But yeah, so… I am going to write about the dark energy anyway (sorry, Sloss).

Educational and inspiring as it may be, the Sloss Furnace museum does shed a fiery light on the brutal realities of the industrial age. Operating as a pig iron blast furnace from 1882 until 1971, it was a crucible of extreme heat, dangerous machinery, and relentless labor. Workers toiled in temperatures exceeding 120ºF surrounded by molten metal, suffocating smoke, and the constant threat of accidents, explosions, and fatal falls. The environment was so perilous that numerous workers lost their lives within its walls, creating a legacy of suffering that seems to be deeply etched into the very concrete and steel of the site’s physical form.

It’s not just me saying this. The Sloss’s molten-hot history of unimaginably hard labor has cemented its reputation as one of America’s most haunted locations, with countless reports of apparitions, disembodied voices, and unexplained phenomena attributed to it. Its most famous spirit is allegedly the ghost of a notoriously cruel foreman named Wormwood, although a friend of mine from Birmingham tells me that this man’s story is wholly fiction. I have no way to know otherwise, so I will share with you what I was told.

The story of a foreman named James “Slag” Wormwood is a point of fierce contention between ghost enthusiasts and Birmingham historians, who claim he never existed at all, because there is no written record of such a name—no payroll, no death record, nothing. This argument is at least partially why I chose to place the Sloss Furnaces in the category of haunted places, rather than in the portion reserved for individual ghosts. Maybe old Slag is just an easy way of contextualizing why this place is so— well, so unsettling and creepy.

According to the lore, “Slag” Wormwood was a night-shift foreman at Sloss Furnaces in the early 1900s. To impress his superiors and increase production, he allegedly forced his workers to take life-threatening risks in the sweltering heat. Racial politics are often in play in these tellings, as Slag is depicted as a relentlessly bossy and merciless white man, and locals know that the workforce of the Sloss at that time was predominantly made up of lowly-paid Black workers, whose options for well-paid labor in the years following emancipation were pretty slim. The men who worked there suffered greatly, but their families had food on the table, so they persisted. Slag is in many ways a caricature of a plantation overseer (and the specter of those men lives on as a dark entity all over the South).

Wormwood was a sadistic boss who ignored safety protocols, leading to the deaths of over 40 men, they say, during his tenure. Workers were allegedly forced to work double shifts and venture into lethal areas of the furnace. Then in 1906, Slag’s reign of terror ended when he slipped and fell into a pool of molten iron at the top of the highest furnace, known as Big Alice. Was he pushed? people wonder.

When and if human tissue sinks into molten iron, it would most surely vaporize into nothingness, becoming one with the plasma of the metal. Days after Slag Wormwood’s total disappearance, workers began reporting a “hateful presence” in the furnace. People said they felt like they were being pushed by invisible hands, or that they heard a baritone voice hollering, “Get back to work!” Visitors today claim they have seen his ghost, describing a barrel-chested male figure covered in reddened flesh—although, burns never would have happened to his real flesh if Slag had fallen in. The guy would have just been physically gone.

Historians argue that the “Slag” myth disrespects the real victims, whose fates should be the real focus. Working at Sloss was incredibly dangerous; people actually did die from explosions, falls, carbon monoxide poisoning, and chronic illnesses sustained because of their time there.

Sloss was historically significant because it became one of the largest producers of pig iron in the world, at a time when the Southern United States was still mostly agrarian, and desperately poor in the years following the Civil War. Its legacy is a proud one to Alabamians. After it closed in 1971, citizens fought to preserve it when they heard that it was slated for demolition. It’s now the only blast furnace in the U.S. preserved as a National Historic Landmark.

The pervasive tales of haunting at the Sloss, with the lingering spirits of its tormented workers, serve as a reminder of the unimaginable pressure and danger that many people face daily in the hardest of jobs. This atmosphere of constant peril and the tangible presence of suffering can be powerfully analogous to the intense pressure many people feel in their modern lives. We might not be literally surrounded by molten metal, but the metaphorical “heat” of high-stress jobs, demanding responsibilities, financial burdens, or overwhelming social expectations can feel equally consuming and inescapable. So surely we can relate to the simmering level of fear that these workers must have suffered in this environment. Honestly one can still feel it there, humming darkly, even in broad daylight on a pleasantly chilly Spring day (like when I was there). This facility surely made great and important contributions to metal technology, but it was also a hellish place—and a death trap—for the people who toiled. May their souls find rest.

The Crescent Hotel in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, has by all accounts earned its reputation as “America’s Most Haunted Hotel.” Among many other supernatural happenings, it is specifically believed that the building includes a crescent-shaped portal to the underworld. Oh my.

Naturally I begin by saying that the hotel has a dark and sad history; and alas, that is so very true. My friend often quotes the author Jason Mott who once wrote, “The South is America’s longest running crime scene,” which makes a lot of sense, when you think about the litany of bad things that have happened here. There’s a lot of fodder for harrowing stories when wars were fought, and people were driven forcefully away. But as with all places, we find personal yet universal horrors in the details, and often that kind of story centers on one sadistic person victimizing the innocent. Which is precisely what happened when Norman Baker bought the old Crescent Hotel in the 1930s, and announced to everyone that he was a doctor, with a reliable method for treating cancer.

(Spoiler: he was absolutely not a doctor.)

The original hotel, built over 40 years before Baker showed up, was finely appointed for the wealthiest of “health tourists” who came to soak in the waters of the mineral springs for healing purposes. Although beautifully appointed, the hotel was unable to sustain itself past the early 1900s and by 1908 had changed hands, becoming a college and conservatory for women that lasted a generation. This period of time, while interesting in its own right, pales in comparison to what happened after Norman Baker bought the abandoned hotel-college property in 1936.

Baker was a vaudeville showman, radio personality and marketing whiz from Muscatine, Iowa. After a stint as a vaudeville performer, he returned to his hometown with goals to build a media and business empire based around miracle cures. In 1925, he launched the radio show KTNT (“Know The Naked Truth”), which he used to sell everything from overalls to his amazing cancer treatment elixirs. Ultimately he built up enough of a fortune to buy and outfit an entire cancer clinic in Iowa, which was finally dismantled and dishonored publicly—and rightly so. In those days, we know it was a lot easier to slink away and start over than it is in our time, where the internet tells all. So Norman Baker found his way to Eureka Springs in the beautiful Ozark foothills, where there was a big empty property available for a song, and started the whole thing right up again. Nobody there knew about the drama in Iowa, which was significant. He had suffered many law suits, much public hatred, and many damning lines of angry journalism. But none of that hubbub had made its way to Arkansas, and Baker knew it.

He painted the interior of the old Crescent a cheery shade of purple, hired a basic staff, and opened the doors of the Baker Cancer Curable Hospital in 1937. Many desperate and ailing patients arrived at their doors, praying and paying for their miraculous recovery.

Baker held a huge vendetta for the American Medical Association (because they had already sued him for half a million dollars, calling him a “quack” and a “faker”), so a large part of his marketing language involved discrediting modern cancer treatments like radiation and surgery, as “medical murder.” Vilifying the mainstream medical community, RFK Jr —oops, sorry! I mean Baker— promoted mineral water baths, eating lots of carrots, and—most importantly—large doses of his special cancer-curing health tonic. We now know what was in the tonics, because multiple lab teams over the decades have tested the contents of extant bottles, and found that they held no more than flavored water; namely a diluted mixture of corn silk, clover, and watermelon juice mixed with phenol (alcohol and carbolic acid).

