The Ghost of Mahogany Lane

The Ghost of  Mahogany Lane- A Jesup Ghost Story

In Memory of Chance  - you loved this club so much and you and others like you are why I still do it.

When we moved to Jesup we rented a small little cracker box house on  Mahogany Lane.  It was just half a block off cherry street down where the original arch was situated many years before. Our neighbors said that then that was almost country, but now it’s more like the middle of town.  It was a cute little three bedroom house built in the 1940’s with wood floors and unique shelving built into the wall in the parlor room.  It was quite a charming little house, but it was small and had fallen into disrepair.  The yard was about as big as a postage stamp and it was littered with sandspurs.  I could barely walk to the mailbox without being assaulted by them.  I only tried to walk there barefoot once, when I first moved to South Georgia, and it was almost like walking through a minefield so I never considered it again.

My dog, Bear, however never quite learned that lesson.  He wanted to be a yard dog so badly but every time he went outside we spent fifteen minutes pulling sandspurs out from between his furry little toes.  Bear turned out to be strictly and indoor, maybe lay out on the carport or on the front porch kind of dog.  We had to walk him every morning and every night all around the neighborhood so he could have some exercise and wouldn’t go insane on us.

We started out going down the alley beside our house to the church and turning and walking back up Cherry Street.  Then we moved on to walking out the lane to Walnut street past the "Black Church" as it was called in our neighborhood. I always wanted to visit, because everytime I passed I could always hear preaching and singing.  It sounded fun and I would enjoy the music until we crossed the empty lot by the church and turned around and down back the alley home.   The empty lot by church was our turn around spot, I could let Bear off his leash and he would bounce through the tall grass looking for rabbits.  He would always find one.  I don’t know if there were that many rabbits living in that empty lot or if it was just the same stupid rabbit, but 9 times out of ten he’d chase it around and it would disappear in the shrubbery.

When the weather got cooler we decided to mix it up a bit and we began to branch out in new directions. In Jesup you can still walk around in most neighborhoods without fear of being mugged or molested.  I carried pepper spray just in case and though Bear was about the size of a very large house cat; he had the heart of an African lion.  He figured he was  the only dog we had and it was his responsibility to protect us from all harm.  In his little dog mind that was his job and he took it seriously.  Over time, I learned to trust his doggie senses.  If he waved his tail and smiled his little dog smile at someone they were probably okay but if he ever growled or raised his hackles, I knew I had to watch out.

Eventually we found our way to Wayne Street where people say that once upon a time, every body that was anybody built a house there.  I liked looking at the grand old houses that lined the road.  My momma said once that I looked at houses like some people look at babies.  I’m drawn to old houses.  They’re like time capsules- visitors from a bygone era.  Houses have personalities all of their own.  They tell stories if you’re careful enough to listen.   We had never owned a house of our own; we were just renters so I looked at those grand old ladies on Wayne and Cherry streets with a covetous eye.  One day, I promised myself, I’d own a house with some history. Maybe a creepy old one that people said was haunted.  It wouldn’t really be haunted of course, because I couldn’t stand that, but it would be okay if there were some kind of haint tale to go along with it.  Either that or there was a story about some sort of hidden treasure inside.  Any one of the two would do for me.

As we branched out from our 4- 6 block dog walking routine I made my way to the Cracker William’s park Area and found that a lady I knew from church lived in that area.  She first rented a small apartment across from the pool, but then moved a couple blocks away near the school in a large Victorian.  It was a beautiful white two story with a wide columned front porch and pretty red shutters and two red doors in the front.  Her husband was an immaculate landscaper and he always kept the yard in pristine condition.  It could have been on the cover of a southern living magazine. One day she saw me walking by as she was sitting on the front porch and she called out to me.

“I’ve seen you at my Church.”  She said as she bounced down the front steps.  “I’m Vicky.  You’re new in town, right?”

I told her we were and when I told her we were originally from Alabama she beamed a huge smile at me.
“I’m from Alabama too.  Slocomb- it’s down near Dothan.”

