — right out here the other night—I seen something. Some people call it foxfire. Glows in the dark up in the woods at night. Them scientist fellers say — Mitch assumed a dignified voice — “It’s a mushroom that glows in the dark.” The old timers, they’ll all say — now in a creaky voice — “Why, it’s fox fire.” And the really old-timers, they’ll say, “That’s Wicked John.”
We clapped till our hands hurt, and the boys beamed in a very unteenage manner. I had seen “Wicked John” mentioned in a list of old Irish tales transplanted to the South, but ľd never heard it before. After he finished, Mitch admitted he’d had trouble with the ending — “Its a bit of a downer, besides, I don’t like that whole Hell thing” — and had added the part about fox fire.
“What’s that?” asked one of the boys.
“It’s a light, like a phosphorescent light, that rotting wood sometimes gives off,” explained Mitch. “Looks spooky, but it am ’t.”
Afterwards, while Carla and Zoe made cookies in Zoe’s kiddie oven, we cajoled Mitch into telling us one more tale. This one was called “Whickity-Whack,” a Jack tale he’d learned from Ray Hicks, about Jack trapping Death in a sack (the very tale Ray told to the president of the United States when he received his award from the National Endowment for the Arts). Mitch said he hadn’t quite finished working on this one, which I thought a curious comment, until he began speaking. Then I understood: the tale was a bridge across time that Mitch had built word by careful word. But for a few rough spots, it was nearly complete. In Mitch’s world, a hybrid of New South and Old Appalachia, Jack watches Martha Stewart and Death carries a weed whacker instead of a scythe; the princess is anorexic. Through Mitch Barrett, Ray Hicks met daytime television, and the boys loved it. It seemed that of all the Hicks clan, Jack was the one who had gone upscale and moved into a condo.
We ended the evening very late, with me yawning desperately and Mitch and Carla each playing guitar and singing (they have recorded an album together, and have a new CD in the works). Then, because the boys were in residence, Mitch announced I was staying with his mother, just around the corner.
“But I don’t know her!” I cried.
“She don’t know you neither, but she invited you. C’mon.”
The Barrett family continued to foil my expectations. In the few minutes it took to cross the dark hillside, I populated the little ranch house ahead of me with a tiny, gray-haired old lady; instead, Peggy opened the door, still extraordinarily young-looking at fifty-eight, in pajamas, with a long dark braid down her back to match her son’s. Her home was the antithesis of Mitch and Carla’s: neat, proper, rich with knickknacks. We chatted for a little bit, and I learned that she had married at fifteen and had Mitch at seventeen, and then Peggy announced she had to leave for the greeting card factory where she worked at five A.M. but that she’d be real quiet.
“You just get up whenever you like. I’d leave breakfast, but Carla already offered to do that. Just go back to their house — they’ll be gone too, they’re telling stories at a school a few hours from here — but the front door is always open.”
“But, but you don’t know me,” I stammered, nearly adding that for all she knew I was planning to rob or maim or murder her in the night, then thought better of it.
“Oh, any friend of Mitch’s …,” she said generously, showing me where to find my towels.
The following morning I woke in silence. The only noise in the holler came from a motion detector in the shape of a frog on Peggy’s front walk. Whenever anything crossed its path, which I did several times, it croaked a loud, electronic warning.
I knew Mitch and Carla’s house was less than a minute away, but I didn’t know the direction, and wound up wandering for fifteen minutes before I found it, feeling as solitary as Wicked John. The name raised a visible shiver on my arms. I had been so caught up in Mitch’s telling last night that the sudden, existential awfulness of the ending had curdled in my ears. “Here’s an ember: go start your own Hell.” In the South, where evil has always had a close, familial quality, caught up in a cycle of intimates inflicting violence on one another (the very geography of the South, bordered by the Appalachian range, the Atlantic, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Mississippi River, reinforces a claustrophobic, regional intimacy), to be cast out of the family, however grim, is the ultimate expulsion. To travel always and have no home, not even in Hell. To be alone, without conversation or kin — it is a Southern storyteller s nightmare.
