MAYBE DEATH STILL WALKS THESE RAILS & RIDES THESE MIDNIGHT ROADS: A Ghost Story, Of Sorts

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- Our travels through this world are not ours alone, not merely the logical paths of our construction crews and civil engineers but also the ethereal inspirations of those which man-made things such as logic and reason cannot touch.

In this world, there are things that are natural and things that are supernatural. It's as simple as that, if you accept such things.

But choose to believe at your own peril. This is, after all, the New Postmodern Millennium. To most postmodern men and women, such talk falls into the realm of ancient superstition, religious naivety, or even blasphemy.

As a 21st century man, raised in a resurrected, desegregated New South, I'm probably not supposed to believe in the mythology of my supposedly less-cultured ancestors, either.

You know. Old ghost stories and whatnot. But some of the things I've seen in this world, at crossroads...

* * * *

I'm still not sure who that old black man was, the one who scared the living shit out of me one night, while taking a midnight stroll along the property line of my family's farm in Virginia, away from a clandestine party in the woods.

I'd been drinking and partaking in other illicit substances with friends nearby, well out of sight of local law enforcement and parents. An afternoon of shooting a an old abandoned car full of holes, fishing, and playing Marlboro Fucking Man had taken its toll, that's for damned sure - I was annoyed with the petty late-night boy brawling and cursing and needed, yes, a quiet moment by myself.

He'd wandered out from behind the pines and brambles, from my family's side of an old Virginian Railway access road, from where that red clay road intersected the old timber road.

He made no noise as his feet crossed the earth, as he moved between the rows of thorns and into the open night. Not a sound. In fact, if I hadn't seen the movement in the bush, hadn't seen him step out of the shadows myself, well, I wouldn't have known he was there.

In my part of the country, well, when a strange old dude -regardless of color - sneaks up on you from the woods, even beneath a full moon, you're probably going to level the business end of your shotgun his way when you holler. And that's just what I did, instinctively.

The black face showed teeth and raised his black hands, hollered back. He hollered back that he'd been lost in the woods a whah, boss and couldn't fin' he whah backa' quittin' whenna boss holla'd. He kept looking at the ground, old rag of a hat in hand, asking me the way back towards the railroad tracks so he could get back home for the night.

I pointed due west, back towards the rail bed. I remember laughing and thinking that the guy was merely drunk; a moonshiner lived a few miles away and, well, it's not like his customers only showed up during daylight hours.

I mean, c'mon - boss? In Virginia, by the 1990s, even the oldest black folk had quit staring at the dirt and calling random white folk boss. And hell, one of the Virginian's successor railways had yanked up the last of those tracks when I was a kid.

Figured the guy was one of the numerous retired, half-senile old railroad workers who lived in the area, still stuck in the glory years, and, yeah, just wandering back from a white lightning ride towards home.

The guy just smiled, thanked me for my help in his Gone With the Fucking Wind manner of dialect and disappeared off into the night, feet moving without a sound, walked back towards where the rail bed had been.

I remember staggering back to the campsite, telling a few guys about how I'd run into Uncle Fucking Remus's cousin out in the woods.

Everybody thought it was pretty funny. Even I thought it was funny, back then.

* * * *

More than a decade later, while visiting my home state and the town of Keysville, I met the most interesting elderly gentleman at the lunch counter at one of my favorite restaurants in the Old Dominion.

A retired railroad worker, one of the last of the Gandy Dancers. Older than sin, skin like spotted brown leather, white woolly hair. We started talking about all sorts of things - about his dead wife, his having grown up as, well, a second-class citizen in a segregated United States, his grandchildren, his oldest granddaughter's fondness for downright fugly-sounding white trash guys...

And, eventually, we started up a conversation about railroads, old work songs... and superstitions he'd heard as a young man working the tracks.

Funny thing, those old railroad legends.

Ever hear the legend of the Ol' Joe Gandy?

Neither had I.

* * * *

Apparently, the Angel of Death was once said to take the very human form of a lost railroad man - Joe Gandy. Death would walk the rails, looking for souls to test, strangers in the night who could be judged as either kind or cruel, depending on how they answered his questions.

If the strangers he met in his journeys along America's rails passed his tests - the measure of a human soul is in its capacity for kindness, after all - he'd leave empty handed. If the strangers were treacherous, belittling, or, well, just plain ol' racist pricks, Death would extract a payment in misfortune and doom.