The hospital had a resort-like atmosphere, with beautiful furniture and green spaces. Patients were typically charged a flat fee of around $500 (roughly $10,000 today) for a five-week cancer treatment, and room and board were charged separately, depending on the level of luxury included in the package choice.

Cancer patients suffered and died in Baker’s doomed facility, because their cancers simply spread unfettered from the lack of treatment. The place was only open for three years, shuttering its doors in 1940. For 80 years, stories circulated that very bad things had happened there, and that bodies were buried somewhere. People said all sorts things, such as that Baker had buried medical evidence in a dumping area behind the property. In February 2019, the rumors were confirmed by real archaeological evidence when a landscape gardener named Susan Benson was digging, and she hit a cache of glass. She had found what is now locally referred to as the “bottle grave”—a dump site containing hundreds of medical jars filled with medical specimens of human tissue as well as Baker’s fake elixirs.

The dead did not leave the property, nor were other patients told when a fellow resident had passed away. Instead, the dead body was quietly removed to a morgue located in the basement, and the other residents were told that so-and-so had been declared so well that she was happily discharged to her husband late last night! Why, she was so sprightly to leave, she must have forgotten to say goodbye! Surely the staff of this place were very well-paid for their secrecy on these matters.

The property is a functioning hotel today, remodeled to its 1880s heyday, and marketed heavily to ghost-loving tourists like us. The basement area that once served as Baker’s morgue is still on site, including his autopsy table and a walk-in cooler for cadavers. Century-old glass bottles of Baker’s miracle cure are on display.

Paranormal investigators have labeled a specific spot on the third floor, directly above the morgue, as a “vortex”—a concentrated area of energy where people frequently report feeling lightheaded or experiencing cold spots. Some have said that it has a faint glow in the shape of a crescent, leading to the theory that it is a portal between the worlds. What other explanation might there be?

It’s also a reasonable conclusion that the immense suffering, death, and deceit that occurred within the building’s walls may have imbued the building with a particularly potent, unsettling energy. This hotel, where innocent people were fleeced of their life’s savings, allowed to suffer, and disposed of like so much meat, is a shadowy place to occupy and feel for oneself. Empaths and investigators who have visited the hotel have claimed to sense a strong energetic disturbance, or a thin veil between worlds, in the same location.

The concept of “hell portals” is a pervasive element in the folklore of many cultures, representing points on Earth where the boundary between the mortal world and the infernal realm is thin, allowing for inadvertent slips. Maybe the Crescent is one such place.

“Let’s go!” I said, then quickly afterwards, “wait, can I go too?”

My friend replied that if she were going, the deal would certainly be that I had to be admitted as well. So she asked me: Are we going?

We summoned the server for the tab, and got out of there as soon as we could to make the short trek from the restaurant to the property upon which the Laveau’s family home once stood. Take note here that although Marie Laveau, “the Voodoo Queen of New Orleans,” is one of the most famous personalities in this tourist city, with her name and face printed on every kind of souvenir imaginable, the two side-by-side townhouses that occupy the length of her former property are privately owned today, and rented to tenants like any other fine homes.

The houses were built in the early 20th century, and the interiors have been meticulously updated many times, and by the time I visited in the 2020s, the kitchen fixtures and countertops and all other such things were quite up-to-date, clean, and shiny. No spooky 18th-century Voodoo mansion for us, I figured with a shrug, as we caught the first interior glimpses.

Devotees of Marie Laveau were outside the front door when we arrived, leaving offerings. We gently pushed through, walking right up the front steps to be admitted through the locked doors. They all looked at us and some clucked their tongues with envy. There were at least ten of them, and I was told there are often more, and at any hour of the day.

Tenants actually rent the place. We were informed by our friend Joe The Paranormal Investigator that the homeowners had hired his team
precisely because recently, they hadn’t been able to keep a steady tenant. The place was just… too dark, people said. The investigators, licensed formally by the Archdiocese for demonic exorcisms, had been stationed there for days, and all sorts of bad things were happening—things so freaky that even actual exorcists thought they were freaky.

I will say from my point of view, for the first hour at least that I was at this property, I was under the impression that this team was filming for a TV program. They looked the part, so far as I could tell, and they had very expensive-looking laser equipment and so on. So when Joe was saying things like “This is unbelievable!” I assumed it was for the cameras.

Turns out, the cameras were not for any audience, whether TV or social media; they were tools for capturing energetic activity, and sharing a full report with the homeowner. In other words, the breathless concerns of “this is too much even for us” were honest feelings being shared with us. I gulped.

My friend was called over because she was an initiate and practitioner of Louisiana Voodoo, and so her subject matter expertise might come in handy appeasing the angry entities in the home. She listened to his description of the offerings they had left—rum, cigars, honey— and assessed the concerns about the honey not being local and other things, but ultimately she determined that none of those things might have set off a spirit concerned with authentic cultural traditions. Rather, she posited: “This might not be the Laveaus you’re dealing with, friend. This land has been occupied for 200 years, after all. Do not assume that its most famous residents are its most active.”

We were standing in an empty (save for the investigator’s equipment and belongings) home, with no furniture. All the lights were on. We might have been on a late-night real estate tour, for how tame it all was. I finally opened my mouth to comment that the place didn’t feel dark—to me, anyway.

Joe blinked and glared at me flatly. “None of what I’m describing happened on this side. I’m talking about the dark side.” He cocked his head toward the other house. Next door.

The team had divided the houses into what they were calling “the light side” and “the dark side.” One of the events that he described, along with his wife, who stood close by and nodded in agreement, was this: Earlier that week, they all sat on the parlor floor to hold a séance with the house spirits. The lights were off; only candlelight illuminated the large, unfurnished space. All at once, the room began to smell badly—fishy and rotten—and they all both heard and felt the sensation of the floor being covered in writhing snakes. At least one of them screamed and jumped to her feet to turn on the lights, in panic. When she did, there were no snakes at all… but everyone’s jewelry was off of their bodies, and piled neatly in the corners of the room. None of them were okay after that.

Might a physical place store nefarious energy in its material being, the way a solar battery can store the sun’s energy? For many centuries, humans have believed that yes, it can.

The practice that we call exorcism is the banishing or cleansing of a place or person, basically ridding it of whatever bad juju has taken up residence in there. There are Christian versions of this practice, which the Catholics are expert practitioners of, and there are older, pagan versions that remain in use in many parts of the world, notably Scotland. According to Rob and Nonie Douglas, an esoteric couple who study and practice the magical Scottish art of laying ghosts, the exorcism of a place is concerned with clearing phasmic impressions that have infused themselves into the fabric of a place. In their practice, they take the project a step further to energetically protect their clients’ newly-cleansed structure by “making the place unfit for revenant spirits, thereby keeping them at bay.”

To hear the whole account of the night my friend and I met “Greg” the revenant spirit in the newly-remodeled kitchen on Marie Laveau’s former property… I did a full-length interview on the amazing podcast You Can See Me In the Dark by Melissa Sweazy and Nate Reisman.

Link below to stream the episode on Spotify — but it’s
available wherever you get your podcasts :)

This is the chapter as it appears in my book, HAUNTS: Fearsome Legends of the American South.