I had a faint recollection of Dothan from our first road trip to Panama City Beach. I couldn’t find it on a map but I did remember that it was in the vicinity of the Big Peach water tower.  Everybody loved the Big Peach- people stopped and took pictures of it.  Not because a town having a water tower shaped like a peach is such an unusual thing but because if you looked at it from the right spot on the interstate, it sort of resembled a butt and a crack.

 Finally she asked us up to sit a spell on her porch and get out of the heat.  That was how our friendship started.  We were new in town and we didn’t know many people and we started talking.  I told her that I lived on Mahogany.  I didn’t realize that Mahogany was a street and a lane.  Mahogany Street was one street over.  We lived on Mahogany Lane.  I just said Mahogany and left it at that assuming that she lived in Jesup longer than us, she would know the area.

One day I commented on how much I admired her house.

“It’s just a rental.  She confessed.  “The lady that owned it was a widow and she used to rent it out to single teachers. We needed a bigger house because my husband’s family often comes to visit and we need room for them.”

I told her it was a beautiful house, I loved old houses.

“It’s an old house.  Old houses do funny things.  They make weird noises.  Sometimes it sounds like footsteps upstairs when there’s no one there.  You can’t live in an old house if you’re too easily scared. There are too many strange noises.”

I cut my eyes at her and grinned.  “Are you saying your house is haunted?”  I teased.

She laughed.  “No. Not mine.  You live by the haunted house.”

I looked at her suspiciously.  She had gotten my attention.  “Which one?”

“The one on the Lane behind your street.”

There wasn’t a lane behind my house.

“Mahogany Lane?”  I asked.

She nodded. “Over close to the school.”

My heart seemed to skip a beat.  “The brick one.”  I finished for her, sure that was the one she was talking about.  It looked haunted.

“No, the little blue one.”

I felt like someone had just poured ice water all over my body.

“The little blue one with the white shutters?  Little crackerbox house with a postage stamp front yard?”  I asked just to be sure.

“You know it!” She cried happily.

Yep.  I knew it. I knew it well.  I lived in it. 

******

Well, I had to find out why she said it was haunted so I fought my first inclination to blab that that was my house and instead asked her to tell me about it.

“I’ve never heard that.”  I said.  “Who is it haunted by?”

She grinned at me over her glass of sweet tea.  “They say the lady who owned the house lost her husband in some sort of accident.  She stayed there for years until she was too old to care for herself. Her husband had built that house and they always kept it up.  She planted flowers in the front yard and the shrubs were always trimmed.  It was their perfect little cottage.  They had planned on having children but they never did. He was killed and she lived the rest of her life there alone.”

I shrugged.  “That’s it?”  I asked, somewhat disappointed.  I had expected a little more.

”Let me finish!”  She waved her hand at me.  “Mrs. Smith got sick one night and the ambulance came and took her away.  While she was in the hospital she kept saying that her husband was there alone and she needed to take care of him.  She got so agitated that one of the doctors called for the police to go check the place out.  The officer came in looked but everything was locked up and there was no one to be found.  He went next door and asked the neighbor who told him that the husband was killed a long time ago and she lived alone.”

“Wow.”  I commented.  It wasn’t much of a story.

“I still ain’t finished. “  She snapped.  “You want to hear this story or not?”

I guessed.  It was too hot to continue our walk, so I nodded for her to finish.

“Well, since they had no children and Mrs. Smith couldn’t care for her own self, then she was sent to a nursing home and the house was sold to pay for her expenses.  It’s a rental place now.”

Yep.  I knew that.

“I knew not the last people, but the lady before that who lived there.  She said you would hear footsteps and things would move around.  Every once in a while she saw shadows and heard voices.  She said it was spooky and it scared her sometimes but she didn’t feel threatened.  The people before her had had a bunch of German Shepherds in that house and they destroyed the house.  The rental place had to have it redone.”
It didn’t help.  I thought bleakly.

“But you know remodeling brings the ghosts out.  He must have liked my friend because he didn’t scare her too much.  The last family threw their stuff in their car and left in a hurry.  They said they wouldn’t stay there a minute longer.”

Hey!  The landlord told me that they were in the military and were transferred suddenly!  I’d been lied to!  I felt violated!

“I didn’t know them.  All I know was that it was a black family that left in a hurry.”  She finished her story and took a sip of her sweet tea.