Not that I believe in such things, mind you. I mean, it's not like I grew up hearing my great-grandmother's stories about Louisiana Rougarous and Hoodoos, or ever went witchhunting in the wilds of Lunenburg County or anything...

But now, every time a memory of that childhood experience pops into my mind...

Let's just say that I'm on my best behavior when I happen across an old dude near the train tracks at midnight. I think I've already used my Get Out of Hell Free card once - no sense in tempting fate.

* * * *

"... So I was waiting for the Blue Line out to O'Hare. And it's late, right? Like really late and kinda empty, you know?"

I'm wondering where she's going with her story. She's just finished telling me everything she's been doing with her life for, oh, the last year and a half. And, out of the blue, she interrupted my story about a rather abysmal, tiring week at work here in Oxford Fucking Ohio.

"And I get in the car and there's, like, only, like, ten of us, right? And this old, like, black guy in a CTA hat - Ohmygod! he smelled like something DIED! - like sits down next to me, right?"

I'm getting annoyed. I'm tired. I've got the cell phone plugged into the charger and on speaker, so I can respond to late-night emails and chat simultaneously.

"So... okay. Couldya hurry it up here? Not to be rude or anything, chica."

"Oh. RIGHT! Well, this guy just sits down beside me and starts, like, asking me about flying and telling me that he's never flown before and asks if I'd tell him how to find the Northwest terminal --"

"Yeah. So? Did you help him out or just make fun of him for smelling like ass?"

"DUDE! No... I helped him. But you remember that creepy-ASS story you told me about that Black Gandhi train demon or something..."

I hung up on her. It's two o'clock in the morning, Saturday.

I've a few beers in me and the last thing I need to have nightmares about is an old railroad legend.

Crazy-ass chick, really.

But I pray she hadn't given him bad directions.

You know. Just in case.

* * * *

Hell, maybe Ol' Joe Gandy's flying the friendly skies these days, riding Chicago's L lines, New York's subways and in Los Angeles taxis. Maybe he's traversing European rails and African buses, South American roads and Far Eastern high-speed lines, testing the men and the women of the world by just asking for directions.

Angel. Of Friggin' Death. It's not like he's stuck as a black dude. Hell, every human culture on this planet has a personification of that creature...

But imagine Death as an elderly Polish Jew, sitting down on a train in Berlin, maybe next to the great-grandson of some forgotten Schutzstaffel sturmbannführer, striking up a conversation, like old men tend to do. Say the kid blows the man off, intentionally gives him bad directions to that hotel at the next stop, simply because, well, the guy's Jewish...

Or imagine that angel appearing as a beautiful middle-aged Lakota woman in a truck stop somewhere in Montana, sitting down at a meal counter next to the semi-driving descendant of an Indian Wars veteran and asking for directions to the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument. Say that trucker not only gives her directions but ends up so smitten that he picks up her coffee...

Not that people in the 21st century, us modern folks, should be worried or anything. These sorts of mysterious occurances are long behind us, stories our grandparents heard from their grandparents, stories that became the basis for our movies and television shows and horror novels.

It's not like you, reader, are reading this very essay on an Information Superhighway - a veritable electronic railroad of knowledge, built megabits at a time by hundreds of millions of random strangers every day, each one gandy dancing their way into Facebook profiles and MySpace pages and Wordpress accounts.

Surely, Ol' Joe Gandy, that dancing Angel of Death, isn't capable of navigating the World Wide Web?

I mean, why would he bother with testing our travels upon tracks made of fiberoptic cables?

Right?

Heh. Sleep tight tonight.

- # # # -

A COUNTRY BOY CAN SURVIVE...(Only to Grow Up, Move Off the Farm, Have Post Evil One-Eyed Pony Flashbacks While on Vacation, Etc.)

CENTRAL COAST, Calif. (ZP) -- Ten o'clock at night, sprawled out on my parents' California King mattress, jet-lagged like a motherfucker, even after a five-mile hike through wine country and a barbecue chicken fundraiser...

... And every time I shut my eyelids, visions of that damned one-eyed horse pop into my mind.

Fuck this. It's not like I have to get up and go to work tomorrow. And nobody else is in the house...