The Bell Witch’s Tale
IWAS DRIVING THE FINAL STROKE of the backwards “Z” that my recent travels had traced on the map: west from West Virginia to central Kentucky; east from there back to the Appalachian outskirts of Berea; and now, west again, across the long rectangle of Tennessee toward Memphis. In the north-central part of the state, somewhere on Interstate 40, my car radio entered a strange dimension. One channel, playing oldies out of Knoxville, said it was ten A.M.; another, playing classic rock out of Nashville, said it was nine. This riff in chronology unsettled me. If we can mess with anything invisible to us, like time, and make it bend to our comfort, surely the invisible world can make us uncomfortable as well. You see, I was on my way to Memphis, but I planned to stop at a haunting along the way.
In 1818 — coincidentally, the year Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein — some very interesting things began to happen to a family in Adams, Tennessee, which today is a little farming community about twenty miles north of Nashville, near the Kentucky border. In morning sunlight the countryside looked ordinary enough: tidy seas of chicory bobbing in a light breeze, red barns battened up tight, with smoke curling out from under their eaves (actually this seemed a little sinister, and for a time I considered calling a fire department, until I figured tobacco was drying inside). Adams was just a collection of houses casually calling themselves a town. It was only by chance that I found the sign I was seeking on a secondary farm road:
Historic Bell Witch Cave
Daily Tours 10—6 May thru Oct.
Private tours available
Alcohol strictly prohibited
Another sign added, Closed when Flooded.
In the early nineteenth century there was even less of a human presence in this part of Tennessee than today. The Bell family, prosperous homesteaders and pillars of the small community, had for a time been disturbed by unidentified scratchings and knockings outside their home. Then in 1818 the noises moved inside. Four sons who shared a bedroom were bothered by the sound of a rat gnawing their bedposts; when they searched, however, no animal was ever found. Next the covers began slipping off their beds, as if being pulled from the foot, accompanied by the sound of someone smacking their lips and gulping for air. The same things happened to their sister Elizabeth in the next room, who was also bothered by noises of dragging chains and stones thudding on the floor. It was when the shivering Bells tried to pull their bedclothes back up that the real trouble began. Invisible hands twisted around their hair and yanked hard, or pricked their skin with pins, or pinched them. Elizabeth was “frequently crimsoned as by a hard blow from an open hand,” her brother Richard wrote later.
Their father, John Bell, forbade his family to speak of these incidents until Elizabeth, especially, became so tortured that he asked a neighbor in as a witness. When the nightly tumult started, the neighbor cried out, “In the name of the Lord, who or what are you?” There was no reply except an immediate, temporary silence, which they took to mean that the disturbance understood their words. After that the Bells’ secret was out, and more neighbors came to pelt the air with questions, and were audibly slapped in response. Progressively, the spirit began making whistling sounds, then unintelligible whisperings; finally it spoke, answering the question, “Who are you and what do you want?” by saying “I am a Spirit; I was once very happy but have been disturbed.”
Thereafter the Bells, quite against their will, and their in-house Spirit became celebrities. For two years people came from all over the States and England to witness the phenomenon (the Bells’ English relatives had passed the word), including President Andrew Jackson. Locally the voice became known as the Bells’ Witch. It took an active interest in the lives of the community, gossiping about locals’ private doings, meddling in Elizabeth’s love life — it refused to let her marry against its wishes — and going on for hours singing hymns and quoting whole chapters of the Bible verbatim, at top speed. It chastised anyone who misquoted Scripture. It played tricks. Once it declared itself to be the spirit of a person buried nearby, whose grave had been disturbed; another time it said it was a neighbor woman’s witch; once it announced it was the spirit of an early immigrant who had buried treasure on the Bells’ land. It instructed several people to dig for this treasure in a certain spot — they did so exhaustively, and found nothing — then it recounted the adventure to newcomers for a month, making uproarious fun of the gullible treasure hunters it had duped. Curiously, it was also intensely prejudiced against the Bells’ black slaves, and harrassed them with beatings and slaps.
