storieshaped

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“Somebody should ask me for Appalachia.  Hoo boy do I have stories.”

Can I hear more about Appalachia?

You sure can.

So when I was in college, I used to go ghost-hunting with some friends.  One of them was a reasonably well-known local historian who documented everything about his ghost-hunts down to the minute, and gave us all note cards that we were supposed to fill out and pass back to him with our anecdotal experiences at the end.  That kind of ghost-hunting.  Of the other two who usually came with us, one was a Wiccan who was one of the most level-headed women I’ve ever known, and the other was a really smart guy who studied languages as a hobby and had about ¾ of a degree in family services.  He now teaches CCD at his local parish and is the person everybody goes to when the priest is tied up, because he’s got his head screwed on right.  Rational people, is what I’m saying, the kind of friends you go to when you need help sorting your shit out.  I was probably the flakiest person in the bunch.  This factors later.

There was one cemetery where, if you stood a couple row of tombstones away from the back of the lot and looked into shadows under the trees, you could see red eyes watching you.  They moved around.  Sometimes they’d blink.

None of us were stupid enough to go any closer to the woods there.

There was one–the historian’s hometown cemetery in fact–where if you visited a particular headstone with a carving of dolphins on the right day (the day marked as the person’s birthday) and bent close, you could hear the ocean.

And then there was this time: One day, we were at a cemetery that went up the side of a hill.  About ¼ of it, the back left half if you were looking uphill, was a mowed-down field, not, um, populated yet.  There were woods along the top and the right side.  At the bottom was a two-lane country road, which went curving around a corner just past the cemetery.  Across the road was a thicket that continued down into a ditch or shallow creek.  The Wiccan was standing the furthest up the hill, looking down at all of us.  I was standing a bit down and to her left, among the headstones on one side.  Approximately across from me on the other side of the cemetery, at the line where tombstones became field, was the historian, and the smart guy was below me, not too far up from the road.

In the middle of the field, roughly in the middle of a triangle between Wiccan, historian and me, a clattering started up.  It sounded like a bundle large, solid sticks banging together.  All of us turned to look at it.  It clattered there in the middle of us for a few seconds before it started downhill, past the historian who turned to follow it, and then down across the road into the thicket, where it finally stopped somewhere in the underbrush.

There was absolutely nothing there to see, but all four of us could follow the noise–loud, unmistakable, clear as day.  The historian checked in with all of us immediately and we all reported the exact same thing.

The other thing we all reported, individually and without checking in with each other for our stories first, was a sense of anger that followed the sound–ferocious enough that we all agreed it was a good thing we’d come with friends.

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