Eleven hours of flying, from Dayton, Ohio, into San Luis Obispo, California, via Charlotte, North Carolina, and Phoenix, Arizona. An afternoon with the sister and the boyfriend. With Mom, Dad, and their cocker spaniels stuck in New Mexico, it's just me and the cat house-sitting while they're gone.

And I can't sleep because I can't remember the name of that Connemara pony Mom and Dad bought for my sister and I when we were, oh, still old enough to get excited about having a pony.

I'm still awake because, well, I can't remember something completely insignificant that happened in my childhood, on the other side of the country, in rural Virginia back in the 1980s.

I haven't been back to the farm in five years. And that stupid pony's long dead by now...

After being up for, oh, 20 hours straight...

Oh, why the hell not? Just get back outta bed and solve the fucking mystery...

* * * *

What the fuck was that biting bastard's name? I tell myself as I dig through the umpteen million photo albums tucked away in my dad's office. That mean-ass walking bag of dog food motherfucker...

Hey, I grew up on a farm. My mom owned two or three horses before that one - she even used to train and board other people's horses when I was young. And yep, we had chickens (until I, um, forgot to lock the coop and the dogs killed our organic egg supply), cows (a Brahma-Angus mix herd), and kittens and puppies out the ass every spring (our male mutts were bitch magnets).

There were lots of animals that could've popped into my mind. There was the black bear that used to prowl our timber country, the tasty bass and bluegill and venison and squirrel, my grandmother's poodle, my first calf, named Peanut Butter...

What the fuck was that biting bastard's name? Know there's a picture somewhere...

* * * *

But no, I get a hair up my ass about --

Willy! Jesus fucking Christ, how could I have forgotten that?

How many times did ____ and I watch The Goonies when we were kids? One-Eyed Willy!

It's amazing what other sorts of things pop into the ol' melon when one has a few photo albums sprawled out over a desk, Almost as amazing as the sorts of childhood memories that just pop right up when one is trying to sleep.

And what strange photos one finds, too. Especially in old family albums that haven't been touched in about a decade.

Heh. Draw, pad'na. I be's makin' you wormfood with my authentic Lone Ranger toy six-shooter.

How the hell did he ever survive childhood, anyway?

I mean, the one-eyed ponies weren't the only things that bit him. There were ticks, fleas, lice, mosquitoes, leeches, dogs, wasps, mice, hornets, and snakes, too.

There were falls from barn windows, kicks to the head by livestock, a drug-induced coma, pellet gun accidents, falls into brush fires, almost losing a foot to a hay bailer, almost losing a finger to a hunting knife, a four-wheeler accident, all before that kid in the overalls turned ten.

And I'm thinking about... about that stupid fucking horse? Twenty years later, in California? And what the hell happened to my cap guns?

What a way to start a vacation.

- # # # -

HANDS OF GLORY, NAILS OF IRON, AND DARK TRESPASSERS: Modern Man Fears No Legends, Superstitions, or Mythological Creatures... Right?

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) – Creatures of the night, yes, such sweet music they make upon the windows of sleeping men.

I.

I couldn't bring myself to turn on the lamp. And no, it wasn't fear, nor was it cowardice. Something else caused the paralysis, something deep and primitive, an instinct beyond simple emotion.

My heart raced as I hunted the shadows cast through the open window by the dusk's final light, my eyes straining against the evening for the source of the ghastly noise. It was not a bird, not some lost large praying mantis or squirrel, now was it a man...

Forgetting that collection of Jorge Luis Borges stories on my lap, I stood up suddenly and let the volume – thankfully, paperback – fall to the floor with just one bounce, off my bare right foot. I couldn't find it in me to even wince. I was, after all, in the throes of something beyond emotion, driven by the pumping of a thousand unknown hormones and instinctual neurological impulses – there was no time, not conscious attention given, to things like pain or fear.

The sound disappeared momentarily. I saw the shadow of a winged creature fly off, back into the early night. Within seconds, the hideous thing was once again slamming its veined, purple wings against the screen, digging its claws into flimsy wire mesh.

* * * *

It wanted into my apartment.

For some unknown reason, this evening visitor, this infamous creature of the night, wanted to cut its way through the insect barrier, wanted to fly or crawl through the open window and into my living room.