Racist ghost?  I thought and raised my eyebrows.

I shrugged and told her I’d better be going and Bear and I continued on our walk.  We had lived there six months and we had never heard or seen a single thing.  The dog never let on and everybody knows that dogs are supposed to be able to see spirits.  Despite her story I wasn’t convinced.  The brick house next door was MUCH creepier than my little cracker box house.  What self respecting ghost would want to spend eternity in our house?  I was alive and didn’t want to stay there any longer than I had to.


When I got home that afternoon I told my husband that Vicky said that our house was haunted.  He laughed in my face and told me that Vicky was on crack.

That was when I started LOOKING for things.  I would hear noises which could very well be a ghost but it could just be squirrels in the attic. It wasn’t enough to convince me we were haunted.

Then the kid next door decided to ring the doorbell for about an hour straight one day and stuff started happening after that.  I don’t know if the two were related, but I blamed Daniel and the doorbell.
******

The kid next door was Daniel.  He was about eight years old, looked like Opie Taylor and  was about eighty pounds of nonstop noise.  I had just about decided that he had two settings on his voice- loud and so loud you went into convulsions.  He didn’t have an off switch for his voice either- if he was breathing he was talking and you hoped it was a loud day or otherwise you’d end up in the hospital.

Daniel rode to Awana with me on Wednesday night and on our first trip to church he discovered that if he rang the doorbell it would make the dog howl.  His game every Wednesday was to try to race over to my house and ring the doorbell as many times as possible before I could answer it just to hear Bear’s reaction.

The day of the doorbell incident I had to run a few errands before church.  When I arrived back home to get my Bible and Daniel, I found him on my steps furiously pushing the doorbell button.  He was so engrossed that he didn’t even notice when I pulled up behind him in the car.

Dingdongdingdongdingdongdingdong the doorbell sang out.

Inside the dog was having a conniption.

Outside, Daniel was laughing wickedly.

I screamed at him to stop and asked him what in the Sam Hill he thought he was doing.

He turned and gave me an angelic smile.  “Oh THERE you are!  I thought you were inside!”

I was furious.  Inside the dog was still howling.  He probably would never be able to hear a doorbell without going into some kind of spasm.

“I’m NOT inside!”  I snapped.  “Don’t you think I would have opened the door by now?”

“I thought you might have been asleep.” The angelic voice replied.

I turned and pointed at the empty garage which he had to walk through to get to the door.  “The car is gone Daniel!  How could I be asleep if I’m driving?”

His face said “Awww, busted!”  But he quickly recovered and gave me the same angelic smile and asked if it was time for Awana.

The dog slept between us that night.  He wasn’t normal for weeks.  Well, who am I kidding? He wasn’t normal for life.  From that day on, anytime a doorbell rang he would go into hysterics.  Even if the doorbell was on TV he would go nuts and start running through the house growling and howling.  Dominos commercials became the bane of his existence.

That was the night that things changed.  There was a whole different feeling in the house.  It felt—electric.  It was hard to explain.  The closest I can explain it was that it felt like there was someone with you- like you were being watched.

Then there were the shadows.  It usually happened to me while I was watching TV. It would look just like someone would walk across the dining room or down the hall.  It made my hair stand on end and then I’d get that electric feeling.  I didn’t like it but I came up with a simple solution. I commenced to leaving every light in the house on.  It’s kind of hard for shadows to hide when your living room is brighter than the surface of the sun.

No more shadows after that.


Fine with me.

It got to the point that Don decided I was just born without the light turning off gene.  I didn’t tell him our house was haunted and I was afraid of our ghost.  He would have laughed in my face and asked if I was on crack.   I just left the lights on.  It got so bad I would have left every light in the house on and then bought a sleeping mask to sleep in if my husband would have let me.  Don on the other hand is one of those got to turn off the light when you leave the room kind of people, even if you’re coming right back.  So he was constantly switching them off and I was constantly turning them back on.  Our neighbors thought we ran a disco with all the light flickering in our house at night.

It was easy to say that it was all in my mind until the dog started noticing it too.  I was watching TV and saw my husband walk down the hall to our bedroom.  Bear raised his head and gave it a disinterested look and then went back to sleep.  About half a second later, Don stepped into the living room with a Dr. Pepper in his hand.