Maybe you’re surprised to find the story of the alligator-man in the ghost section, not the monsters section. Well, that’s because Uncle Monday was a real person, and may still live in Florida. Anyone in St. Augustine will tell you so.

The story goes that Uncle Monday was an African medicine man who was brought to America as a slave but escaped to live with the Seminoles. He eventually settled near Blue Sink (Lake Belle) and was believed to be a shape-shifter who could transform into a giant alligator at will. Other folks simply admitted that he was an elderly Hoodoo doctor, also known as a conjure doctor, with great powers and a knack for preserving his secret identity from any authorities. Everyone in the historically Black community of Eatonville back in those days seemed to know someone who had consulted Uncle Monday for one thing or another, and his healing powers were highly effective.

“People talk a whole lot about Uncle Monday, but they take good pains not to let him hear none of it,” wrote Zora Neale Hurston in her essays on African-American Florida folklore in the 1930s. Hurston heard all about the old Hoodoo man when she went to Florida on her research trips to St. Augustine throughout that decade, and much of her work from that time defines a lot of what we know about Southern Black culture in the early years of the 20th century.

A lot of Hurston’s folklore research in Florida was conducted as part of the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP), a branch of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Her mission was to document as much of African-American folklore, language, and culture as possible because she recognized that with modernity, a lot of the old folks’ ways would otherwise be lost to history. Because she had been raised in Eatonville, she was an insider to the culture, and convinced her publishers that she could get all up in it with the locals and be trusted to record all of the best stories. Her aim was to document them authentically.

One of the resulting books was the now-famous Mules and Men.

The tale of Uncle Monday, at least the part relayed to us by Hurston, came in an excerpt from a different book, called N*gro: An Anthology, edited by Nancy Cunard.

Hurston’s entry reads as follows:

Nobody knows where he came from nor who his folks might be. Nobody knows for certain just when he did come to town. He was just there one morning when the town awoke.

Joe Lindsay was the first to see him. He had some turtle lines set down on Lake Belle... He says he started on back home, but when he was a few yards from where his lines had been set something made him look back, and he nearly fell dead. For there was an old man walking out of the lake between two cypress knees.

The man came up to him and passed him without looking at him seemingly. After he had passed, Lindsay noticed that his clothes were perfectly dry... Another thing that struck everybody unpleasantly was the fact that he never asked a name nor a direction. Just seemed to know who everybody was and called each and every one by their right name. Knew where everybody lived too.

Nobody can say exactly how it came to be known that he was a hoodoo man. But it turned out that that was what he was. People said he was a good one too. As much as they feared him he had plenty of trade... Uncle Monday asked, ‘Why would I be skeered?’ ‘Well, you liable to take sick in de night sometime, and you’d be dead befo’ anybody would know you was even sick.’ Uncle Monday got up off the nail keg and said in a voice so low that only the men right close to him could hear what he said: ‘I have been dead for many a year. I have come back from where you are going.’

Hurston went on to describe a very old man in the town who had escaped slavery decades before, by outwitting his oppressors. He was very wise; in fact, he seemed to know everything about everyone, yet no one seemed to know much of anything about him, including his real name. He was simply known as Uncle Monday, and he was magic. He was believed to be a shape-shifter, one who could turn into an alligator at will, and sleep in the lake.

Uncle Monday was said to be a very strong man, with seemingly no illnesses associated with age. Once, he emerged after a violent scuffle unharmed. Townsfolk posited that he might just be an immortal spirit that could grow back any limb at will. This brings deeper meaning to his line above, where he said, “I have been dead for many a year. I have come back from where you are going.”

I should check myself and stop writing about Uncle Monday in the past tense, because plenty of Floridians claim that he still lives and performs magic there. Just about ten years ago, a woman named Judy Bronson allegedly claimed publicly that she was a more powerful folk healer than anyone else in the area. One night she was fishing at Blue Sink when she was astonished to spot an alligator walking upright across the water, like a two-legged man. Like Jesus himself, walking on water. She turned to flee, but before she could escape, she fell paralyzed to the sandy beach. Stunned and trembling, she realized that her legs wouldn’t function. The alligator-man leaned ominously into her field of vision, and told her plainly that she would stay right there until she admitted that her magic wasn’t as powerful as his. Shocked and nearly voiceless, she whimpered until she could form the words: “I—I—cannot do such magic,” she said weakly. “I am sorry. Please let me go.” Once the words were uttered, the monster formed himself into a strong, kind-looking man, and carried her gently in his arms all the way back to her house. People say she threw away her candles and herbs, closed up shop, and deleted her website. To this day, friends say she firmly believes that Uncle Monday himself paid her a visit.

Post script!

Zora Neale Hurston’s works were recently repackaged by Amistad Books, and given a fresh lease on life for a new generation of readers. If you’re not familiar with this amazing author—perhaps most famous for Their Eyes Were Watching God— please have a look at these titles and put ‘em on your summer TBR!

https://www.printmag.com/graphic-design/10-artists-were-commissioned-to-redesign-zora-neale-hurston-book-covers/

The name of this young woman has not been left with us in the historic record, but for the purposes of recounting this tale I will use the name Lucy, since it means “bringer of light.” Her story is often associated with candles.

The Bulloch Hall mansion was built in the 1830s by James Stephens Bulloch, and was the family and childhood home of Mittie Bulloch, mother of U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt. The house and grounds still stand today as a history museum, striving as accurately as possible to educate visitors about the realities of life at the Georgia plantation during its heyday in the 19th century. It is one of several historically significant buildings in the city, and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and history tours are given year-round. The fate of Lucy is rarely mentioned, unless someone asks about “the little girl who fell down the well.”

Like many antebellum sites, Bulloch Hall’s records of enslaved people are fairly incomplete. While we know Major Bulloch owned a labor force of approximately 45 people, they are often listed in census slave schedules only by age and gender, not by name. It is not unusual for these names to be left unrecorded, appearing only when they may have been named in wills, or bills of sale. In the case of Bulloch, there is an actual plaque that names 33 of the individuals whose names were known, and it hangs in the newly-reconstructed dog-trot cabins that form the heart of the slavery exhibit on the tour. The story of the girl falling down the well is not a part of the tour, if only because the property wishes to keep the information strictly to the written record of history, and this all falls within the lore of oral storytelling.

No one alive knows whether this young woman really died on the property, but the story has endured for generations, so there must be some reason to explain why people visiting Bulloch Hall, especially at night, see inexplicable paranormal activity in the mansion, and the moving shape of an adolescent girl out by the well, translucent in the moonlight.

One of Lucy’s main responsibilities at Bulloch Hall, as one of their young domestic slaves, would have been to light all of the candles in the evening, and extinguish them when the family retired to bed. At that age, she would have been expected to be the runner and helper-in-training for the more skilled maids who served inside the house, so any and all messy or repetitive jobs would have been handed off to her. She would have been old enough to do much of the work a grown woman could, with the boundless energy of youth, so hauling water in and out of the house from the well would surely have been a regular job for an adolescent girl. She was approximately 14 years old when the accident happened: she slipped at the well, fell in, and tragically drowned.

