Memoirs of a Ghost Chaser

Well, I’ll just tell you. I believe way down in my insides that whatever we go looking for, we will find. And it was about this same time of year, never mind which year exactly, it just so happened that the veil between now and what was opened just enough to let us get a quick shine of it. Nowadays I go searching for good things, you know, but it wasn’t always that way. There was a time, a time that seems like another life and world ago, when we went looking for the other side. And I’m here to tell you, I found it. Or rather, it found me.

Now here in the middle of nowhere, in the valleys and hollers of these mountains that roll on further than we can see, just about everybody has their own spook story, their own recollections of things without explanations. We regale each other with these tales, all the while wondering if they hold any sort of truth at all, and hoping beyond our fears that they do.

I recollect a night from a handful of years ago, when a bunch of us hometown kids loaded up in Shawn’s ’77 Mustang and Curtis’s little beat up Escort and headed across Jewell Ridge to the long ago abandoned Jewell Valley coal camp, flashlights and bravery in tow, and went on what we cavalierly called a boo hunt. We had to see for ourselves, to go beyond just the words taught to us by our good Mamas from the Good Book, to prove to ourselves that this is not all there is. I’ve written about the mystique and camaraderie of that Jewell Valley night before:

Beyond the glow of headlights we spied the remnants of a tiny community that once, not too long ago, had a few hundred inhabitants. We passed rows of identical, plain white houses along the forgotten road. Most of the doors and windows were missing; some had been partially burned or vandalized with spray paint. Across the front of one small house lingered the words Steve Underwood is a scab. His defamation glowed with crimson spray paint on the front of, what I assumed to be, his own house.

Beyond the rows of lonely houses were the remains of the core of the old coal camp. We rolled our windows down and breathed in old air and the mist that hung low from the mountain. The skeleton of the coal tipple stood haggard and faithful against the blackest black you’ve ever seen. I heard the distant echo of water trickling on down from Dismal Creek. On the left stood the remains of the general store, its front door wide open. And it was even more beautiful and mysterious after dark, the white wooden church with intact double doors in the front and quaint stained glass windows on either side. The steeple reached toward the canopy of pines above it, and then branched into a cross at its height.

The chirring of crickets hushed as we entered the church. An odd beam of moonlight covered the altar ahead of us; that’s when I noticed the gaping hole in the ceiling above. The altar was covered with the tattered remains of red carpeting, which shone like dried blood in the spotlight of moonshine. Shawn and Curtis sang a Kurt Cobain dirge to steady their nerves and we laughed until our voices echoed into the deep black and beyond.

In the pines, in the pines, where the sun never shines… I shiver when that cold wind blows…

As much as our scene was fit for some gruesome tale, not a disappointed one of us saw or felt anything beyond the confines of our world that night, other than the lingering melancholy of that abandoned place. Perhaps our flashlights didn’t shine brightly enough. That blackness beyond the veil is near impossible to penetrate, you know.

But then we had the Mattie… The old hospital has long since been replaced by the new town hall, but the year before it was torn down, we all went back again with our flashlights and moxie, determined to see or feel something we could not explain, something to spook and quicken the mundane flow of our small town ho hum. The Mattie Williams Hospital had been over a hundred years old; it stood on the peak of a small knoll above downtown, imposing and antiquated, with tall white columns and a pitched roof like a storybook castle, with heavily draped windows and too many brick steps for sick people to climb.

I was never allowed inside; children under twelve were not allowed past the front doors. But I recollect sitting on the long front porch with my brother, waiting for Mama and Daddy to come back out. Papaw was inside somewhere, suffocating from the fifty years of coal dust trapped in his lungs. We got a pop out of a vending machine and pretended we were rich people, and that grand front porch was ours, and all of our mysterious riches were stored up inside.

The Mattie closed her doors permanently not long after that, but the sentimental reveries about her exist even now, as do the tales from ghost chasers like us. I recollect one particular musing about a nurse that refused to leave the Mattie, even after she had died there in the earlier years of the grand hospital’s tenure on the hill, and she could be seen floating past in the evening, the glow from her lamplight steadily floating from window to window.

We filmed our escapade at the Mattie on a VHS tape, one that I still have in a box somewhere in the attic. The last time I watched it, the town as my youth remembers it was preserved, pristine and sadly familiar, in the lamplights of Suffolk Avenue below the Mattie. It captured the voices of myself and my brother and good ol’ Shawn and Curtis, our chatter and whispers concerning ghosts and old relics and the talk of the coming demise of the old hospital. With the watchful eye of the camera held as still as our hands would allow, we caught old Mattie’s sad silhouette dark against that blackness that has no compare, and before the battery went dead, just as the scene panned toward the lights of town, one of the old windows on the Mattie’s second floor lit up as bright as day shine for a moment, and then suddenly went dark again.

We chased those old ghosts on more nights than I can recollect now, and truth be told, we never found a one. Not how we had pictured them, at least. We had tried our damnedest. The truth of those boo hunting nights of our youth was much harder to discern then, but I see it now. How could I not see it before? At last, those spooks I went looking for have finally found me.

I am the ghost, you see.

Or I will be, one day in the wild blue. And so will you. And that’s why we love the stories of the others. That’s why we long to catch a glimpse of them, and with held breath hope to hear their footsteps and feel the breeze from their shadows. I think we need to believe that some things really do last forever.

Sometimes even now, especially in these Fall days, I will go downtown after nighttime seeps down from the mountains, and go looking for something I cannot name. I think we all do this. Certainly it cannot only be me. And sometimes I’ll listen to those old songs, the ones that Shawn and Curtis used to sing along to before they were killed in that awful accident, and I will still hear their voices, harder to recollect now, but still here in the corners of my memory. Yes, I know it’s not just me.

It’s funny how it happens, if we let it, in that place between the evening and the time when that old blackness like no other sets in, that everything looks just the same as it once did. The old hometown, the abandoned places. The old homeplace, where Mamaw lived until she went on to the hereafter, it still yet rests against the enveloping dark of the rising ridge, and as I drive by, I imagine she’s still in there somewhere. And perhaps, just perhaps, she is. Some fragment of her light or a spark of her energy, just maybe. And even the music sounds the same, and so do the voices that accompany it, even when the flashlights have long been burned out.

Perhaps that’s what we’re looking for — some brave brightness in the growing dark.

This is what we do, isn’t it? Isn’t this what all of us do? Certainly we are not the only ones with flashlights out there in that deep black, hoping beyond fear to find something beyond the veil between now and what will be. There has to be, somewhere out there past the place where our voices can carry, others who hope to be found, other bright lights still burning. And that’s why I keep looking, and like I told you, what you look for, you will find.

If they don’t find you first.

(Have you read Rural Legend?Stop in for a visit if you have a moment to read it again. And for the record, it is a very {mostly} true tale. Best wishes and much obliged, and happy Fall, ya’ll…)