I looked at him and then back up the hall. My first thought was, for a fat guy he sure could move fast, but then I reconsidered.  I KNEW he could not have gotten in the living room THAT quickly- unless I was having a matrix moment.

That’s when I started watching Bear very closely and I noticed that he would take a sudden keen interest in things that weren’t there.  In my mind I tried to say that he was looking at dust particles or watching a gnat.  That’s what I told myself to keep myself sane but more and more often I noticed that he would sit at the foot of the couch and stare up at nothing just like it was something… or more precisely someone.  And sometimes while he was watching nothing his ears perked up and his eyes danced like nothing was holding a dog treat.

That bothered me immensely.

Weird feelings and dogs staring at nothing- that was one thing. Those kinds of things you could put over in the corner of your mind and file under the heading of “things that make you go humm?”

When it said my name I was ready to burn the house down.


***********

I was at home alone.  It never bothered me when Don was there.  Maybe it just liked me.  I don’t know.  I had come home from school and went to the Library and got myself a book and had every intention of stretching out on the couch and reading until midnight.

I was totally engrossed in my novel.  Then I heard it.  Clear as day.

“Lillah.”

I jumped up and chills ran all over my body.  The logical part of my brain wanted to explain it away and the illogical part just wanted to run away.  It didn’t make sense.  I didn’t really believe in Ghosts.  If you’d asked me before that I’d have said ghost stories were bull hockey.  I believed in spirits.  I believed in angels and demons but the spirits of our departed went to either one of two places.  I found it hard to believe that Mr. Smith’s spirit was spending his eternity hanging out in my house creeping around in the shadows, entertaining the dog and whispering my name.  It bothered me to think that, but it bothered me worse to think that if it WASN’T Mr. Smith, then WHAT was it?

Several nights later- after I’d had enough time to talk myself into believing that I’d just dreamed the whole thing- I ended up on the couch in the middle of the night.  I was having trouble breathing, and I just couldn’t get comfortable so I drug my pillow and my blanket into the living room and crawled on the couch.  Bear followed me and lay at my feet.  It made me feel a little better, at least I wasn’t alone.   Perhaps if someone tried to break in on me he would bark or growl; especially if the hapless burglar tried to ring the doorbell.

I woke in the dark living room to the familiar electric feeling.  I had my back turned to the supposedly empty room, but I felt like someone was there with me. I could almost feel them sitting beside me on the coffee table.  I had the uncanny feeling that if I turned and looked he would be there and I would see him.  It felt like he wanted me to look, like he was waiting for me to look at him.  I was terrified, and I didn’t dare open my eyes even though my every natural inclination was to look.  It was like having an itch I wasn’t supposed to scratch.  No matter how much I wanted to turn and look, my fear would not let me move.  I lay there as quietly as I knew how and prayed for some sort of relief.  I probably would have stayed like that all night had the Lord not sent my husband to retrieve me.

He bent over me and asked me why I didn’t come back to bed.  I followed him obediently back into our bedroom and lay as close to him as I could.  Whatever it was didn’t come around when Don was there.  I didn’t know why, but that was the last night I spent on the couch until we moved to Screven.

But I had to be at home by myself.  I couldn’t just leave and not come back until Don showed up at seven thirty at night.  I fought back as best I could.  I blasted my rock and roll.  Mr. Smith didn’t seem to like my taste in music so I played it loudly.  As an added precaution, more for my benefit than anything else, I left all the lights on in the house and if I ever started to feel that electric feeling- well it was time to walk the dog or take a trip to Wal-Mart.

Sometimes it would be days or weeks between visits.  One such night I was cooking supper and I heard footsteps down the hall.  I wiped my hands on a towel and looked around the corner to see what Bear was up to.  He was on the couch with his head tilted as if to ask why I was bothering him. The hair on the back of my neck stood on end and I felt as though someone was standing behind me.  So I did what could do, I turned off the potatoes and told Bear it was time for a walk.

I took my cell phone and talked to Don who assured me he was on his way home from work.  I took an extra long walk that afternoon and then stopped by Mrs. Katherine’s house to play with her weenie dog, Buster.  Mrs. Katherine was working out in her little yard.  I looped Bear’s leash around a skinny little tree and put Buster on his leash.  I walked him around in the yard while I wasted time waiting for Don to come home. 