Some historical context here. To us, it seems highly unlikely that someone in the family could die tragically on-site, and not make it into the written record. But is it really? Back then on a Southern cotton plantation, any and all of the enslaved workforce would have started work there in one of only two ways: born there, or bought. They would leave the job in one of only two ways: die there, or get sold. Therefore the death of a servant on the property—while dramatic, due to the youth of the victim—was not altogether unheard of in a place where people were subjected to all sorts of bodily harm in and around the whole property, and who fully expected to remain there working, until death.

A girl’s ghostly figure has been spotted in and around the house for generations, which is why the story persists. If no one ever fell down the well at Bulloch, is it possible an adolescent girl perished there in some other way? Another strange phenomenon has occurred at Bulloch Hall for many years: The candles throughout the house will light up, inexplicably, without the assistance of any person. Even when the mansion sits empty, passersby have reported seeing candlelight emanating from the windows in the evening. Alternatively, at special events with candles, the tapers will go out, even when no one is near enough to have blown them out. The candles at Bulloch Hall seem to have a will of their own.

The staff at Bulloch Hall, together with local historians, have been researching 19th century documentation to identify the actual names of the enslaved people who lived there, such as Grace, Luke, Nancy, and Charlotte, to move the narrative away from folklore and toward historical recognition.

Pray that as the South continues to heal, and that spirits like Lucy’s can finally blow the candles out for good and find everlasting peace.

She was a nine-fingered woman.

This is a story of an outlaw who not only survived and got away, she also found a way to escape the grave itself... by becoming a mummified sideshow attraction.

We begin in Louisville, Kentucky, just about 100 miles away from the legend of Pearl Bryan, during the tumultuous political year of 1905. Louisville at the time was a hotbed of political conflict, as the November mayoral election loomed and a thuggish figurehead for the Democrats, a Colonel John Whallen, ran a political machine that threatened to collapse the whole city. His office was run out of a burlesque theater with a full saloon, if that paints a picture of the state of things.

Louisville back then was a huge center for American manufacturing, and bourbon was its greatest export. Hazel and her husband John lived in the the Tenderloin, a notorious Red Light district where crime, saloons, and gambling were protected by Whallen’s political machine. Lawlessness and police brutality reigned, and crime was rampant. Both of the Farrises were hard drinkers, and neighbors reported hearing a lot of noisy altercations from their apartment, such as hollering, thrown objects hitting the floor, and glass breaking.

One night, Hazel and John ended up in yet another yelling match, some say because John wanted to dissuade her from buying a new hat— and the drunken couple ended up in a brawl; shots were fired, and neighbors who heard it ran to the police-call box at the end of the street to summon the authorities with a frantic pull on the lever. When three police officers arrived, people directed them to the Farris apartment where they found Hazel still there, packing her things to flee the scene. John was dead. The cops hardly had a moment to spot the dead man on the floor before Hazel, gun already in hand, shot at them, too. Legend says she hit all three of them. During the scuffle, Hazel lost a finger from a deputy’s shot, but she broke free and escaped, wounded but running.

This is the story that people tell, but alas there seems to be no primary evidence that it ever happened. One might say the story got lost in the overwhelming criminal activities afoot in Louisville that summer—but I would argue that a woman mass-killing three officers and her husband would surely have made headlines. It is entirely possible this series of events is fictional, which is disappointing. But let’s continue anyway, and find out where the legend takes Hazel.

With a bounty on her as an escaped criminal, Hazel had to get out of town fast, so she made her way alone all the way to Alabama, where she attempted to stay under the radar. She found a place to stay, and started up in sex work to be able to pay the rent and keep food and liquor on the table. Her hot temper hadn’t changed though, so she built up a reputation in the small town of Bessemer for being a tough cookie indeed, and one not to be toyed with.

One night, drunk and triggered by the smart mouth on her client for the evening, she boasted that she was wanted for murder—so if she decided “to murder him tonight, he wouldn’t even be the first.” He managed to leave the place with his life, and the following day he reported Hazel to the local authorities in case there was reward money on her head. The Alabama authorities (in this story, anyway) learned that the nine-fingered woman was the runaway outlaw from Louisville, and started a local “manhunt,” so to speak, which Hazel got word of. Before the authorities could capture her, she took her own life one night by drinking herself to death with boozy drinks laced with arsenic.

This story is fantastic and exciting but again, it is pretty weird that there are no newspaper accounts about any of this, nor any record of a Hazel Farris or a bounty.

What we do know with absolute certainty is that an unidentified young woman, approximately 25 years of age, was found dead in a small town in Alabama in December 1906. We do not know whether her name was Hazel, or if her death was by suicide or poisoning. An autopsy performed nearly a century later, in 2002, on her mummified body (more about that in a moment) actually indicated her cause of death might have been pneumonia. She had been soaked in arsenic, but most likely post-mortem.

When the young lady was first found, she was brought in to the morgue per city procedure, and an announcement was made in an attempt to find her family or friends, who might identify the body. No one did.

When no one showed up to claim her at the morgue, the attractive young woman’s body was put on display at an undertaker’s parlor and furniture shop, in a fine wooden coffin propped up in a window behind a glass plate. She stayed there for days, and then weeks, and didn’t seem to decompose much at all… so that’s when she became “Hazel the Mummy,” and presumably when the sordid backstory of a feisty prostitute on the run from the bourbon-soaked city of Louisville began to take shape.

Her well-preserved remains were sold to showman O.C. Brooks, an off-brand P.T. Barnum. While Hazel the mummy traveled the countryside in his truck, she was at some point likely pickled in arsenic to preserve her money-making potential a little longer. While traveling, a legend developed that Hazel’s physical remains possessed a strange power. Brooks claimed that rubbing money on Hazel’s hand would bring the person good luck. This is reported to have continued for decades, until O.C. Brooks died too, never having made it as a famous circus showman.

In his will Brooks left the mummy in its fine wooden box to his nephew, who definitely did not want it and so immediately donated the nine-fingered mummy to the Bessemer Hall of History, where accounts of her spirit still occur. The mummy is no longer on display— the good people of National Geographic funded a whole study on her in 2002, after which she was cremated and laid to rest after a long, long journey. But the Hall of History in this tiny town still enjoys a little bit of dark tourism, as people from all around stop in to see if they might glimpse her spirit lurking about the premises.

It all began in the piano room…

Clara Robertson never dreamed of ghosts and goblins as a child—at least as far as we know— but by the time she reached her early teens, she was a sought-after psychic medium in a city gripped with chaos, disease, and violence. Just to set the stage, so to speak, let’s go back in time to early 1870s Memphis, Tennessee.

Every living Memphian in those days was affected in one way or another by the profound losses of the Civil War, rampant disease, and the immense upheaval that transpired in the years following the war’s conclusion. Newly-emancipated Black citizens faced a dangerous future in a hostile place. Families of all shapes and sizes had lost sons, brothers and fathers to the war, or from its lingering wounds. Crime and lawlessness reigned. Waves of Yellow Fever swept through the city, and worse epidemics were still to come, in a time when no one had yet discovered the cause (spoiler alert: mosquitoes). In 1871 Memphis, if the mosquitoes didn’t kill you, life on those mean streets certainly could.

As a result, there was a huge rise in Spiritualism— a religio-spiritual movement grounded in communications between the living and the dead. (More of this in the next chapter, Conjured Spirit.)

So it is perhaps little surprise then that a 13-year-old girl became a local sensation in a city gripped with spirit-o-mania when she claimed to have seen, and talked to, a real live ghost.