And the sound of the animal's teeth gnawing through the wire, the shrieks of its claws and flapping of its shrouded forearms, drew me towards its intended entrance.

But it really, really seemed to want inside my apartment, for some reason.

* * * *

Bats, for the record, sometimes have problems with things like screens in windows.

The animals are damned near blind by human standards, forced by nature to rely on their acute hearing and other heightened senses to navigate through darkness, to hunt for prey against purple, sunless horizons...

Hey, you try steering clear of a window screen with only an echo to guide you...

... There's a logical, rational explanation, of course, for everything.

II.

One summer night, back when I was a kid, I sat and watched in amazement as a lone bat attacked and feasted upon a thousand moths circling a lit lantern in a tobacco barn. I was drawn to that bat's racket, too.

The animal's movement alone, its graceful gliding and diving, is as fascinating a thing to witness as anything else the natural world has to offer. I sat there in awestruck silence while my friends chatted away about girls, sipped my moonshine and Mountain Dew cocktail and watched the Animal Kingdom's epic story unfold before my very eyes.

As we passed around a Swisher Sweets cigar, one loaded with all sorts of secret herbs and spices, I would take my alloted puff and stare up at that marvelously sinister creature as it bombed into the swarm of moths in the rafters...

... And soon, my friends were all staring up at that mysterious, sinisterly close, probably rabid bat, too.

* * * *

I remember making some comment to my companions, about wishing I had with me a Hand of Glory - according to my great-grandmother, such things as corpse candelabras were still in use in Louisiana when she was a girl in the 1910s, still harvested from the freshly executed by hoodoos to aid in mystically blocking their activities from the view of preachers and local police.

My friends were astonished, almost frightened. Sure, a Hand of Glory sounded cool, but, well, wouldn't we go to Hell for using it? And why waste something that cool on a fucking bat anyway?

Waitaminute! Dude, bats sometimes turn into...?

They'd been too stoned and drunk to notice our hovering companion earlier, the one that was probably nothing more than a normal, everyday brown bat...

...Yeah, I'm thinkin' it might be a vampire or something. Kinda cool...

* * * *

One of those stoned childhood friends stroked the few curly hairs on his chin, then carefully patted the sides of his perfect sphere of an Afro - the ritual he normally went through whilst deep in thought.

His grandmother, he said, had learned about such things from her grandmother, who'd been a slave on some plantation nearby.

Nigga please! I remember him saying, One, I'm too pretty to eat an' two, I'd make one pimp-ass Blacula.

He added something about how, if his family's stories held any truth, vampires were the spirits of murdered runaway slaves and other imported Africans, only killed white people, and, well, the wild pokeberry and chickweed surrounding the barn would be enough to keep such a creature from transforming.

What if it attacked? we asked. We'll just grab the mothafuckin' thing, nail it to the door jamb with iron nails, leave it hanging upside down until the sun burns up its ass...

He was cut off after that. No more tokes from the magic cigar, no more sips from the Mason jar, either. He didn't seem to mind. He was, in his mind at least, Afro the Blacula Slayer. And, well, if all vampires really were black undead men, he was the only Brotha in the barn who knew anything about the Afrocentric nature of the Nosferatu.

Afro was at that armchair philosopher point of intoxication, thoughtful as he kept reminding everyone that Hollywood and Bram Stoker had made up the pale-ass white dude vampire mythos to keep white people from learning the truth - white people are scared of everything dark, vampires and people and even the night, because, well, such things aren't really afraid of them...

Yeah. Some guys shouldn't drink moonshine or smoke magical Swisher Sweets cigars...

* * * *

Finally, another of our party had an idea. If it was a vampire bat, it probably would like to come down and drink something other than blood, might be willing to share in its immortal wisdom and arcane secrets.

Hell. Blood or Virginia's finest rotgut? Please. The moonshine probably had more nutritional value to the living dead, anyhow.

That friend climbed atop a stack of hay bales, began talking to the poor, bug-munching animal, offering it both a taste of his wrist and of his moonshine. Vampires, in all versions of the legend, have a way with women - we all thought, well, the damned thing could just fly off and bring back some Lunenburg County tail, those really slutty girls just up Nutbush Road, the ones with big boobs and skimpy redneck denim cut-off shorts...

