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By JEFFERSON WEAVER
The old house loomed through my childhood, the very image of the classic haunted Southern mansion.
The stories surrounding the place were as wild as the vines that ate away at the once-magnificent columns, pillars for a portico that would have made Scarlett O’Hara pea-green with envy.
The double doors were stolen years before, but for some reason the wide sidelights and stained glass arch were still there, half-protected by the sagging courting balcony.
Only a handful of windows were intact, and most of the main roof was gone, but the wings still stood solid.
It was through one of these side entrances we broke into the ragged old mansion one Halloween night.
We could, quite legitimately, blame our civics/history teacher for our crimes. Mr. Gomedella insisted no one would care if we visited the haunted house.
While he helped us to trespass, he also taught us that we were to look, never touch or take. He hauled us to old churches, cemeteries, and forgotten settlements on a weekly basis, often at night. I’m proud to say there was never a report of vandalism or theft in our wake, though we trespassed with the impunity of a band of teenage Visigoths.
We were a band of teenaged ghost-hunters, mostly seniors, with a few well-behaved underclassmen.
The old house was our Mecca.
I first saw it when I spent the night with a fellow third-grader. His aunt was our teacher, and by the warmth of a woodstove, she told us stories about rattling chains and screams from the house a half-mile across the field.
I don’t think I slept that night, since the old house faced our bedroom window.
Later on (generally in daylight) other folks told us stories about Mr. and Mrs. M., how Mrs. M. went insane, and Mr. M. chained her in the attic.
More lurid versions of the story had her husband being snared by the charms of a comely young slave woman, who convinced the master to lock up Mrs. M.
Naturally, the slave, whom we’ll call Bathsheba, took over the post of lady of the house.
The master was never the best-loved fellow by his neighbors. He was prone to beat his workers and cheat everyone else, according to legend. He laughed in the face of an earnest new preacher who came by to visit, and flaunted the slave-turned-concubine in the community’s collective face.
Occasionally Bathsheba would appear on the front courting balcony in various stages of dishabille, especially when neighbors were passing by.
The children of the family were outraged, but could do nothing. They were grown and gone when their father locked their mother away. Once they reported to the sheriff that they could hear her crying from the attic whilst they visited.
They heard scraping sounds as she tugged at her chains, trying to pull out of the wall. When the mother screamed for help, Bathsheba beat her into silent submission.
This went on for years; even after Federal soldiers wandered through the area in 1865 and told the slaves they were free, Bathsheba remained.
She was rumored to taunt and torment her former mistress whenever the mood struck. The man of the house descended lower into debt, cruelty and alcohol.
And Mrs. M. slowly but surely lost her mind for real.
But like all ghost stories, the bad guys got what was coming to them.
No one explained how or why there happened to be an axe in the attic, but then the best ghost stories often have unexplainable factors.
Anyway, the wronged missus got hold of the axe and broke herself free.
You can imagine the rest.
The story says that one of the last sounds the cheatin’ husband heard was his wife dragging her chains and axe down the hall toward him.
Bathsheba, however, put up a fight. She and the missus duked it out on the gallery above the hallway.
The stories vary, but either Mrs. M. whacked Bathsheba and escaped, or Bathsheba shot Mrs. M. as she delivered one final chop, or the gallery railing gave way and they fell together.
Either way, the bodies, according to a period newspaper account, were found on the wide-boarded pine floor 20 feet below.
More than a century later, we wanted to see where the last fight happened, and so made our way upstairs to what had been a servant’s entrance to the gallery, and began prying at a door.
When the door opened, there was nothing on the other side.
One of the underclassmen almost joined Bathsheba and her mistress below, but a quick grab to the belt prevented his fall.
We slipped back into the room and went through a smelly passage closet, coming out on another section of the gallery.
Our flashlights created shadows that seemed to linger too long as we carefully made our ways through the once-grand old place.
We were seeking the attic door, and it was right where old Gomedella told us it would be.
We played our flashlights across the room, noting the places where the roof had given way and rain was melting the plaster walls.
The stains left dark smears on the wall. The stains looked old, and we wondered if they were truly watermarks, or the blood of the unfortunate Mrs. M.
Sure enough, there were even ringbolts in the wall.
There was wild, inexplicable graffiti on the walls, words that gave credence to the rumors of wannabee devil worshippers visiting the house.
The sight of those ringbolts, the odd figures on the walls and the strange graffiti robbed us of all our intrepidity.
When the wind blew through the house in a particularly haunting manner, we decided we’d had enough.
We bolted.
A few days later, the old place was burned to the ground. The owner told the fire department he had caught a couple smoking marijuana behind a derelict barn the same day.
There’s a housing development there now, nice little tract houses with manicured lawns.
I doubt most of the residents know the story about the namesake of their subdivision.
The developers took the family name and the plantation’s name and added some curlicues to a fashionable logo, creating an instant example of “Olde Southern Charm” with built-in appliances.
There are families living there now, with little kids who would be deliciously terrified at the story of Mrs. M. and her axe.
In this modern world of computer-generated special effects, I have to wonder if kids today would be scared of anything so mundane as a bump in the night.
Indeed, as I have grown up (a little) since my ghost-hunting days, I am more prone to consider an unexplained sound as evidence of a criminal intruder, not something supernatural.
But once upon a time, when the moon was right and the wind was gentle, you could sometimes hear chains rattle in an old house on a hill, and we all hoped Mrs. M. wasn’t looking for us, too.
Weaver is a staff writer at The News Reporter. He may be reached via telephone at 642-4104, or via e-mail at jeffweaver@newsreporter.biz.
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