What Walks the Hollows

Don't call them ghost stories. Mattie Yager's mother wouldn't stand for it. "Now this is a true story," she'd say. "This is not a spook story." So let me tell you how these came to me. People who grew up in these hollows told them into a tape recorder in the nineteen seventies, long after they'd been moved down off the mountain. I'm only passing them along. The old people would come in of an evening and tell these with the children sitting around, and Rosie Hoffner said it would scare them to death. Duke Harris was riding home one night when a ball of light came down over the mountain and landed on the head of his daddy's horse. A jack-o-my-lantern, he called it. The horse went wild. His daddy took a riding switch and rubbed at it, and it kept crawling back around the horse's neck, until it closed up into a ball with sparks coming off it "like these Christmas sparklers children have," and took off across the hollow. They sat their horses and watched it out of sight. Rosie Hoffner's father was walking home from Syria, Virginia, at night with his mother, groceries on their backs, when, as he told it, "something just walked up to 'em and took a holt of that bag and took it right off their back." He never saw what. It happened to other people at the same spot, the Lade place, and the school children went the long way around. Mattie's mother told of a woman with a mean husband, who saved a little money, bit by bit, and hid it, and died. Her children kept going to the springhouse for water, and every time, they said, they saw their mother. The old-time people knew the words for that, and they taught them to the children. The children said them. She led them to a spot in the springhouse. "There was her money and she was never seen after." It wasn't all so gentle. Mattie told about the peddlers, foreign men mostly, crossing these mountains on foot with packs of jewelry and tablecloths. "Some of them would come out," she said, "and some of them never would come out." One heard men talking about what they meant to do with him, and he got out through an upstairs scuttle hole with his life. They'd already been digging his grave, he said. They kept all he had. Then there's Roy Harris. A bunch of them went to an old empty house one time, "nothing in it but a solid room," and the steps going up, and no closets anybody could hide in. They'd always been told it was hainted, and they didn't believe it. They danced. When they came back down they heard as many up there as they'd been, five or six, dancing and carrying on just like they had. "We all about run ourself to death to get home." They never did know where it came from. Those families left the mountain with what would fit on a wagon, and the tales went along. The houses came down. Roy Harris and his friends got clean away. I do wonder about that crowd upstairs, and what they've been using for a floor.