Post by Joanna on Oct 13, 2014 18:43:17 GMT -5
Asheville Haunts
ASHEVILLE, N.C. – “Ghosts in the Aftermath” – that could be the title of a book about the supernatural in times of dislocation. “Ghosts in the Foreboding” could be the title of another book.
In 1890, the Lakota Sioux began performing ghost dances during the extermination of their culture in the hope their ancestors would be released from their graves. It was seen as a real enough threat to provoke the U.S. military to attack the Indians at Wounded Knee.
The Late Unpleasantness. In our region, one of the most ghost-haunted times was the Civil War. In William Faulkner’s novel, Light in August, the ghost of a Confederate cavalryman visits his grandson, the Reverend Gail Hightower, and in now-buried South Buncombe history, a Civil War headless horseman appeared to people along the road to Fletcher. The headless horseman, according to local lore, had been a Union soldier who died in battle before requiting his love for the daughter of a staunch Confederate. Their last tryst took place at Calvary Baptist Church beside a wishing well. She’d given him a red scarf as a keepsake, the wearing of which became the ghost’s identifying marker. We are now crossing from the psychological and supernatural into the tall tale realm. The headless horseman story draws upon the grievous assaults that the Fletcher area suffered from Stoneman’s Raiders in April 1865. Fitted to a romance, it bleeds out its life.
We are no longer haunted by it. What does truly haunt us? That’s a good question for seekers of historical significance.
Montford sighting. Randy Russell is one of our top “ghostlorists” writing today. His fifth book, The Ghost Will See You Now: Haunted Hospitals of the South (John F. Blair, publisher) continues his tradition of putting some flesh on bare-bones spooks.
The only story from our region in his collection involves Zelda Fitzgerald (above) and her time at Highland Hospital, a former psychiatric retreat in Montford. Apparently, years after Zelda’s death, a frizzy-haired, doll-faced woman with a paint brush occasionally emerges from the night on Montford streets; and then dematerializes from the head down, her bright red shoes the last thing to go. “Oh, and she smells like smoke,” one witness has said. Zelda, wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald, was one of eight patients who died in a fire at the hospital in 1948.
Such a story would customarily follow the pattern of shocking death, iconic ghost and mystical fade-out if it weren’t for Russell’s moody twist. He diagnoses Zelda’s incurable disease. “Those who live in Dixie recognize the symptoms of ‘Southern Belleism’ – also known as ‘the Deadly Sugar’ – at a glance. Little girls catch it when they first try on their mamas’ fancy dresses ... They catch it in their toes, and it crawls right up their knees, which, according to some, accounts for the invention of the Charleston.”
Zelda described the advance of Southern Belleism, Russell notes, when she wrote, “I am really only myself when I’m somebody else whom I have endowed with these wonderful qualities from my imagination.” For a hand to reach out from the grave, there has to be a morbid uneasiness – or dis-ease – that we can’t shake. Halloween can be considered a legitimate representation of this if popular culture were to be seen as a bewitchment.
The other take on the ghost-connection grows out of family rather than cultural influence. It is typified by Russell’s story about the Wofford College freshman whose grandmother forbids the girl to visit her on her deathbed at Spartanburg Regional Medical Center. The grandmother’s physical appearance – sans teeth, sans wig, drooling, covered with lesions – is the medical picture of horror and a memory that the dying woman wants to keep from her devoted darling. The girl is so distraught, she can’t do her schoolwork, and her physical appearance worsens – until she gets a visit from a ghostly medic transmitting the grandmother’s message: “Your time is now.” For how long do the experience, wisdom and love of our ancestors affect us?
Where there’s smoke. Cliff Davids has been collecting oral histories in the region for many years. He finds the events that make the most lasting impact on people are ones that rise to the level of an Edgar Allan Poe story, and he posts his amazing tales on his website under the heading “My Haunted American South.” As in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and in the Zelda story, fire emblazons its supernatural significance on our psyches. Thus we are drawn, with Davids, to the fire that consumed the Hotel Gordon, outside Waynesville, in 1957. In Davids’ retelling, “The Spirit Fiddler’s Ghost Dancers,” we find the fire, started by freak lightning, coincided with the frenzied fiddling of an unnamed musician whose intensity and endurance “would exhaust dozens of dancers” and make accompanists fall off “like flies.” With the “boisterous celebrants” at Hotel Gordon whom Davids describes, there is only a hint of the decadence of the partyers Poe had depicted in “Hop-Frog” (death by fire) and “The Masque of the Red Death” (plague). Also, in Davids’ tale, we learn the fiddler had a connection to two graveyard ghosts whose aches go unspoken. I would like to dig up those characters’ histories.
Night call. As I was writing this piece late into the night, finding myself balked at the otherworldly barrier, I received a phone call, which I decided to take, mainly because I was curious about who would be calling at such an hour. The speaker said I’d written about him years ago and had gotten things all wrong, leaving out the best parts. The fact that my historical subject had died decades ago left me thinking I was the target of an inventive prank. Then, the speaker told his story. It was full of so much love, sadness and detail that I must save it for another article. “History means something,” he kept saying. “Why can’t people see the signs? Why are we dead ancestors not part of the conversation?”
Source: Bob Neufield, The Citizen-Times, October 12, 2014.
