The Cold, Cold Hand: More Stories of Ghosts and Haunts from the
Appalachian Foothills
by James V. Burchill, Linda J. Crider, and Peggy Kendrick
Copyright © 1997 James V. Burchill, Linda J. Crider, and Peggy KendrickCEMETERY
VISIONS
TONAY JONES KNOWS OF THE HAUNTING tales of rumbling about the Appalachian foothills,
for she has heard them all her life, both from older generations and the present one. Her
husband, Mitchell, also knows of the unexplained mysteries that take place in the hills
and hollows for her has experienced their strangeness on occasion.
"It happened to Mitchell," said Tonya, her eyes wide with the telling. Her
long, curly brown hair caught the sun’s rays as she turned her head from the legal
papers in front of her. "I know it’s true."
She gazed across the room as if maybe the story was best left untold, best left in the
cemetery and the tidal pools of silent memory.
It was in the summertime, and Mitchell and some of his friends were out on the east
side of the county. They were just riding around, enjoying the day. He said it was sunny
and warm, not a cloud in the sky, when they rode by the old Tickanetly church cemetery.
It’s way out in the country, and there would generally be nobody there. But this
day there was. Mitchell said there was a woman in a long red dress and a child wearing
blue. The dresses were from another era. And they stood as if grieving beside a
weatherworn gravestone.
Mitchell stopped the car, and he and his friends watched as a cloudlike shadow formed
and rose up behind the two. It grew until it consumed the woman and child, then all was
gone. Everything just vanished, as if it had never been there at all.
The men, being brave, young, or foolish, ventured over to the place where the
apparition had appeared, but they found nothing, not even footprints in the duty red-clay
soil surrounding the grave. But each knew he had indeed seen something there and began
searching among the gravestones.
Mitchell said the stones marking the graves where the two had stood were old and
timeworn, but the names were still legible. A woman and her child, both of whom had died
in the late 1800s, lay beneath the earth of the old cemetery, and someone still grieved.
Mitchell was disturbed by what he had seen and told the story to a friend, who went to
the county library and searched the records to find the story among the archives.
A woman and child bearing the same names as those on the gravestones had been savagely
murdered by the woman’s husband. It was also recorded that the husband was a brutal
man who had always abused his family.
The account in the archives was so detailed that even the burial clothes of the
murdered mother and child were described. The woman wore a long red dress and the child
was dressed in blue. |