Finally, the Spirit announced its intention of hurrying John Bell, or “Old Jack,” as it called him, into his grave. At the same time it showed real love for Bell’s wife, Lucy, caring for her when she was sick and bringing her presents. It also brought a gift to the Bells’ daughter-in-law, Martha — black silk stockings, “to be buried in,” it told her — when she moved to Mississippi. But John Bell was its target. The Spirit cursed him viciously, and one night in 1821, finally poisoned him. Bell was discovered unconscious with a vial of dark liquid nearby (when the family tested some on a cat, it immediately went into convulsions and died). The disembodied voice announced gleefully, “It’s useless for you to try to revive Old Jack — I have got him this time; he will never get up from that bed again.” As usual, it was right. Bell died and the Spirit sang a drinking song — “O, row me up some Brandy!” — at his funeral. Afterward, it said it was leaving the household but promised to return seven years later. Sure enough, in 1828 the Spirit came back, and this time had a tête-à-tête with John Bell, Jr., to whom it fairly accurately described the upcoming Civil War, and World War I.
“Some say it never left,” said Chris Kirby, a pretty blonde woman who along with her husband now owned the former Bell farm. She wore a T-shirt printed with an icon of a witch — a figure in a tall hat, riding a broomstick — superimposed over a big yellow bell. Her familiar was a friendly black Lab named Panther. The Kirbys had built an open-air pavilion in the middle of one of their fields, with a corrugated iron roof overtop to create some shade. The pavilion functioned as a kind of outdoor office; although the Bell’s house had been razed long ago, for five dollars the Kirbys took visitors on tours of the “Bell Witch Cave,” a cavern on the property. The cave had its own body of folklore, including a story I had heard on The Moonlit Road about a little boy who had gotten stuck in it, and had suddenly been jerked out by unseen hands.
“We’re the Number One haunted spot in America,” Chris announced proudly.
Before touring the cave, Chris told me a ream of spooky stories under the pavilion, while Panther licked his private parts and the roof creaked in the heat. “There’s somethin’ here, I don’t know if it’s the Bell Witch or what,” Chris began.
“When people takes pictures in the cave, weird things come up on the film.” She opened a photo album and began pointing out strange lights and glowing spheres on otherwise ordinary photographs. “We had a guy come through with one of them night cameras, like they used in the Gulf War? Here’s what come out.”
She showed me a second-by-second sequence taken by a thermal-imaging camera inside the cave, that depicted some kind of aperture opening and closing in quick succession in one of the crawl spaces; one image clearly showed a face contorted in a scream, seemingly being torn apart by the aperture. My skepticism had a tussle with my eyes, and there were no winners. “Now look at these,” she said. “They were taken by ordinary folks who’ve visited us. They send me copies of the real good ones.”
Chris first pointed out a snapshot she herself had taken of her daughter and a friend. She had accidentally moved the camera and created a double exposure. The curious thing was that in the primary image of her daughter the girl’s hair was off her face, while in the shadow, or ghost image, it fell across her forehead. I looked at Chris and raised my eyebrows. She smiled and rubbed her forearms, which were covered in goose bumps. “Real creepy, ain’t it?” she commented, handing me another snapshot, this time labeled March 1977. It was an ordinary color shot of a family on vacation, taken next to a crumbling wall.
“Tell me what’s weird about that,” she challenged.
I peered at the people, who all looked normal enough, if unfortunate victims of seventies fashions. Then I glanced at the wall: almost formed by the cracks and peeling paint and lichen, but not quite — it was too vivid to be a suggestion — was the colorless outline of a woman in a long skirt, holding a baby, with a child by her side.
“That’s been tested by labs an’ everything, and it ain’t a doctored photo.”
