It may seem that I'm having a fit of morbidity this past week, what with train wreck songs, ghostlights, and ghost monks, but the following story does sort of tie all those themes together. This particular place also is the only one of all the "haunted" places I've read and written about that I have actually stood and looked at.

About thirty-five or forty miles up Highway 11, as the crow flies, from my hometown lies Cleveland, Tennessee, and in downtown Cleveland stands the gorgeous Gothic Revival St. Luke's Episcopal Church, designed and built by the architect Peter Williamson beginning in 1872.

Next to St. Luke's is the Craigmiles family mausoleum, built shortly after the church. My story is about the tragedy that struck the Craigmiles family and what has since happened at the mausoleum.

Church and mausoleum both were built with money donated by John Henderson Craigmiles, in memory of his little daughter, Nina. Nina was born on August 5, 1864, and died on October 18, 1871, when the buggy in which she and her grandfather, Dr. Gideon Blackburn Thompson, were riding was struck by a train. Dr. Thompson, thrown clear, survived, but Nina was crushed to death by the cowcatcher, that quaint contraption on the front of the train that protected the engine from damage should it hit a large animal on the tracks.

The church was consecrated on October 18, 1874, the third anniversary of Nina's death, and incidentally on the feast day of Saint Luke in the old tradition. The mausoleum was built almost immediately after the church was completed. It is made of imported Carrara marble--that lovely Italian rock favored by Renaissance sculptors--and is also Gothic in appearance, with a spire topped by a cross that towers nearly forty feet in the air. Inside are six sarcophagi, but only four are occupied: one by Nina, one by an unnamed infant son who was born and died the same day, one by John Craigmiles, who died in 1899 of blood poisoning, and the fourth by his wife, Adelia Thompson Craigmiles Cross. She remarried after John Craigmiles' death, but was entombed with her first husband and children when she died in 1928, after being struck by a car as she was crossing a street in downtown Cleveland.

The "haunting" appears in the marble of the mausoleum. Shortly after Nina's body was placed there, red streaks and splotches began to appear in the stone. Some say that the townspeople tried replacing the stones at first, or scrubbed the stains away, only to see them return. Although it is possible the stains are the result of climatic conditions or undetected flaws in the marble, the story has grown over the years that they are blood--dark reminders of the tragedies that wiped out an entire family.

Some years ago, on a trip to Cleveland, I conned my mom and aunt into letting me stop at Saint Luke's. I walked around the Craigmiles mausoleum; I saw the stains. And even though I am not the most psychic person in the world, I could feel the sorrow in that place.

I wish I could have located an actual picture of the mausoleum; no luck, but I think this one will do:



Till next time, fair thee well.

Sunny early but still a chilly damp in the air this morning. So I went looking for anyplace that's warm. This was the best image I found--an imaginary place, maybe like James A. Michener's Bali Ha'i from TALES OF THE SOUTH PACIFIC. When Rodgers and Hammerstein made this great episodic tale of WWII on far-off exotic islands into their hit musical, SOUTH PACIFIC, they gave the song about the island to the immortal character Bloody Mary, one of the great hustlers in all of literature and music.

This morning, with that chill of midwinter hanging around me, clouds moving in that may bring snow flurries or (more welcome) rain, Bloody Mary wouldn't have a hard sell. Just to sit on the beach and feel the warm wind on my skin and listen to the surf ease up onto the sand, lapping at my toes--

Sounds like paradise. And on that seductive note, fair thee well.

Welcome to the weekend, friends. Miss A may have mono. I have a sinus infection, my brain is moving like molasses and my ears are stopped up. But I want to contribute a little something in case there's a blog crawl tonight, so here goes: one of my favorite local ghost stories.

About thirty miles northeast of Chattanooga, on the Hiwassee River, sits the little town of Charleston. Nowadays it's famous mostly as the site of a giant Bowater plant. On days when the air hangs close to the ground like a wet blanket and the wind is just right, you can smell the sickly sweet scent of wood pulp being made into paper products all the way over in my county, some thirty miles farther east. If you drive by the plant itself, it burps great stinking clouds of white smoke. If there's fog on the river, smoke and fog can turn into a deadly soupy mess of low visibility and agonizingly slow traffic--if you're lucky; if not it can turn into a chain reaction wreck, as it did some years ago, when several people were killed.

