Ghost Stories
When I was a little girl, I used to love ghost stories. My friend and I would take turns making them up, trying to scare each other on our way home on the bus of an evening (since we lived in the middle of nowhere and it took almost an hour to get home). I borrowed old stories from the library all the way through high school. But, while I had read the local ghost stories books, I'd never heard anyone talk about haunted places where we lived, until now.
I went to visit my parents this weekend for my dad's birthday. A couple of their friends came over and we had a corn roast, since it's the season, though corn's not really my favorite food. As we were finishing up dinner and talking around the table, our friends mentioned the recent Hatfields & McCoy's miniseries the History Channel recently did. My sister was saying how she liked that they had stayed true and actually told the story versus portraying them as "dumb hicks with rifles" (Which is our one pet peeve, being from West Virginia and all).
One of our friends agreed but was sure that the didn't portray things quite the way they were. "They were a lot nastier back then and I'm sure there was a lot more killin' and innocents being caught in the crossfire, " he said. He looked to my dad and asked, "Did I ever tell you about why my grandpap hated old Jack _____." My dad shook his head.
"Well, way back when, there was an old peddler came into town up there. This was of course back after the depression and there were a lot of people wandering around looking for work and so on. Well, my grandpap had seen this old peddler going around with a gold watch. Shortly after going to see old Jack, that old peddler turned up dead and the next time my grandpap saw Jack. He was wearing that gold watch. My grandpap swore up and down that old Jack had killed that peddler for his watch. Never trusted the guy since."
My dad countered, "I guess that happened a lot back then. Did you every hear about the old Bennett house over in the next county?"
We all shook our heads and he continued, "Well, I heard this story a few times from a few different people. Some of the Bennett's around this area are related to them. Apparently Boss Bennett and his sons used to live out there back in the Depression era. He had a good bit of money and out-of-towner used to go see him when they came into the area. Well, they used to say Boss would kill them for whatever they had on them and bury their bodies under the porch.
Even after he died and his kids moved out, the family still kept the house up. You never saw a creaky floorboard in the entire place. And even after it was sold to somebody else, it stated in the bill of sale that they couldn't touch anything on the property. Not build anything new. Not tear the house down.
A few people have tried livin' in that place. None of them could make it more than a night. Somebody Mom and Dad used to know said they weren't no such things as ghosts and they didn't believe in them and they went to go live in that house. They might have made it two nights and they were out of there too. Heard moans and screams of all those people Boss killed whose souls couldn't rest. Til this day that place still stands."
I found this whole conversation so interesting because I'd never heard him tell it before. I'd never heard anybody really tell a ghost story about a place I knew of before. Something that wasn't just a story.