May 18, 2018
In the early sixties when I was growing up, most homes didn’t have TVs so people would go and visit each other for entertainment.
We lived in the main back of the hollow.
Dad owned two thirds of it, the entire left side and over to the right hand side. He let a couple build a house on the left side and said they could stay there, rent free, for as long as they lived. If they moved, the house would go back to him.
They were a nice old couple and we spent a lot of time with them.
Aunt Sarah, was what we called her, would gather us around and tell us ghost stories. She told us about how her cow milk was going sour and she didn’t know what was causing it. It was stored down in a well that kept everything cool.
She was told that a witch was doing it and for her to stop it from happening, she had to get some willow switches to whip the well with. She did, and the next day her milk was good. She said later that day she saw a woman that had been mad at her for years that had stripes from the switches all over her!
Aunt Sarah would tell us about how, late at night, she could hear something coming down the mountain on the other side of the hill. She also told about how she had seen a ghost and told how it just seemed to float instead of walking like a normal person would do.
Even in the middle of the day her stories would raise the hairs on the back of your neck. There was a dirt road that ran up the hollow shaped like a horseshoe where Aunt Sarah lived you could see the other side of the road from her house. There was a bottom in between the the two sides of the road. In the daylight there was a path that you could follow and make a shortcut. At night without a light it was impossible to do.
When I was six we moved out of the hollow and back into the house that my grandfather had helped to build for Mom and Dad. My oldest sister, Mary, and her husband, Roger, moved into our old house at the head of the hollow and lived there for a little while before lightning struck the house and burned it to the ground. They then bought the house that the old couple had lived in. They had moved out a year or so before.
Modernization began catching up with us and people started putting phones in their homes. They were party lines. You would have to wait until the line was clear before you could use it. You could pick it up and listen in on anyone’s conversation. Today we all have private lines, but back then there was no choice in the matter.
Me and my baby sister Sarah had been staying with our sister Mary and playing with the babies, when Mother called and said that she was coming to get us. It was right at the edge of dark, in the twilight.
The moon was full and was out bright.
There was a mist in the air from the moisture of the night.
You could see fog starting raise out of the ground.
Mom was standing straight across from the house. She told us to walk down the road and come to her so we started walking, holding each other’s hand and remembering the stories that Aunt Sarah had told us about the hollow. Mom was talking to us all the time and that helped to ease our fears a little bit but not much.
Just when we were getting to the the back of the horseshoe curve in the road, we saw something moving. It was all in white. It was moving towards us swiftly, seemingly to just float above the road. It was in the moon light and from where we were, it didn’t appear to move like a human at all.
We started yelling and screaming for help and ran back to our sister, Mary. We were still holding hands, with me pulling my little sister onward. We would look back and see that it was gaining on us, This made us yell and scream even louder.
We had almost made it back to Mary’s house, when it caught us!
We thought we were dead!
It turned out to be our middle sister Elizabeth. Mother had forgotten to mention that Liz was going to stay with Mary that night to help with the children. She and Mom had been to church and she was still wearing the white dress that came down to her knees, that she had worn to church. She was about ten and was afraid herself and was running to get there quicker. She didn’t mean to scare us at the time, but did rather enjoy it. She was out of breath from running and laughing at us. After what seemed like an eternity for us we calmed down and caught our breath and started back again.
We made to Mother with no further incident.