Finally, I had enough and put Buster back in his little pen and I sat down on the porch to talk to my neighbor.  Mrs. Katherine worked at the First Baptist Church too so she knew absolutely EVERYBODY in Jesup and she knew ALL the news that was worth talking about.  She turned out to be my main source of information on our “ghost”.

“I’m glad you’re trying to keep the place up.”  She commented as she worked in her flowers.  “You should have seen it when Mrs. Smith lived there.  It was always kept up; she had flowers in the yard.  She would just die if she could see it today.  Before they turned it into a rental it was really pretty.”

That made me feel bad.  Maybe our “friend” was visiting because he was angry over the condition of the house he had built.

I gently prodded Mrs. Katherine for more information.

“So… whatever happened to Mr. and Mrs. Smith anyway?”  I asked as if I hadn’t heard the story.

“Oh, she’s in the nursing home.  She has Alzheimer’s.  She thought her husband was still alive.  Poor thing.”

I wondered how much of the story Mrs. Katherine knew or would tell me.  I asked her how Mr. Smith died.

“Oh, he died on the train.”

“He worked on the railroad?”  I asked.

“No, the train de-railed.  He was the only one what was killed.  They were young and in love.  It was so sad, they never had children and Mrs. Smith never married again.  She lived there until they took her away and they made the place into a rental.  You know, one family had a bunch of ol’ dogs in there.  They destroyed that house. I wonder what Mr. Smith would say if he could see it now.”

I wanted to tell her he was probably hanging out in my living room if she wanted to go ask him, but I kept my mouth shut.

Don pulled into the carport and I waved at her.  “I gotta get going.”  I told her and retrieved Bear from her tree.   I had my first clue to the puzzle.

The Librarian gave me the next clue.  I was a history major in college and if I learned nothing else, it was how to research.  I camped out at the library after school that day and found the newspaper clippings in a big scrapbook.  It talked about how the train- Number Ninety Six had derailed just outside of Odum and Mr. Smith was the only one killed.  It mentioned that he was supposed to take an earlier train but he had been delayed on his business and he took Number Ninety Six instead.

I shook my head.  He wasn’t even supposed to be on that train!  It seemed like such a waste.

The feelings came more and more often as summer gave way into fall.  I don’t know if the cool weather brought our “friend” out or if I was in the Halloween mood and just started noticing things more.  I had finally gotten to the point where I could stand to be home by myself.  He had never tried to harm me after all.  All he’d ever done was make noises and entertain the dog.  Things moved from time to time but I couldn’t say that was his fault and not the fact that I am extremely scatterbrained.  I lost my keys every few days but I don’t know if he took them or I just toss them absentmindedly.

He also used to like to lock doors.  The front door in particular.  When we moved in one of the first things we noticed was that the front door had about six different locks on it.  My mother looked at me and said “You must be in a bad neighborhood.”  There was the original old lock, which was made into the oak door itself.  Then there was the doorknob lock and the deadbolt which we changed, another deadbolt and a slide lock.  Okay, that’s five.  It had five locks in all.  We changed everything out except the lock on the bottom, the original.  We just decided that since we didn’t have a key we wouldn’t lock it.

It didn’t matter, it locked itself.

Don asked me why I always locked the bottom lock and I told him I didn’t but he didn’t believe me.

Locks don’t lock themselves.

Except when they do, and it did a lot.

He never believed me until it locked itself of it’s own volition one night while we were sitting out on the front porch swing.  We had spent the afternoon at the beach and we came home and decided to relax outside on the porch.  It was fall and it was just getting cool enough to enjoy Jesup a little.  He told me not to close the door but it was too late.  We were sitting in the porch swing when we heard the lock turn.

I smiled smugly and Don gave me that “What the...?”  Look.  Finally!  Maybe now he would believe me.

I pulled on the door and it refused to open.  Bear peered out at us over the back of the couch and barked plaintively because we had left him inside.  We had to call a locksmith from Brunswick to come let us in.  He worked on the lock at the front door for thirty minutes and couldn’t get it to turn.  We took him around back and he was in at the back door in thirty seconds flat.