Soon, we quit thinking of it as an it; the bat was a clearly a he, a cool-ass motherfucker stuck eating moths and mosquitoes because, well, there was wild pokeberry and chickweed growing around the barn.

All of us, over the course of the evening, began to think of that bat as the living - or undead - embodiment of raw, unadulterated seduction, the veritable Man's Man, the cool mythological beast that could seduce even our hottest, most unattainable high school fantasy girls.

And we were all ready and willing to make our own deals with that flying devil, too. Pfft. What's a little bloodletting when you're a fourteen-year-old? At that age, well, most teenage boys would feed their own mothers to an army of zombies if it meant getting laid...

Sure, you'd sleep away your days, live like an albino. Big fucking deal. Vampires get pussy, all the time! Just watch the movies, read the books! And so what if you were never again forced to go to fucking church because of a crucifix allergy? Fucking badass!

Our African-descended, terrestrial brother was not amused. That vampire, yes, was a black man's soul, probably that the soul of one of his ancestors, trapped in a bat's form by our slave-owning ancestors.

We shouldn't have asked him to deliver unto us the flesh of redneck women. Instead, we should've asked for those fine-ass sistas from over in Meherrin... If you're gonna sell your soul, well, at least do it for women with asses...

Four teenage boys - and one oblivious bat - stayed up till dawn, drinking and begging for nosferatuous sex advice, passing a blunt and hoping beyond all hope that the other magical herbs surrounding the barn kept our vampire pal from turning the white inhabitants of the barn into a supernatural buffet.

Ah, the creatures of the night. What sweet racket, what chattering and noise and conversation, they make.

Especially when drunk and stoned.

III.

The only living thing in my apartment was, well, me. And I'm just, well, too big to eat. I'm not a moth or cricket or mosquito.

Sure, the North American brown bat's sonar probably can't account for such modern marvels as window screens. But after hitting the damned thing once, why try to break into the apartment beyond it? Why dive back into that undetectable, echoless barrier, tear at it with claws and teeth?

... Unless, well, it's a vampire, dude. Come to drink your blood...

I stood at the window for a few minutes as the bat continued tearing at the wire. Finally, I spoke out loud, in a whisper. No need to yell at an animal that nature built to hear better than people.

"Motherfucker, do I look like motherfucking Batman? Or a big-ass moth? Or some hot English chick from some goddamn novel?"

The flying mammal stopped dead. And I'm fairly certain the damned thing was staring at me. Staring at me, well, like a toddler stares at a meowing cat.

It hung there on the screen for a few moments, its head seemingly cocked to one side, as if it were trying to figure out why the blurry mass before it was jabbering away in that rackety chirp hairless primates use to communicate, as if its poor bat brain could comprehend such nonsense.

Then it pushed itself back, spread its veiny wings, and disappeared into the night.

I shut the window after that. As if out of nowhere, suddenly, I found myself cold and shivering.

* * * *

Obviously, it wasn't a vampire.

Obviously.

We all know that there are no such things as vampires, right? This is the Modern World, a world where demons are reduced to mere Wikipedia entries and vampires all look like supermodels down at the Cineplex.

Or maybe it was something more, a figment of my memory, that childhood Man's Man bat, sojourning through southwest Ohio? Maybe it realized that this here male hairless ape wouldn't be anywhere near as entertaining as the females of the species, the ones caged up in first-year dormitories, two or three hot, tanning-bed broiled female slabs of meat crammed into rooms like sardines in a can?

And some of those women probably had their windows flung open, too. After all, it was a warm night and most of the Local U's residence halls aren't air-conditioned. Maybe they'd taken out their screens, decided to let the air blow more freely through their sardine cans?

Imagine, yes, that same bat - that poor little nocturnal creature, that one so misunderstood and shrouded in mean-spirited myth - slipping unnoticed into a dorm room, transforming into some skinny-ass Romanian or some tormented ghost of a runaway African slave, sliding its cold, unholy hands up beneath the bedsheets, underneath those Cincinnati Bengals and Cleveland Indians tee-shirts...

Imagine those innocent mammalian teeth transforming into undead razors, that hairy snout transforming into a moist mouth inches from an unsuspecting neck, breath quivering in anticipation of an easy meal...

Maybe there are vampires after all.