You may have read accounts of the notorious Pink Lizzie, the original creepy-Victorian-child-in-a-dress that has now become an icon of ghost tropes. Few ghost stories have gripped the attention of a city so completely as the tale of Pink Lizzie did back then. If you are imagining a gaunt little blonde-haired girl, mouldering from the grave, and wearing a doll-like pink dress caked with moldy slime, then congratulations, because that is the very image of Pink Lizzie. And Clara is the person who first saw her.

According to The Daily Memphis Avalanche, the ghostly apparition of a girl approximately 8 years of age, with “sunken lustrous eyes” and wearing a “slimy” pink dress, appeared right next to Clara while she was practicing for a recital in the music room at her school, alone.

The school, called the Brinkley Female College, was located in a two-story mansion that had once been the home of Colonel William Davie. After the Civil War, the veteran Confederate went bankrupt, and sold the property to J.D. Meredith, who established the school and became its Headmaster. The disgraced rebel leader then moved to Kentucky.

Clara had only been a student at the B.F.C. since the previous Fall, and was not a boarder but a local Memphis child enrolled for daytime-only classes, which included piano lessons and party manners. So on that fateful day in February as she practiced her piano recital piece, a shadowy figure appeared before her and then instantly solidified into the form of a terrifying little dead girl in a pink dress. Clara shrieked in terror and ran screaming out of the room, straight into one of the bunk rooms where one of her fellow students was resting in bed, feeling sick. Clara jumped into bed with her classmate, breathlessly explaining that she had seen a ghost, and wildly motioning toward the door with her hands. Soon afterwards, the little ghost followed into the room and both of the girls were able to plainly see it, and so they shouted wildly in fright, as the ghost proceeded to disappear right through a wall.

Miss Jackie Boone, one of their teachers, was the adult who unfortunately had to deal with the aftermath of this drama, as the entire school (approximately 50 girls) all fell into ghost fever. Some cried, some laughed, and many of them ridiculed Clara and her feverish classmate. Clara was sent home, her parents were fully apprised of the situation, and she was reprimanded sternly for her nonsense.

Following this incident, she was welcomed back to school the following day, Wednesday, and presumably nothing supernatural happened, to the great relief of the schoolteachers. But on Thursday it happened again, once again in the music room. Clara was in there with two other girls—because after all, the recital still needed to be practiced for— and sure enough, there was an unusual noise, described as a kind of water splash on the hard floor. All three girls turned to look, and what they saw was “the same spectral visitor of two days before,” as the newspaper reported. The trio fled the room in a panic, still not having heard the ghost speak aloud. Once again the peace and order of the school devolved into the wild chaos that only panicked adolescents can muster. Another day of study, ruined.

The following Tuesday, gosh darn if it didn’t happen again, and in the music room. Clara ran to find Miss Jackie, and they returned to the piano room to settle this matter once and for all. And behold, the little ghost was patiently standing there, visible to both teacher and students. This time Clara spoke directly to it, and asked it what it was doing there and what it wanted.

The ghostly girl answered Clara, saying that under a tree stump, about 50 yards from the house, there were some papers rolled up in a jar, buried for safekeeping, and that she wanted Clara to retrieve them. Over the course of several more days, the accounts say that the ghost appeared and provided more and more information to Clara. She revealed that her name was Lizzie Davie, daughter of Colonel Davie, and that the papers in the jar would reveal the truth surrounding her father’s bankruptcy.

Well as you might imagine, once the journalists caught hold of this story,
accounts of it were everywhere, and spread to newspapers as far away as Wisconsin and beyond. This story had everything: innocent little girls, a mouldering and slimy ghost, a bankrupt Confederate, and a mystery jar.

Ultimately, the drama unfolded into a massive, city-wide mania to come and spectate at the LIVE excavation of the jar, an event for which tickets were widely sold (by Clara’s father, naturally). In front of hundreds of onlookers, a large jar filled with mysterious contents was allegedly unearthed, and Mr. Robertson stopped short of opening it. Instead, he declared that the jar would be opened in a more suitable location, and that details of this formal event would be publicized shortly. The jar was stowed, unopened, in a “safe location.”

Perhaps you can guess what happened next, or at least a version of it. As the public anxiously awaited the unveiling announcement for two months, instead they got a report that the Robertson house had been burgled. Mr Robertson had been attacked and found unconscious from a head wound, and the jar was forever gone.

The sad ending to this story is that the Brinkley Female College collapsed under the enormous weight of this scandal, both because of the mass exodus of current students and the unwillingness of new families to enroll their children in such a disreputable place.

The teenaged Clara Robertson, however, was not in need of a new school to attend, because her father had career plans for her. Having already succeeded in renting out the local Greenlaw Opera House for various interviews and events surrounding his daughter’s interactions with “Pink Lizzie,” he continued to pursue profit from this story by finding new ideas with which to prolong the spectacle.

The teen was promoted for her first post-Lizzie stage appearance as follows: Miss Clara Robertson has kindly consented to appear upon this occasion in her TRANCE STATE, in which a most angelic expression possesses her, beyond the power of language to describe. Admission, 75¢.

Clara went on to perform several times on stage in her teens, including one onstage battle of wits with the notorious “medium detective” Professor Van Vleck in a popular 19th-century format in which one performer attempted to debunk the supernatural claims of the other. A sort of Victorian precursor to today’s outrageous debate podcasts, if you think about it.

She later made herself available for hire as a psychic medium, enjoying only a very short career as such before marrying a much older man and moving into Memphis’ Market Street projects. Clara died of consumption at the tender age of 26, when her only son David was just a toddler.

She lies in an unmarked grave alongside her husband John Zent at Elmwood Cemetery in Memphis.

As for the final resting place of little Lizzie Davie? Well, records show no daughters for the old Kentucky colonel. Who do you think she was?

A Crime of Passion?

Pearl Bryan was 22 years old in 1895 when she fell in love with Scott Jackson in Greencastle, Indiana, where she was born and raised. Pearl was an educated woman who worked as a teacher, which gave her a certain amount of freedom to wander the town alone, unlike so many other young women at that time. Armed with this independence, Pearl found plenty of opportunities for courting her beau, without introducing him to her siblings or parents. Pearl lived on a busy homestead with nearly all of her 11 brothers and sisters, plus her parents and some assorted dairy hands, so it’s easy to imagine why she enjoyed a private life off of the farm.

Scott Jackson met Pearl when he came to Greencastle with his mother to live near his married sister, who had moved there in recent years. He wasn’t in town long, because ultimately he left for Cincinnati to attend the Ohio College of Dental Surgery. Naturally, Pearl fought some strong feelings when her boyfriend packed his bags for college, but she understood and respected his decision to pursue higher education. They stayed in touch through love letters.

On January 28, 1896, Pearl left her home in Greencastle under the pretense of visiting a friend known to the Bryant family in Indianapolis, when in reality she went to pay a surprise visit to Scott. She traveled to Cincinnati in what must have been a highly emotional journey, made all the more worrisome since she knew that her family didn’t know where she was going. She was driven by an urgent announcement for Scott: she was pregnant with his child, and she needed him to know the truth—and to weigh in on the situation. Should they get married? Run away? She was already in her second trimester, though she hid her predicament well under her baggy clothes.

Days passed, and as the snow fell in Greencastle, the Bryants worried after Pearl. Why was she taking so long to come home? Surely they blamed the cold Midwestern snows for her delay, as they watched and waited. The early days of February came and went, with still no sign of Pearl.