He shrugged as my husband doled out sixty dollars.  “I guess they don’t make ‘em like they used to huh?”

Don glared at me.  “No, I guess they don’t.”

That must have amused him because it soon became his favorite game.  I averaged locking myself out about once a month.  It would necessitate me sitting out on the porch and listening to the dog complain until Don arrived or having to walk to the rental agency to pick up the spare.

I tried teaching Bear to unlock the door but I was never successful.  He would sit on the couch and peek at me through the living room window and argue about why I had left him inside while I was quite obviously outside. Sometimes I felt like the two of them were in on it together and often wondered if Mr. Smith and Bear got bored and they would lock me out for fun.

It never was much fun for me though.  It was a ten minute walk to the Rental agency. The secretary finally got to the point where if she saw me coming she would go ahead and put the key up on the counter.  Finally I got smart, and anytime I wanted to go outside I either propped the door or took my keys.

I guess he could be opening doors in the middle of the night, so between the two I figured I’d rather have locking doors ghost rather than an unlocking doors ghost.  At least he was a safety conscious ghost and felt that if I could somehow talk him into unplugging the coffee maker when I left it on we’d get on quite well.

Eventually I got used to the noises and the locking and at last even the shadows didn’t bother me.

Then one day, when I thought I had seen and heard it all, I turned and found that wasn’t exactly true.

I hadn’t seen him yet.

I was cooking fried chicken and I looked up from the electric skillet expecting to see Don but instead I saw a stranger. For a half a second I thought we were being robbed but before I could even react he was gone.  I only saw him for a second.  I shrieked and threw the wooden spoon at him- or where he had been- anyway.  It went right through him, but it made me feel a little better.

Don was watching a football game in the living room.

“What?”  He yelled as he pounded into the room.

“I saw a roach!”  I lied looking down at the wooden spoon.  Was I supposed to tell him our ghost likes chicken?

He looked down at the wooden spoon and the spatter of grease on the floor.

“Did you get it?”  He wanted to know.

“No.  It got away.”  I replied, still shaken.

 “Musta been a big one!”  He observed and went back to the football game.

“Yeah, about six foot tall.” I told him and he laughed.

He thought I was exaggerating.

I wasn’t.  I’m not real observant but I got a good look at him in the two seconds that he was there.  It’s amazing how closely you’ll pay attention when something like that happens.  It’s been years now and I can still tell you what he looked like.

He was tall and blonde; he was wearing slacks, a white button up shirt, suspenders and a plain dark tie.    He did not look scary, like I imagined a ghost to look.

He looked… normal. 

I hadn’t expected normal.  I expected the prince of darkness or something.  I hadn’t expected him to be handsome, and to look almost as surprised to see me as I had to see him.

I was officially spooked.  Now that I had seen him with my own eyes, there was no arguing.  It made me cry.  I poured out my heart in my prayers that night.  We were too poor to move, and I couldn’t live like this.  The verse that came to my heart was the one that said “For I have not given you a spirit of fear…”  It’s your house, my heart told me.  Tell him he has to go away.

The next night was Friday.  I played on the computer until Don got finished with his TV watching and decided to call it a night.  I had banned him from our bedroom so I waited for him in the living room.  Around eleven o’clock I felt that familiar feeling and I looked up to see him standing in the dining room.

Again, there was an almost horrified expression on his face.

My expression must have been just as horrified, but I managed to speak.

“Mr. Smith. You’re not supposed to be here, you’re dead.  You died when the  Number Ninety Six derailed.  I’m sorry sir, but if you’d only not gotten on that train--”

He looked shocked and sad before he disappeared.  I wondered if he didn’t know he was dead and the thought made me so sad I couldn’t stand it.

I didn’t see him again after that.  The shadows stopped, the door never locked itself, and the dog stopped watching nothing.  That was the end of our ghost.   Or so I thought.

 It wasn’t quite over, not yet…

Eventually we found ourselves a house in Screven and we had to leave the little cracker box house on Mahogany lane.  Mrs. Katherine said she would miss us, and while we packed up I wondered whatever became of Mr. Smith.  Had he passed on to the other side or was he still here?