And why would they prey on the older, toughened 1978 vintage? The late 1980s produced much better stock - healthier, better fed, athletic and tender and cosmetically moisturized. And much of that crop of mankind grew up sucking down enough prescription stimulants and mood-enhancers and vaccines to qualify as either a vampiric multivitamin or an energy drink.

Why feed on weathered, drug-free librarians when there are the Prozac and Adderall Kids upon which to feast? There are even ones flavored with the same sorts of magical herbs and spices those librarians were once flavored with...

* * * *

I laughed at my own silliness, turned on a light, and sat back down to finish reading the English translation of Borges' "El Inmortal" [The Immortal]...

Dude! You creeped yourself out there, with stupid childish memories. You're an ADULT! Sure... fucking vampires.

As I picked my book back up off the floor, I felt the remnants of that silly superstitious paranoia, that childish instinct beyond emotion that causes one to find supernatural explanations for the most explainable things, slip away into the night.

I stood up, walked back to the window, opened it once more. The cold chill was nothing less than refreshing, no more supernatural than the setting of the sun. Bats behave the way they behave for evolutionary reasons - not because they are secretly bloodsucking monsters.

Back on the farm? Just a bat. Here in Oxford? Yeah, just a bat. Fucking dumbass.

I sat back down once again, embarrassed at my own superstitiousness. I opened the Borges collection back up to the passage where I'd stopped before the bat's arrival, before the sun had set, back before I'd dozed off...

Of course, dude, it could've been a she-bat... like, maybe female vampires prefer eating 30ish single guys? C'mon - you'd make a perfect meal! What if you hadn't had that screen, or hadn't woken up...?

I fought the urge to get up and shut the window once more. Fucking superstitious dumbass. Should've grabbed the damned thing, nailed it to the door jamb with nails of pure iron...

Oh yeah.

Afro the Blacula Slayer had something there, way back in the 1990s.

- # # # -

THE LUNENBURG COUNTY HOODOO HUNT OF '92: A Southern Tale of Witchcraft, Ghosts, and Other Human Terrors

"Pete" and I rode out into the dusk on our bicycles. It was the summer of 1992, along the Lunenburg/Prince Edward county line, a few miles east of the Green Bay, Virginia, post office.

We'd heard the stories for years, the tall tales of old white women, the legendary yarns of tobacco farmers and soybean sages. And we'd been warned by our elders, too, to never look for that old shack, because anyone who trespassed there would be doomed.

According to Pete's grandmother, the shack, whatever remained of it, was cursed - decent white folk, as she put it, never went a-looking for that nig'ra witch's place.

Despite the warnings, Pete and I had decided, in the midst of one of the hottest summers of our lives, to find out the truth. We sat out to locate the mythical witch's cabin, to investigate the rumors and legends for ourselves.

* * * *

Older people in that area knew the legend, but all of those who told it to me are now dead. I don't know if the story is still told in the 2000s, in this modern era, around campfires and at family cookouts. I suspect that those who are now the age I was in 1992 probably have never heard the tale.

This may well be the only written account of the legend of the Washerwoman Shack.

According to the versions I remember, the shack once belonged to a black laundress, a former slave. Her name has been lost to history, but she was said to have been a witch, a practitioner of the lost arcane art known throughout the South as Hoodoo. Rumor had it that her death was the result of arson, that several white teenagers had trapped her in her own home and then set the place ablaze - punishment for being an uppity nig'ra.

No historical record exists of the old midwife, or of the fire that supposedly killed her. That should shock no one reading this; the barbaric history of the Jim Crow South is full of convenient disappearances. Black people who were different from or educated beyond their white counterparts, especially in a region once known for its Klan-dominated government, tended to disappear, and people often left it at that.

To this day, in fact, there are still old white men alive throughout Dixie, family barbers and nice country doctors, kindly police officers and polite retired shopkeepers, who helped make people like the midwife disappear. And they will take their secrets to their graves as surely as they smile at church suppers and play poker down at the VFW, the face of one man or woman's unsung butcher simultaneously the face of someone's cherished grandfather or favorite teacher or beloved community leader.

With such hidden horrors of this mortal coil, throughout Virginia and the rest of the South, why would anyone be afraid of a dead woman's curse, a woman for whom there may be no record of her having ever lived in the first place?

* * * *

Pete and I didn't believe in witches, of course.