On the morning of February 1, 1896, a farmhand named Johnny Hewling was working on a farm in Fort Thomas, Kentucky, just across the Ohio River from Cincinnati. In a secluded orchard near what is now the local YMCA, he discovered the grisly sight of a murdered woman, her clothes soaked in blood, and with no head or neck.

According to the presiding coroner, the woman was found decapitated to the collarbone, with additional wounds across the back and on the hands. He also wrote that in his estimation, she was decapitated while still alive. And most tragically, the victim was five months pregnant at the time of her death.

The victim was unidentified, but the pregnancy certainly suggested a motive, considering the context and social rules of the time. At first, no one could guess her identity, as the head was missing from the scene, and no local women matching her description had gone missing.

Why in the world was Pearl’s body found in Kentucky? How had she come to such a horrifying end?

Scott Jackson had in fact received Pearl at his boarding house in Cincinnati, and he absolutely did not like the sound of her news. Clearly Scott was not in favor of marrying her, and being forever tied to her dairy-farm country family. What we now know that perhaps Pearl may not have known, is that Scott Jackson was a person with a fairly checkered past, including a criminal background of embezzlement that came to light in his later trial. What other atrocities was Scott Jackson capable of, that we will never know?

The way the story is believed to have unfolded after thorough investigations, and Pearl’s autopsy, is this: Jackson probably tried to use his newfound surgery skills to perform an abortion, and botched it. In a panic from the aftermath, he and his Ohio College roommate, Alonzo Walling (see photo above), must have taken the suffering Pearl across the river to a remote area to kill her and hide the remains far away— because she was the embodied evidence of a botched illegal abortion.

The so-called “Highlands” of Fort Thomas were much more rural and isolated than the bustling streets of Cincinnati, and only about 45 minutes away by carriage. Just across the river, the Kentucky side would have provided quiet, cover of darkness, and solitude. They would have traveled across the bridge into Kentucky, probably with no specific destination in mind, to find a spot far enough away from the dental college and their boarding house to avoid any chance of being caught. Somehow they found the orchard near the next bend in the river, and the rest is history. We don’t know whether she was killed by decapitation, or if the victim’s head was lopped off after her killing in order to hide her identity. The head of Pearl Bryan was never found, so people speculate that perhaps Jackson and Walling brought it back to Cincinnati with them, burned it, or buried it somewhere.

The body was later positively identified as the remains of Pearl Bryan, because of the Louis & Hays tag found in her custom-made shoes from Greencastle, Indiana. When detectives sought out the shoe store in Greencastle, the clerk consulted the store’s ledgers. They found that only a few pairs of that button-up style had been made, and only one in such a very petite size (3), which were confirmed positively to have been sold to Pearl back in November of the previous year. The shoes and clothes were then carried to the Bryan farm, where the devastated family heard all about the crime and mournfully confirmed that yes, indeed these were the belongings of their daughter. They must have been so absolutely shocked by all of the unknown aspects of this tragic tale, so fully opposite of the happy journey that they believed their Pearl had taken.

Scott Jackson, along with the man believed to be his accomplice, were hanged in Cincinnati, Ohio after a trial.

The people of Kentucky have been living with this story a long, long time now. Because the trial and the subsequent executions of Jackson and Walling took place in Newport, their state became the nexus for the media circus that followed. The story became a famous chapter in Appalachian folklore, immortalized in several murder ballads like “Pearl Bryan” which still get played on stage, and can easily be found on Spotify (right there with all of the true crime podcasts about her, poor thing).

Does she haunt the YMCA in Fort Thomas, though?

The old orchard of the 1890s is long, long gone, and in its place is now the YMCA. Locals have reported seeing the specter of a headless woman wandering the woods behind the place at night, wearing a bloodied dress and with her hands outstretched, as though lost. When approached, she allegedly vanishes into the trees.

I know there must be at least one reader wondering when I’m going to mention Bobby Mackey’s Music World, an eccentric old honky tonk in nearby Wilder that was demolished in 2024. Featured in shows like “Ghost Adventures” and “Ghost Hunters,” this place spent years claiming to house the spirit of Pearl Bryan, as well as plenty of other high profile ghosts, too, as long as they were good for business: we’re talking Satanic rituals, a portal to Hell, the works. No reliable connections have ever been made that explain why Pearl may have wandered heedlessly (or headlessly) to Bobby Mackey’s, except when her story is told from the jukebox in the lyrics of her tragic ballads.

I am so glad to finally get a chance to speak my mind about the ghost of one Miss Helen Johnstone, because ever since I heard my first podcast episode about the Bride of Annandale, I had my doubts. As you must surely know by now I am a huge believer in ghosts, obviously, just not all of them. And for me, Helen’s point of view in this story just does not add up. I just can’t quit it though, and of all the tragic ghost stories that the state of Mississippi has to offer, I just kept coming back to Helen Johnstone. When it came time to make the oracle cards “The Haunts” back in 2021, she had thoroughly wormed her way into my psyche, and insisted upon having her story told. Again.

Let me tell it to you now, the way it is always told. It is a well-loved Southern Gothic tale from the Mississippi Delta.

Helen was the very rich, privileged princess daughter of the Johnstone family, whose wealth came from harvesting and planting cotton. Her multi-millionaire father John Johnstone had made his fortune in the early 1800s in North Carolina, and when he decided to expand his farm holdings to Mississippi, he commissioned the building of an eight-bedroom Italianate mansion, and christened it Annandale. Even the name was a flex, because it derived from his claim that the family was descended from the great Johnstones of Scotland, a royal clan who claimed the lordship of Annandale— one of the oldest and most honorable titles in the south of Scotland.

Helen and her sister Frances were this castle’s princesses. Frances was much older, and already married away to a prominent Mississippi lawyer. Baby sister Helen was the apple of their mother’s eye, always dressed in the frilliest of dresses—sewn from imported silks and taffetas. Her beauty was known across the county, and the promise of her implied dowry was equally compelling to other planter families.

In 1859 when 20-year-old Helen became engaged to Henry Gray Vick, the handsome scion of the very powerful Vick family (who gave the town of Vicksburg its name), they were instantly the hot celebrity couple of their time. Henry and Helen’s wedding was going to be the fashion event of the decade in Madison, Mississippi, and as far afield as Memphis, Tennessee. Anyone who was anyone would have been on that invitation list.

Here’s what happened. Just four days before their wedding in May—the mansion was already nearly fully decorated, you understand— the groom to be, Henry Vick, was on the last day of a trip to Mobile, Alabama. He got in a fight with an acquaintance of his by the name of James Stith, supposedly over some dealings with a servant. Stith had previously demanded that one of Vick’s servants be punished for an incident during a hunt. Vick refused, defending the servant’s honor. The argument escalated at the St. Charles Hotel, ending with Vick slapping Stith—the ultimate 19th-century demand for a duel.

Longer versions of this story by Mississippians add here that Helen had already shared with Henry that she and her siblings were raised to honor the code duello, an old-world system of honor that her father explained, which set out rules for one-on-one combat. Codes duello were meant to stave off vendettas between families, especially when both the levels of testosterone and savings accounts ran high. Anyway, Helen was against dueling, and Henry supposedly knew that.