I took the key to the rental place on our last day.  The secretary told me they’d miss seeing us around and wished us luck with our move.

“I guess Mr. and Mrs. Smith can sell that house now.”  She said offhandedly as I started to walk out that door.

I stopped dead in my tracks and turned to look at her.

“Mrs. Smith?”  I asked.  “I thought she was in the nursing home.”

The secretary gave me a shocked look.  “Naw, I don’t reckon.  They live in Odum.”

“They?  I thought Mr. Smith was dead.”

“Naw.”  She said again.  “I don’t reckon.  They’re real old, but they’re not dead.  Whoever told you that?”

“The neighbors?”  I said uneasily.  “Said he was dead and she was in a nursing home.”

“You must ‘ha got your folks mixed up.”  She said.

“I reckon so. “ I told her and told her to have a nice day.  Inside I was furious!  The neighbors lied to me!  Were they all in on it?  Was this the kind of thing that passed for fun around this town?

We had to meet the people from the rental agency for a final inspection before we turned in our key.  I was still fuming when a car pulled up in the driveway but I threw myself into stuffing boxes into the back of the Explorer while Don and the man from the rental agency did the final walk through.

Mr. Jackson crossed the alley and stuck out his hand.  “It’s too bad ya’ll are moving.  We sure are gonna miss you.”

I thanked him and told him we’d miss him too.

“Don is doing the final inspection.”  I told him as I waited.

“I hear Mr. Smith is going to sell this house now.  I’m glad.  It needs someone to take care of it.”

I nodded.

“I don’t really know why he didn’t sell it when they moved to Odum.”  Mr. Jackson laughed and wiped his hand over his face.  “You know he claimed it was haunted!”

I looked up at him.  I’m not sure if he noticed the deadly stare I gave him.  If he did, it didn’t seem to bother him.

  “Do tell.”  I said flatly.

“You didn’t notice anything did you?”  He asked and I shook my head like I thought he was crazy.

“Yeah I thought so.”  He conceded.  “That one family did though.  You know they were black. Packed up and left in a hurry.  They were… peculiar…”

“Maybe it was a racist ghost.”  I growled and he laughed.  I wasn’t really joking.

“Aw... too many stories told.  You know.  Mr. Smith, he was adament that it was haunted.  Whenever he came he asked if anyone saw anything.  He claimed there were shadows and he heard noises and things moved around. Said the lights came on by themselves and he always complained that he couldn’t keep the doors locked.”He said.  "Said he saw a woman.  Which was funny 'cuz ain't no woman lived there before him.”

“A woman.”  I repeated.  He had to be kidding me.

“Yes ma’m.  Said she looked as scared of him as he was of her.”

I wondered if I wasn't seeing a ghost at all.  Could it be that we were... somehow... seeing each other?

“Said she spoke to him too-something about some number.”

That got my attention. I think my eyes got big as hubcaps. 

He rubbed his head like he was trying to think of something he’d forgotten a long time ago. “Aww… shoot… I can’t remember… Ninety Six.  You know he was really superstitious about that number?  He was supposed to ride a train once and he found out it had that number and he wouldn’t ride it?”  Mr Jackson laughed like he thought the whole thing was hogwash.  “He waited all night for the next one.”

I stared at him.

My mouth fell open.  I got a gnat in it and strained at it like I had swallowed a June bug.  Mr. Jackson shook his head.  They say that's how people know you're a transplant.  If you're born in Jesup the gnats don't bother you.  

He rubbed his chin  and continued his story.  “I don’t know… that was the train what derailed… Might have saved his life… I guess the Good Lord works in mysterious ways.”

Yeah, I guess He does.

Someone told me later that Mr. and Mrs. Smith live in Odum, not far from where the train derailed.  I returned to the library later and asked to see the clipping I had found earlier from the newspaper.  Try as we might, we couldn’t find it.  The Librarian shook her head and told me she didn’t know what I was talking about.  We did find one mention of the train derailing in Odum but there was nothing about anyone being hurt or killed.  You can go on over to the Wayne County Public Library and look for yourself if you want, but I’ll tell you right now you won’t find it.



L. T. Crane
Young Writer’s Club

10-20-2009