Southern Gothic Dreams

When I was a small boy, I had a dream where I was lost in a dark wooded area with only the illumination of the full moon to help me navigate through the brush. I remember walking, and walking, and if I concentrate hard enough, I can actually smell the pine trees of Wilmington, North Carolina, and the musty smell of damp earth that pervaded my nostrils as I sought my way home. I remember seeing a cinder-block house coming into view as I walked, and under the cover of the trees, and surrounded by the sounds of night birds and a softly-blowing wind, I found myself drawn to this rectangular construct. It was covered with Spanish moss, and overhanging pine tree limbs.

There were open windows on this old monstrosity, made grey by screen windows that kept out flies and other insects, but the main thing that caught my attention as I looked at the opened windows was the strange blue light that emanated from inside. I couldn't tell if the light stemmed from a lamp, or a candle, or a television set, but there was no sound coming from inside the old-style house, nothing except the rhythmic creaking of what I perceived to be old, wooden rocking chairs.

I crept up to the house in the shadows, confident that I was hidden in the night, and I carefully peered inside. Seated in several old rockers were elderly women, plump in size, and sporting nightgowns that had apparently been worn for quite some time. Enshrouded in an ethereal blue light, they were staring out the screened-in windows in silence. Their faces were marked by deep lines that made them look like human prunes, and they seemed all-knowing, and eternal, and as I pondered what I was witnessing, it began to dawn on me that I knew who these white-haired, old women were.

They were my father's dead aunts. All of them. They were sheltered in this house in the deep woods, and I wasn't supposed to know of their existence, or how they'd escaped death, or why they held their silent vigil in the deep woods off Kerr Avenue, in Wilmington, NC, of all places.

I studied their faces, their hair, and reflected on how I'd seen images of them in my grandmother's old photo albums, and I pondered the stories I'd heard about them over the years. Three of the sisters inside, for example, had become fond of the family cow when they were children. Being the daughters of a farmer, they had to maintain this cow, and milk it, and attend to it when it was sick. They gave the cow a pet name and, one eventful night, wept bitter tears when a stray lightning bolt ended the life of their bovine pet. As they prepared the cow for burial the next day, they swore an oath over its lifeless carcass that they would never again eat beef - and so they didn't.

Suddenly, one of the ancient faces looked out into the void and saw my shadow hovering in the darkness; she stopped rocking, and leaned forward, and I dashed off into a nearby thicket, and I hid. Silence. My heart was pounding in my chest, and I felt my blood run cold as the sound of rustling leaves broke the quiet. Something was moving near me. Something old, and slow, and cautious. 

I spoke not one word as I waited for this overwhelming presence to pass me by, and I looked up into the starry sky, and focused my gaze upon the moon. My heart began to beat wildly as the creeping terror lurched its way in my direction, and my breath froze as I heard the sound of massive wings flapping upward into the clouds. A large figure blotted out the moon for an instance, but I couldn't make out what it was. And then I woke up.

It was around 3 in the morning, and images were flooding my mind. Recollections of past adventures from my childhood - of throwing eggs at a mean, old neighbor's home at the behest of mischievous older cousins, of responding to a dare and walking through a graveyard after midnight. Memories of being talked into toilet-papering houses on Halloween, and one strange thought kept coming back to me. I recalled a secret room behind the garage of my grandfather's next-door neighbor. A secret room that my cousin and I had accessed after daring each other to go investigate. We climbed in through a back window when we were sure no one was looking, and discovered a hidden room with cryptic paintings on the wall that confused and confounded us, because we couldn't make sense of what the primary image on the wall was - a bizarre looking creature with a reptilian head, and huge, outstretched wings. As much as I wanted to tell my dad about it, I couldn't bring myself to do it, because I was afraid I'd get into trouble for sneaking into his father's neighbor's garage.

Regardless, my father loved ghost stories. He loved to whisper to me tales of Joe Baldwin and the Maco Light, and how he and my mother used to drive up to Maco in the 50's, when he and she were courting. They claimed that the light would come closer to them if they tried to walk away from it, and would go away from them if they tried to approach it.

Daddy also liked to tell me stories about ghostly hitch-hikers, like the one where a boy on the way to his Senior prom spies a cute girl on the side of the road, dressed in a skirt for a school dance. The boy, of course, picked the girl up, and agreed to take her home and, on the way there, noticed that she was cold. He draped his Letterman's jacket over her shoulders, and drove on toward her home, Once there, he saw that she was no longer in the car with him. Unsettled, he rang the doorbell of the girl's home, and after inquiring about her, was told by her stunned mother that the girl had died in a car wreck many years prior, and in the same area where he'd picked her up. The same area where many others had picked her up as well. The boy asked where the girl's grave was, and when he trekked out to investigate it, of course his Letterman's jacket was draped around her headstone.

One of the more curious stories my father told me involved his Uncle Buddy, who died in a tragic car accident. Daddy claimed he saw Uncle Buddy on the side of the road at the very same time he'd been killed in another part of town, and Uncle Buddy had waved at him. When his mother told him of his Uncle's death, he simply couldn't wrap his brain around it, and neither could I. Just like I couldn't wrap my brain around the kid I kept seeing on every street corner I passed in Wilmington one summer. No matter where I looked, there the kid was, looking strangely familiar to me.

Agitated, I drove out to see one of my dad's elderly aunts, and after visiting with her for a while, I stepped outside her trailer to collect my thoughts, and when I turned around, I noticed a large "FOR SALE" sign in the window. I hadn't noticed it during the entire visit, when I'd been served Pepsi Cola and Potato Stix by Aunt Sister. When I peeked into the window, I almost fainted, because her trailer was empty. There was nothing in there. Not furniture, not anything, and - most notably - not Aunt Sister. Later, I found out she'd died some ten years prior, after I'd first moved away from Wilmington. I drove past the empty trailer a few days later, and could have sworn I saw her waving at me from the living room window.

I've seen some strange things over the years, and some have lingered in my mind, but the image on that wall, and the flapping of the massive wings in my dream of the dead have never left me. I've convinced myself that my dad only imagined seeing Uncle Buddy the day he died, and also that I must have dreamed up what happened with Aunt Sister. But that little kid on the side of the road still haunts me. Who was he, and why was I seeing him, and why do I feel like there's a connective tissue here somewhere?

MORE TO COME...