Back in Mobile, both Vick and Stith were fully riled up over this dispute so they met at a practice range at daybreak anyway, armed with loaded pistols. The morning air must have been thick with their rage. On the count of one, Henry Vick intentionally fired his pistol into the air, signaling he would not take Stith’s life. Stith, however, did not return the gesture. He took aim and shot Henry Vick right smack in the forehead, killing him instantly.

When Henry’s body was brought back to Annandale, Helen collapsed in the throes of despair. The estate was fully decorated for the wedding, and the baked goods were already being made. In a decision that locals to this day still recount, Helen insisted on a midnight burial for Henry at the Chapel of the Cross Cemetery to take place on the night of their wedding date. She wore her stunning satin bridal gown with a black veil, transforming her wedding day into a funeral.

Helen remained inconsolable in her grief, they say. For years, the tragic beauty wandered the gardens of Annandale in her mourning veil and gown, they say.

Multiple accounts convey the sighting of a misty “Lady in Grey” spirit, weeping silently near Henry Vick’s gravesite. The misty spirit can be spotted in the moonlight near Vick’s grave even today, sometimes on a nearby wrought iron bench or atop the grave itself, eternally grieving.

It’s such a tragic tale of true love, and it is indeed based on a true set of historic events. We do love a dark romance down here, and this one has everything: right down to the black veil and impeccable satin gown. The part I stumble over is this: Helen married another man three years later, the honorable Reverend George Carroll Harris, an Episcopal minister. What’s more, George and Helen were apparently quite happy and settled over in Rolling Fork in a fine mansion built on a sacred burial mound, but that’s beside the point for the purposes of today’s story. My point is, Helen lived to have a whole new life, a community of faith, with three children and many grandchildren. She died peacefully at home at the ripe old age of 78, surrounded by family.

My burning question (for myself) is this: if I died at 78, surrounded by my weeping grandchildren in my big comfy house, would my spirit need to come back and haunt my college boyfriend’s gravesite? I mean, I know how marvelous young love can be, so it’s hard to say…but I really do hope that I would have moved on, and I hope that Helen did. I think it’s the rest of Mississippi who are not ready to let go.

The etymology of the word nostalgia is “pain for homecoming,” or a toxic and irrational longing for the past. When I decided to include the darkly romantic fairy tale of Helen Johnstone in my Haunts oracle card deck, I made her card about toxic nostalgia. The guidebook warns, If you drew this card, perhaps you feel trapped in a spiritual cycle of some sort, and progress seems impossible.

This story is one of many that feature bereaved women unable to rest. In next week’s installment, we will learn about one who didn’t leave us so peacefully…

Welcome to The Haunts: Fearsome Legends from the American South

This is the “start here” Table of Contents for the serial online version of the limited-edition book Haunts: Fearsome Legends from the American South.

This post is being released Monday, April 6, 2026, and below you will find the TOC and the Intro, which will remain public, and free to read.

Installations will come out every Monday, and will be free/public for one week. On the following Monday, a new one will come out and the previous will move into the permanent archive for paid subscribers only.

Thank you for joining me on this journey of ghosts, monsters, haunted places, and devilish things… I sure wouldn’t want to wander into it alone.

Table of Contents

* If the item below is not yet hyperlinked, it means that story has not yet posted.

Part 1, Echoes of Grief: Spirits That Were Once Human

Helen Johnstone >

Pearl Bryan >

Pink Lizzie >

Hazel Farris >

The Candlelight Spirit >

Uncle Monday >

Part 2, The Lamp’s Eerie Glow: Spooky Places and Objects

The Crescent Hotel

Sloss Furnaces

The Poinsett Bridge

Lunatic Asylum

Sweetwater Mansion

Ghost Garden

Part 3, Waiting in Ambush: Monsters, Creatures, and Cryptids

Rougarou

Mothman

Wampus Cat

Hicklesnoopus

Boo Hag & the Plat Eye

Tailybone

Part 4, Marks of the Profane: Unclean, Devilish Things

Conjured Spirit

Yazoo Witch

Bell Witch

Hellhound

The Casquette Girls

The Devil

Introduction

This book is the natural expansion of the research I did for my oracle deck called the HAUNTS Oracle, starting in 2021 and expanded in 2025. That oracle deck is what some might call a fortune-telling deck of cards—and a dark one at that—designed with one frightful story on each card face. The idea behind it is to draw a card, and then either guess what you think it might mean to you or look up the story in the accompanying guidebook.

I based each card on a real legend from the American South, and I tried to include everyone. From the far northern reaches of our area in the tippy-top of West Virginia, all the way down to the swamps of Louisiana and Florida, I found hundreds of chilling tales that really lived up to the concept of Southern Gothic. For the purposes of making a card deck, I curated it down to just the ones that I thought carried an interesting foreshadowing of a person’s fate, or maybe a feeling they might be having. For example, if you draw a card with Mothman on it, maybe you ought to consider the ways you’ve been retreating from society. After all, says the guidebook, if you hide too long away from the light, you raise the risk of losing what makes you human.

This is just something we do here.

On a recent vacation to South Carolina, my partner and I stumbled time and again on attractions that offered thrills and chills. “The Only Haunted Carriage Tour,” boasted one brochure. “Book now for a spooky night you’ll never forget.” In my hometown of Memphis the historic Elmwood Cemetery not only has guided tours with themes like “Scandals & Scoundrels,” it even offers movie night, in which we all spread quilts and munch on snacks in order to keep the spirits company.

Of course New Orleans, not to be outdone by any city anywhere, has a Vampire Café with cocktails called The Bloodiest Mary. The Crescent City’s macabre attractions are too numerable to list. There’s even a Museum of Death in New Orleans.

Bookstores throughout this area are filled to bursting with books (like this one) titled Ghosts of Old Kentucky and Florida’s Haunted Hospitality. I was grown before I decided that although this phenomenon exists in other American states and even overseas, there simply does not seem to be any culture anywhere as preoccupied with death and scary things as we are here in the American South. It’s a pastime, it’s a lifestyle, and it fuels our tourism industry. Where would a Southern Gothic novel be without shrieking ghosts in the attics and wooly beasts in the forests?

Ultimately I found that I was in possession of too much juicy information to keep these legends contained in the tiny little guidebook that accompanies the cards in their box. I wanted to share the longer versions of the stories with you, just for their own sake.

All of these books about ghosts in Southern states, my own included, reveal an awful lot more about the readers than they do about the legends’ face value. There are many discussions about the nature of fairy tales, and what they say about bigotry, misogyny, and prejudice. One of those points concerns the predominance of ghosts who are tragic women: nearly always white, surely young and beautiful, forlorn because of a lost lover, baby or husband. There is only one of those in this book: The Bride of Annandale, based on the legend of Helen Johnstone. I included her precisely because I needed one to would represent the innumerable “women in white” ghost stories that pump like oxygenated blood through the veins of folkloric literature down here. And what about the stories of wandering, dead Confederate soldiers — could those have more to do with the myth of the Lost Cause than any actual specters out her bothering anyone?

(Checklist: I also needed a haunted house that wasn’t really there, monsters in the woods, some demons, and a couple of witches. I found loads of them; just you wait.)

