Out of the blue this afternoon, I found myself singing an old song that has become a folk song, despite the fact that we know its composer's name: "My Grandfather's Clock," written in 1876 by Henry Clay Work. Work is also known for composing "The Ship that Never Returned" which was, if I remember right, recorded by The Kingston Trio, and the rousing "Marching Through Georgia," a tribute to General W.T. Sherman's March to the Sea of 1864--and, though I shouldn't admit it, southern girl that I am, my alltime favorite march tune.



"My Grandfather's Clock" was based on a story from England that was told to Henry Clay Work in 1875. The story told of two brothers who jointly owned a "longcase" clock, one of those gorgeous old timepieces that stand six feet or more tall. The clock began to lose time when one brother died, and stopped completely when the second brother died at the age of ninety. In Work's song, the clock belonged to his grandfather, and is described as a member of the family, "bought on the morn of the day that he was born/And. . .always his treasure and pride/But it stopped short, never to go again when the old man died." Work includes one spooky element: in the third verse, when the old man lies dying, the clock "rang an alarm in the dead of the night/An alarm that for years had been dumb."

Stories of clocks being connected in some way to a death are not that uncommon, come to find out. Here are two of my favorites:

One is about a cuckoo clock owned by the actor John Barrymore, who died on May 29, 1942.



According to Dennis William Hauck in THE NATIONAL DIRECTORY OF HAUNTED PLACES (1994), the clock had not worked in years. A friend of Barrymore's decided to set the hands at 10:20, the exact time of Barrymore's death, as a tribute to the great actor's memory--only to find the clock's hands already set to 10:20--although they had been set at a different time for many years.

The other story was told by our Monroe County, Tennessee historian, the late Sarah Sands, in one of her volumes. The clock involved, yet another longcase, was owned by three sisters, older women who had never married and who shared a home across what was then the main channel of the Little Tennessee River (since obliterated by the Tellico Dam) in Blount County. The clock had been inoperable for many years. The sisters died within a three year time span, and each time one of them died, the broken clock chimed. After the death of the third sister, it never made another sound.



And on that timely note, fair thee well.

My mom grew up in a household headed by a fiddlefooted dreamer. Papaw was always positive that there was a better life waiting on the far side of yonder hill, and the end result was that the family moved thirteen times before Mom turned eighteen. Life was never better, of course, but Papaw never lost hope.

The longest they ever stayed in one place was five years, on a dairy farm behind what is now our local sports complex/duck pond/walking trails.

The house on the farm was, when they moved there (Mom was about nine then), over a century old. It consisted of a log portion, two large rooms, one over the other, and two smaller rooms and a front porch built on to the front. The walls were papered with newsprint, and the oldest layers dated back to the eighteen forties. The walls were pocked with bullet holes, and in certain parts of the house there were holes drilled out, exactly the size to stick a rifle barrel through. These, I figure, dated to the Civil War; we had a few skirmishes hereabout. The outbuildings were about what you'd expect on a dairy farm: the barn, a corncrib, a shed for equipment, and a box built over one of several artesian springs for cold storage; the house had electricity, but it was a few years before they got a refrigerator.

You would think that my gruff but gentle papaw, the fiddlefooted dreamer, would have been the one to be aware the house was haunted, but he wasn't. It was in fact Mamaw, highstrung but practical--who had as a young girl seen the ghost light in the cemetery--who realized it first.

Papaw and the kids got up early in the morning and did the milking; he would then go to the fields, the kids would go to school, and Mamaw would spend the day with her housework. She was almost obsessively clean, and one day a week she did laundry in a wringer washer on the front porch. Her clothesline was at the back of the house, just outside the back door.

They had not been there very long before Mamaw noticed that there were voices coming from INSIDE the house, behind her, when she was at the clothesline. One might dismiss them as the products of voices carried on the wind or as a result of other atmospheric conditions, except that they came from the upper story in the log portion of the house. That room was used only to store potatoes and canned goods that Mamaw put up from her garden. She didn't hear them regularly--not every time she was at the clothesline--and she was never able to distinguish whether they were male or female.

There were other peculiar phenomena that involved that upstairs room: the footsteps of a large man wearing heavy shoes, for one. Mom and her sister both heard those, on occasions when they happened to be the only ones in the house. My aunt insists to this day they were not footsteps, they were rats rolling the potatoes around; Mom just as adamantly says they were footsteps, and nothing like the sound of potatoes rolling. Bear in mind, Papaw was in those days a big man, six feet one and two hundred pounds of muscle and bone, and wore brogans, but he was never in the house when they heard the footsteps. My uncles were, respectively, a painfully skinny teenager and a small child--and in any case were never there when the footsteps strode across that upper floor.

There were also sounds of something being dragged across the floor of that upper room at different times, but not at the same time as the sounds of footsteps. Mom never heard the dragging sounds, but other members of the family did--and nobody had the nerve to investigate.

They stayed on the farm five years. After her marriage, Mom moved four times--the fourth to our current home, where we've lived for nearly forty years. This house is haunted too, but it doesn't bother either of us--and is a story for another blog anyway.



Sweet dreams, and until next time, fair thee well.