There was no Bowater plant in Charleston in 1867, though. Then it was more or less just one of the small towns that sat on the East Tennessee and Georgia Railroad. In 1861, at the beginning of the Civil War, Union sympathizers burned the railroad bridge at Charleston to keep the Confederate army from using the tracks to move soldiers and materiel. The bridge was rebuilt after the war, and all was fairly quiet until 1867.

That year was a flood year. The rains came and did not stop. The waters of the Hiwassee rose and rose. Most dangerously, the flood undermined the roadbed under the railroad bridge. One train did not make it much beyond the bridge before sections of the roadbed gave way under the heavy train, and one by one the engine and cars tumbled down an embankment and into the swollen river.



The citizens of Charleston worked heroically to save as many people as they could. There were many dead, and many injured. A temporary morgue was set up in the depot so families could come and hopefully locate their dead, only to load them on another train for their sad last journey home.

Charleston had only one doctor in 1867. He nearly worked himself into his grave in the couple or three weeks after the wreck, and once the crisis was past, he was forced to spend some time at one of the spas, or "watering places" where the sick (or sometimes hypochondriacs) went to get well. No sooner had he left town, though, when a family arrived from Baltimore seeking their brother, a Catholic monk who had been on the train, on his way to New Orleans.

Survivors from the train remembered seeing and even talking with the young monk, but he had simply vanished in the aftermath. The family hung around Charleston for a few weeks, waiting for the doctor to return, hoping he might have treated their brother or at least seen him, but they had to return to Baltimore without knowing what happened to the young monk.

When the doctor came home, he was well and ready to go back to work, and he brought with him a new piece of office equipment, you might say: a fully articulated skeleton, something he'd always wanted. The skeleton remained in his office as long as he was in practice.

Some years later, when the doctor retired (taking the skeleton with him), a younger doctor bought his practice and set up his office in the same building the old doctor had used. From the earliest days of his tenancy in the building, the new doctor was plagued by sightings of a robed figure that always disappeared before he could turn to speak to it, and most annoyingly by a sound that reminded him of beads clicking against each other. It was not until a patient told him the story of the monk who vanished after the 1867 flood that the young doctor realized that he was hearing the click of rosary beads, and that the robed figure was the ghost of the monk--and surmised where the old doctor had gotten his skeleton.

In 1932, so the story goes, the doctor's office building was torn down. The workmen found, in a space between the interior and exterior walls, a brown robe and a rosary hanging from a nail.

For perhaps the best version of this spooky tale, see Kathryn Tucker Windham's 13 TENNESSEE GHOSTS AND JEFFREY (1977).



And on that watery note, fair thee well.

It's a cold--brutally cold--partly sunny day here in East Tennessee. I've done my housework for the day, Mom and the cat are napping, Willard's at a cousin's recuperating from oral surgery, Miss A has the flu, and I am bored with myself, bored with the process of reaching nominees for president, bored with blogging about politics (I do that at another site under an assumed name), and not feeling up to train songs.

But I've been listening to Charlie Daniels this morning, and two songs caught my attention: an eerie minor-keyed one called "Midnight Wind" about a woman's lover who "came in on a midnight wind" who "may never pass this way again" and his brilliant ghost story "The Legend of Woolly Swamp." One thing led to another, and I was reminded of how many stories they tell of ghost lights along railroad tracks.

The ghost lights stories always follow pretty much the same scenario: a trainman, most usually a brakeman but occasionally an engineer or conductor, dies in an accident, and shortly thereafter begins to haunt the tracks, carrying a single lantern.

Arguably the most famous of these is the Maco Station Light, once seen along the Atlanta Coast Line tracks that ran through a tiny town roughly fourteen miles west of Wilmington, North Carolina. The story goes that, on a foggy spring night in 1867, an ACL conductor named Joe Baldwin stepped out onto the caboose's platform only to discover the car had come uncoupled from the rest of the train. Joe's one thought was to signal the train following behind him that there was a car loose on the tracks, so he began waving a lantern to try to stop the oncoming freight. The train plowed through the caboose, crushing the car and decapitating Joe Baldwin. Although his body was found, his head never was. His lantern, which he waved until the crash, landed in a boggy area, upright, still burning.