Sure, "Sara," Pete's neighbor, claimed to be a witch, a follower of something called Wicca. But she simply smoked a lot of pot, burned incense, and liked to dance around her mobile home naked, calling her acts sabbats. To us, witchcraft, at least the Caucasian version, was nothing more than a stoned redneck girl who collected dragon sculptures.

And curses? I believed in them, but, well, I'm part Cajun, with a great - grandmother who used to read my tea leaves on a regular basis. I still cross myself every time I pass a cemetery. Pete, however, did not. He was a Good Ol' Boy. He believed in the Holy Trinity of the Peckerwood - God, Guns, and the Rebel flag.

Pete and I had just celebrated our fourteenth birthdays. We were almost men at the dawn of the 21st century. We'd grown up with things like television, FM radio and VHS machines. We'd watched the Challenger explode a few years earlier, listened to Def Leppard and Winger and Warrant, and frequently shoplifted softcore porn from the local video store ...

* * * *

The Virginia dusk soaked us in sweat a few miles into our journey, so we stopped alongside Molasses Hill Road for a quick break. After carefully hiding our bikes in a patch of pokeberry, we did what many rural Southern teenagers do when there's a lack of adult supervision during the summer.

We had a pint of moonshine liberated from a local farmer's private stash. We had an ounce and a half of a certain illegal plant, rolled up in fresh cured tobacco leaves. And we had a backpack full of pimiento cheese sandwiches.

No great adventure, as a teenager, is ever devoid of a ceremonial meal. And witch hunting, in Southside Virgina, is hard work.

* * * *

We knew the legendary haunted ruins lay just off a timber road, somewhere along the county line. And by sundown, we'd found it.

The pine log structure was charred, held up only by the crumbling red clay that filled its joints. Inside, those same logs were found to be half-consumed by whatever fire had once raged through it. In what was left of the kitchen, a rusted iron kettle still hung in the back of a river stone fireplace - the walls around the hearth had collapsed long before we arrived. The remnants of two chairs and a table rested on the ground, partially buried in leaves. Firs and maples grew up from what had once been someone's well-worn dirt floor.

Pete and I decided to make camp for the night, right in the middle of our Virginia version of El Dorado, our great archaeological find in the Lunenburg wilderness. In the morning, we'd return home to tell of our expedition, to boast to friends on the phone, and to, well, begin planning new ways to use the site as a party spot for our forthcoming high school careers.

The way I remember it, I built the fire, using some of the chimney's collapsed stones to build a decent pit. We needed light to explore by, and, like the young juvenile delinquents we were, we'd forgotten to bring more than one flashlight. For some reason, the air inside seemed cold and damp despite the lack of a roof, as if the southern summer stopped at the walls.

Pete had brought his father's .45 and a box of shells; he spent most of the time killing off the blunt we'd started earlier and shooting at what had once been the outhouse a few yards past the "back door." I tossed him the old kettle at one point, figuring he could at least practice his aim on something smaller than an outdoor shitbox.

* * * *

Shadows cast by fires can play tricks on a person, especially at night. Moonshine, of course, doesn't help matters much.

Pete and I explored the ruins carefully. There were only three rooms to the place - a front room, the kitchen in the back, and what we guessed had at one time served as a bedroom. In every room, there were remnants of life buried in the leaves underfoot. Old tin cans, broken lanterns, and even what looked to the remains of a bed frame. Everything bore the signs of one hell of a house fire.

And then we found the door.

* * * *

There were no interior doors in the ruins. And the back door into the kitchen was long gone. The four windows, which probably hadn't held glass anyway, were nothing more than gaping holes into the darkness.

But ten feet away from the front room entrance, just past the charred remains of what had once been a porch, we found a z-frame door, propped against an old walnut tree. The hinges looked as if they'd been blown apart at the pin, as if the pin itself had exploded. The door looked as if it had been carefully placed there, like a tombstone in some old cemetery.

Pete, in his eagerness, wanted to drag the door inside, near the fire, so it could be inspected. He grabbed both sides and lifted the sucker while I held the flashlight. When he turned around, the backside was exposed for probably the first time since it had been placed...