I chose each of these stories not only because they are sordid and dramatic, but also to reveal a little something about those of us who tell these tales. Forgive the Southern mom in me, but damn if I don’t love a hearty lesson at the end of a bedtime story. In Part 1, we examine stories of ghosts who were once human. In Part 2, we’ll visit haunted places and objects. Part 3 concerns beasts and cryptids lurking in the dark, and lastly, in Part 4 we penetrate the nexus of darkness itself: the profane.

The “shadow” is a term from Jungian psychology, and it refers to the parts of ourselves that are often troublesome, maybe even one might call them personality flaws… but which are there following us, because they are a fundamental part of our soul’s makeup. Our shadowy tendencies are best dealt with and tamed when we face them head on, instead of ignoring or denying that the shadows exist. They stem from our personal traumas and shortcomings, but they also give rise to very real fears— and sometimes fears are valid because they keep us reasonably cautious in the face of danger. We all have both a light side and a dark side, depending on which way the sun is shining.

But first, let’s draw a couple of cards from the Southern Botanic Oracle, because duh, ‘tis the season. Happy spring and Ostara, everyone! 🌷

Spanish Moss, for self-expression and flow, and Periwinkle, for leaving a legacy. OK well damn, we are right on topic…. this oracle does not lie. Because what are we really concerned with as creatives, as artists?

To be seen and heard, and ultimately to make a difference with those messages.

For many years I painted and wrote (and cooked, and built things, and sewed) “as a hobby,” as other people put it, but the things I made were in fact messages that I needed to share—and more than what I think the word hobby deserves. And I was right.*

Well, except for the sewing, which remains strictly in the inept hobby category, trust me. But back to the writing.

When I first came out with The Southern Gothic Oracle on Kickstarter, it was only about a year later that a very prominent publisher of tarot decks approached me, and inquired whether they might acquire the deck. I was elated! I was flattered! I was dancing around the house!

….. until my partner sat me down and asked all the important questions, albeit gently. These were his questions.

• Why are you elated? (because of course I am! They want me!)

• Who is they? Why do they matter? (This is the mainstream, baby! This puts me in the canon!)

• Was it not enough that hundreds of souls bought the deck from you and wrote rave reviews of it? (I mean, yes of course, but what about millions?)

• Does quantity matter to you? (I mean I want to reach as many people…)
  Because it definitely matters to them, as they’ll be taking 95% of your profits. (Me: silence)

Ultimately, I turned away the publisher, and the next publisher after that. Yes, there were a few, and yes, I was flattered (at first). But finally after becoming a publisher myself, and signing on others, I can honestly state the two—and only two— reasons for signing with a publisher. And they’re both totally valid.

Two reasons for signing with a publisher

1. The reach they can offer you (see our two cards above: flow, and legacy). Note that the importance of this has to be greater for you than the monetary income you imagine you’ll earn.

2. Because you would prefer that this work not become your day job. There are huge reasons for this: Perhaps you have the right day job already, or you are very busy with personal obligations such as caregiving. For most artists, this is because they want to keep creating, and not be bogged down with marketing.

Two reasons for staying indie

1. The freedom of expression (again, see see our two cards above: flow, and legacy). Ain’t no editor going to tell you that you cain’t say ain’t. Do whatever you like, fly your freak flag, ain’t no corporate committee going to hold you back.

2. Because you do actually want this to be your day job. You love the idea of ditching that thing you do every day in service of someone else, and packaging and shipping your work—as well as hauling it to the post office—sounds awesome to you.

Am I biased toward the latter, because it’s the path I chose for myself? Not anymore, actually. I long to have more time to create new projects, and sometimes I get bogged down by the demands of emails and fulfillment and customer service.

I am going both ways now… agented for some things, and indie for others.

I’m doing both! I am so pleased to have been signed by Three Seas Literary Agency, who will be helping me reach publishers for my written work. More on these pursuits in another post.

And the best part? My agent, also named Stacey (always trust a Stacey) is supportive of my staying indie with some things, and going mainstream with others. That’s a real partnership and I am very pleased about this.

Weigh in, other creatives. What are your thoughts and notions about staying indie?

Also, speak as readers. Do you have biases toward (or against) independently published works? Why or why not?

Stacey

* Without darting off too far into what constitutes a “hobby” and why I hate that word, just suffice it to say I find that to be a fairly derisive word.

Over Christmas break I took part in an “Omen Days” activity organized by a group of Ozark pagans whom I met at an event back in November. I am new to the group, but they’ve been experimenting with New Year-focused divination for over a decade. As someone who is far more likely to read tarot/oracle cards for others than for myself, I went ahead and gave it a try. The idea is this: on each of the 12 days of Yule, you perform your preferred method of divination—let’s say tarot card readings, or dream interpretation—and each one corresponds to a month in the New Year.

Here’s how January played out.

I didn’t take a picture of the cards, I just scribbled the cards in my journal. And rather than make this a tedious “here’s what I drew and why I interpreted them in this way” tarot study, I’ll just cut right to it and tell you. My January message was about having a lot of creative choices in front of me, vying for my attention, and I’d need to tap into whatever stores of emotional regulation I could muster in order to prioritize them.

The omen I saw in December was a flock of grackles.

I didn’t actually believe that in December, but here we are.

The New Year began, and it was as if my Mac was a kind of magnetized vortex or tornado, because one after another, long-dormant projects just kept whooshing into my inbox. This is not to say that they all have merit, mind you, so I guess that’s where the emotional regulation and judgement are going to have to come in. But all of a sudden, I quite literally have six projects on my desk that require my attention, and none of those include the marketing, bookkeeping, and other administrative stuff that my business needs. That’s truly project one, if I’m honest, and the other six must get in line.

Did I mention I just wrote a small book?* So that is done. Never mind I already have a draft for another!

The struggle is in finding strength to follow through, and to do those hard bits, without spreading myself too thin. I do believe that I, and you, can literally do anything. We can, you know.

So why start a Substack now of all times? My Instagram page is stalled, because I truly struggle with posting there. The business one has cobwebs. Truly I do get a little rush of dopamine when a reel does well, but — ughhh, social media. You know how ‘tis.

I admire digital creators, I’m not knocking the medium. It is an art form all on its own—reels and images are themselves mini-productions, and require a huge amount of time and planning.

Unfortunately the voice in my head whispers, But why though?

A clamoring orchestra of marketing strangers shriek: Because it’s the only way! If you’re not appearing, you’re disappearing!

You know that cliché “this meeting could have been an email”? In my world, this essentially translates to “this reel could have been a painting.” The devil on my shoulder replies: Yeh but, ain’t nobody gonna know that painting exists ‘nless you talk about it on my gawd-damn internet.**

So I think I would like to take a bit of a rest from all of the image-making and write some. I’d like to activate that throat chakra and talk. My eyes get a little sore from looking at all these pictures, sometimes.

I have deleted my TikTok, and also Twitter looooong before it was X. I have abandoned more platforms than I care to remember. I have a YouTube but it is really, really sad. So if you’re here, thank you for stopping in, because this party will one day end just like they all eventually do. But I actually think this format suits me better. I miss reading; I think we all do.

Meanwhile I look for more omens and signs, to keep me in line on this winding path of creating.

Now if you’ll excuse me, that’s my timer. Enough energy spent talking, I gotta go paint.

Subscribe now

Footnotes

*The book is called HAUNTS: Fearsome Legends of the American South and it will come out as a small run of limited edition paperbacks. It’s not on Amazon but you can pre-order here.

**The devil has a pronounced Tennessee accent in my imagination.