Shortly thereafter, people in the area of Maco Station noticed a white light that seemed to come out of nowhere and move along the lefthand rail, until it reached the place where Joe Baldwin died. There it would swing in a frantic arc, then stop, hang suspended for awhile, then blink out. Most opined it was old Joe searching for his head.

Some versions of the story say that sightings of the light became so frequent and intrusive that ACL trains began using a second light, this one red, along Joe Baldwin's stretch of tracks. It's said that, during one of his terms as president, Grover Cleveland was traveling in North Carolina and spotted the two lights, one white, one red. He asked why there were two, and was told the story of Joe Baldwin.

There have been no official reports of the Maco Station ghost light since 1977, when the ACL discontinued the Wilmington-Florence-Augusta run and removed the tracks. Not all accounts agree; some say that Joe Baldwin still is out there looking for his head.

Another railroad ghost light was featured some years ago on the TV series UNSOLVED MYSTERIES. This light allegedly haunted the spot of a murder that took place around 1930 just outside Gurdon, Arkanas.

There are a number of books that tell Joe Baldwin's and other ghost stories of the rails, my favorite of which is Tony Reevy's GHOST TRAIN! AMERICAN RAILROAD GHOST LEGENDS (1998). Not only does Reevy tell any number of ghostly railroad tales, but the book features excellent cover and interior art by Mark Harlan Johnson and a number of photographs of historic trains.

(Should get in a plug for Tennessee's own railroad ghost light, which haunts an old L & N crossing at Chapel Hill, fifteen miles south of Murfreesboro in Middle Tennessee. Some say it's the signal lantern of a flagman decapitated nearby; others link it to a 1940 murder of a mother of two, whose body was found near the tracks.)

Ah. I feel less bored now. Hope I didn't bore you with my little tale. Till next time, fair thee well.

Today is January 24, just another ordinary day--but it's a little special to me, for totally egotistical reasons. It was a year ago today that I posted my first blog as Fairweather Lewis.

It's been a roller coaster year. Many times, when it felt as if I was fooling myself thinking I can actually write, when it felt like nobody was reading, when I was frantically searching for ideas and my head was empty, or when circumstances were such that I couldn't post (I only have had my own computer since November) I considered giving it up altogether. It's a near thing today, thanks to shifty weather and midwinter blues, but I keep trying because I can no more stop writing than I can stop breathing.

So I want to say thank you first to my devoted friend, Willard, who will not let me give in to my vapors and who helped me get my puter, who has contributed several blogs herself and helps me keep Madame Sadie in line.

To Mr. Knowlton, who commented on my second blog, "Out in the West Texas town of El Paso," and helped me believe it was okay to write about classic country music.

To Sylvia, an early and devoted reader, whose comments have always heartened me and brought me laughter, and who is our third charter member of the Ornery as Hellfire Club.

To Miss Bella, who found us just before Halloween 2007, put out the word that this is a good blog, and who loves the ghost stories as much as we do. Thanks to her, our readership picked up tremendously. I was hoping to have accumulated 1500 hits at the end of my first year; here we are nine hundred hits past that, and it's because of Bella's PR!

To Indian, whose comments and admiration keep me inspired and energized.

A big thank you to my mom, who like Willard will not let me give in to my hysteria and discouragement, and who loves anything I write, no matter how bad it may be.

And thank you to all you readers who read but haven't commented. Someday I hope to meet more of you, to find out what you like about this little blog.

Thanks, too, to Sherry, to Desari, to Cowboy, to Karen (have you watched Olbermann yet?), and to all the great country singers of the past and to all the people who have hung around after death and whose stories I love to read, collect, preserve and retell.

And of course to Miss A, my feisty niece, and to the inimitable Madame Sadie--the psychic whose predictions are off but whose capacity for fun is limitless.

Hugs and big kisses to all--and let's see what happens in the next year!