At that moment a fierce, hot wind came whirling out of the calm afternoon and shook the pavilion, scattering photos and papers every which way. Chris and I looked at each other and laughed, but we both fumbled unnecessarily with the photos, shaken though too skeptical to admit. At that point we were also joined by a portly mother and much-pierced daughter from Nashville, the latter sporting beet-red hair and blue fingernails. They came with us, along with Panther, on our excursion to the cave. The additional flesh was somehow reassuring.
The Bell Witch Cave was on a cool, ferny hillside above the Red River. Chris explained that we had to be on the lookout for canoeists who sometimes tried to sneak up the bank. The Kirbys had been forced to install an electronic alarm system around their entire property, because so many people — teenagers, she said pointedly, nodding at the daughter — tried to sneak in at night to have themselves a good scare.
The cave mouth was outfitted with a sturdy iron gate; inside, its entrails were wonderfully cool, so cool that steam rose faintly from Panther’s back. It was not a particularly beautiful cave. Stunted stalagmites and stalactites, no bigger than wax drippings, fixed themselves to a cluster of immense flowstone formations that writhed and twisted alongside the central passageway. The floor was uneven, and water dripped from the ceiling. Panther lapped noisily from a puddle. The colors replicated every shade of copper penny, from brand-new (orange-rose) to ancient (deep brown). Chris told us that three-thousand-year-old Native American graves had been discovered above the cave, and pointed out a small stone sarcophagus to one side of the pathway. It was about three hundred years old and had contained the skeleton of a young girl, until someone had stolen it. That reminded her.
“Never take anything from the cave,” she cautioned. “I took an arrowhead once, and three days later I got a serious back injury. Then my daughter took a rock, and the next day one of our barns collapsed. We lost $25,000 worth of tobacco. You bet we put all that stuff back.”
I looked in horror at my sneaker, which was covered in ocher mud. Did sediment count? As it turned out, fear was the only thing that haunted me from the Bell Witch Cave — that and a curious impression. What the Bells called their “Family Trouble” made for a first-rate ghost story, but in many ways it was a very human haunting. The Spirit had preyed on personal relationships and employed, to my mind, fairly low-level methods of nuisance-making. It even stooped to poisoning. Although it claimed to be from “heaven, hell, and earth,” its manifestations and concerns fell within the sphere of mortal activity, so much so, in fact, that unlike other ghosts it was obsessed with the present and future, rather than the past. This human orientation puts the Bell Witch in a different category from the ghosts I had encountered earlier on my journey — those incarnations of the terrible, impersonal predations of the coast: the storms, the disease, the Devil lurking in overwork, heat, and stagnant swamps. Whatever shape they assumed, from human to plat-eye, coastal ghosts were ultimately part and parcel of the elements, which is what gave their stories such sensory-soaked fatalism. The heat, the thunder, the damp: the weather there was always ripe for recalling old hauntings, always threatening to create new ones.
But we don’t expect such terrors in the hardy soil of Adams, Tennessee. So where did the Bell Witch come from? She — the Witch was gendered female from the very beginning — had an all-too-human fanaticism about her, from her imperious judgments about what was best for members of the family, especially the lone daughter, to her rabid dislike of blacks, her overwrought citations from Scripture, her autocratic sense of right and wrong, her violent outbursts. In an eerie way the Spirit prefigured a very “Southern” brand of intolerance that scarred the twentieth century. Consider the repeated attacks on the teaching of evolution (the Scopes Trial of 1925, in which a biology teacher was found guilty of breaking a state law prohibiting the teaching of Darwin’s theories, was held in Tennessee). Consider the white-supremacist ravings of the Ku Klux Klan, and the three thousand lynchings of African-Americans of which Dick had spoken; the decision of the Southern Baptist Church, the largest Christian denomination in America, to cease ordaining women ministers in the year 2000. All of these descended from the attitudes of the Bell Witch. I could not help thinking that those black-and-white TV ghosts that rolled in my memory, the same ghosts I found trapped in old television sets in the Birmingham Civil Rights Museum, were forty year-old incarnations of the Bells’ Witch, returned as she had promised (the Spirit had made allusions to coming back to earth a century later), to haunt America.