I remember the chill that shot up my spine, the numbness of shock and childish fear that enveloped my body. There were bones on the back of the door. Not human bones but animal, firmly attached with wires, dangling in the light. There were whitetail antlers and groundhog skulls, petrified bird feet bound together. There were strings of bottle tops, too, interlaced into long bead ropes with animal teeth.

Pete dropped the door, its rotten timber splitting in half at the cross brace. We ran back into the house, swearing as we ran, huddled with our backs to the fire. Suddenly, the typical nighttime noise of the woods, the crickets and owls and whippoorwills, was amplified against the night.

As illogical, as irrational, as it sounds to write now, in the 21st century, I'm quite sure there was something out there watching us, something that we'd disturbed. And I remember feeling as if we were squatting in that something's ruined house.

* * * *

Pete and I sat in silence for almost four hours, afraid of the dark for the first time since we'd been little kids, terrified to make a sound without so much as a blanket to cover our faces.

And then, without warning, Pete reached into the backpack, withdrew his dad's pistol, and started firing wildly into the night. I tried to stop him, but the weed-induced paranoia had gotten the best of his fears. Ghosts, even if they do really exist, have never been known to be afraid of a gunshot.

Pete kept pulling the trigger until he'd emptied the clip. And I started to yell, to scream. I felt it in my throat, working its way up from my lungs. But my scream died somewhere between my teeth and my ribcage, died mute and still in captivity.

There was nothing but silence. Not a sound coming from the darkness.

Suddenly, from above us, from the back of the chimney, came a shrill scream like none I've ever heard. A large black bird, probably a buzzard, tore off into the night sky. I saw nothing but a looming silhouette against the light from the fire, felt nothing but the breeze of its wings.

At least, as an adult, I've convinced myself that it was simply a buzzard.

* * * *

The South is full of stories about black people who mysteriously disappeared, of old Hoodoo women who may or may not have met their ends at the hands of a lynch mob or group of white supremacists. While I'm convinced that whoever lived in that house probably practiced some sort of folk medicine, there will never be a way to prove or disprove the tall tales I'd heard.

Every once and a while, I'll have a nightmare about that ruined house, about that door. In the parts that I remember from those dreams, the door is almost always somehow alive, possessed by demons, the animal skulls and bird claws dancing with the strings of fangs and bottle caps.

And there's an old black woman there, too, my mind's interpretation of what she may have looked like, her white hair made of clouds and her body aflame, cursing those who killed her and crying out for justice.

And when I do dream those little dreams, I find myself hoping that I'm not cursed myself. I know, it's a silly thought. But one never knows what sinister powers exist in the World of the Supernatural.

A few days ago, I caught the smell of burnt pine drifting through my apartment windows here in Oxford Fucking Ohio, the same scent I smelled back in those Lunenburg ruins almost two decades ago. I flashed back to that night as I lay in bed. And I felt that strange chill upon me once more, that terrifying cold of the unknown.

I wonder now, as I did a few nights ago, what it would feel like to simply disappear, to become nothing more than a phantom in a tall tale?

I wonder what those surviving old white men dream about, the ones who will go to their graves knowing the true fate of African-Americans like that phantom hoodoo woman? What haunts them as they lay in bed? If there is indeed a Devil, the Judeo-Christian fallen angel of lore, I wonder what flesh-tearing things he has in store for them in his infernal pits of brimstone?

I wonder what terrifies those men? What torments those still alive who lynched innocent men across America, or burned them alive in their homes? Did their victims forgive from their disappearing graves? Or do the Undead rise like a mojo hand, returning to this world to serve as brown-skinned swords of a vengeful God?

Maybe, just maybe, that property really was cursed. And maybe we disturbed the restless spirit of a murdered black woman that night. And maybe, just maybe, Pete's gunshots were merely a reminder to her that the time had come for her to depart this world for a better, more Hoodoo-friendly afterlife.

Maybe we were spared that night because we were simply drunk, stoned children in search of adventure, not the old white men who once roamed Virginia nights in pointed white hoods?

The realm of the supernatural, if it does exist, is one a 13 year-old Virginia boy couldn't explain in 1992. And that kid, as a man, years removed, can't explain it, either.

Some of the things that haunt the sons and daughters of the American South, as real and as vivid as Emmett Till's bloated corpse, as haunting as Medgar Evers and the other ghosts of Mississippi, are much more terrifying than a simple ghost story could ever be.

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