My beautiful and talented niece, Miss A the Ornery, is nineteen today. May you have a happy happy day, sweetheart!!
PS Miss A has begun a new blog on the 'Stream, called Can You Hear the Rain Weep. She has already posted some amazing pictures and words. Check it out!
Saturday Ghost Story: The Death Lights of Crusheen
In Irish legend, the most common death omen is the Ban-sidhe--the banshee, that woman whose dreadful weeping chills the hearts of all who hear her. The little County Clare village of Crusheen, though, has a death omen all its own: a pair of tall, ghostly lights that hover about six feet off the ground. They rise in the old graveyard, on an island in the middle of nearby Lough Inse Chronain (Lake Inchicronan), and, crossing the water, move through the village, stopping to hover over any house where a death, expected or otherwise, is about to occur. The lights have appeared for centuries. This is the story behind them:The island of the graveyard was once the site of Inchicronan Abbey. Linked to the mainland by a causeway that is only passable in spring and summer, the island can be a trap in winter's snow. Still, the monks there made every effort, no matter what the weather, to get to the village of Crusheen, which had no priest of its own, to hear the confessions and perform the last rites for the dying--save once.Centuries ago, a woman lay dying in the village at the height of a winter storm. Her son struggled through the wind and snow to reach the island and beg one of the monks to come give his mother the last rites. He reached the island safely, but, to his dismay, the monk refused to come with him, saying there would be time to make the return trip in the morning, when the storm moved on.He was wrong, for the woman died in the night, her sins unconfessed and unabsolved. She was buried in the old graveyard with her ancestors, however.The monk lived on for many years, and was, in his turn, buried in the section of the churchyard reserved for the monks of Inchicronan. But his spirit, so the story goes, bears a burden of sin for that one thoughtless act: failing to attend the spiritual needs of a dying woman, so long ago.And so it is that, when someone in the village is about to die, two flames rise in the churchyard: one from the grave of the woman who died unshriven from a monk's selfishness, the other from the grave of the selfish monk. They move together, then side by side, across the old causeway and through the village, whenever a death is imminent. They rise to rooftop level, where they hover for several minutes, then slowly drift back down to the lake and across to the graveyard, where they disappear.There are many stories of the appearances of the lights: the most famous involves the death of an elderly hermit named Joe Cavan, who lived all but forgotten in a hut near the eastern bank of the lake. One night, the lights passed through the village but did not stop; instead they came to rest over an apparently empty spot east of the village. Only then did the villagers recall Joe Cavan, and when they checked, they found him dead on the floor of his hut.Outsiders, so the legend goes, need not fear the lights; they only show up to warn of deaths in families whose ancestors lie in the graveyard by the ruins of Inchicronan Abbey. Still, they're a fearsome sight to behold--and all brought about by an old, old lack of charity.A fuller account of the Lights of Crusheen can be found in Robert Jackson's book GREAT MYSTERIES: GHOSTS (1992).And until next time, fair thee well.
Friend and fellow music lover Jamie reminds me that on September 6, 1901, President William McKinley was shot at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, by the anarchist Leon Czolgosz. Although McKinley survived the initial attack, he could not survive the surprisingly inadequate medical care he received; after an period of some days when he seemed to be recuperating, the wound turned gangrenous, and he died on September 14. He was succeeded in office by Theodore Roosevelt.
In the old days, such momentous events would often be commemorated in song within a short period of their occurrence, and the McKinley assassination was no exception. Although its original composer, let alone the date of composition, remain unknown, "White House Blues" was in the vernacular as early as 1923, and quite possibly earlier. The term "blues" suggests it may have originated in with black singers in the South, and was picked up by white singers. It was collected separately by Bascom Lamar Lunsford and Alan Lomax in several variants.
Charlie Poole (1892-1931) formed the North Carolina Ramblers, an oldtime string band, with his brother-in-law in 1917. Like many a musician before and since, they were unable to support families simply by playing music; Poole worked in a textile mill in his native North Carolina until, in 1925, his little band recorded "Don’t Let Your Deal Go Down Blues"—which is said to have sold 102,000 copies at a time when there were only 600,000 phonographs in the entire country! They were paid seventy-five dollars for that initial recording but royalties from it and subsequent recordings and performances enabled Poole and the band to leave the textile mills and play music full time.
Poole was a hard-living man. With the coming of the Great Depression in 1929, his record sales fell off (unlike those of, say, Jimmie Rodgers and the Original Carter Family) and he fell into a depression of his own. He died of heart failure following a three month drinking binge in 1931, aged thirty-nine.
"White House Blues", though, remains a standard among bluegrass musicians in particular, having been recorded by Flatt and Scruggs, Bill Monroe, and many others. Many of the recordings are quite obviously influenced by Charlie Poole and the North Carolina Ramblers.
Way back in 1966, the late great Marty Robbins, on a LP called THE DRIFTER, recorded a gunfighter ballad called "Mister Shorty." It tells the tale of a bartender who befriends a small man (who stands "about five foot three") one night, only to witness the justice the little guy deals out to a bully who makes fun of his short stature. I had never heard the song until a few months ago, one day when I was listening to Willie’s Place on satellite. When I heard it, it reminded me of a ghost story from Arkansas that I first ran across in Michael Norman and Beth Scott’s 2002 collection HAUNTED HERITAGE.
In the area of Big Flat, Arkansas, where the Buffalo River and North Sylamore Creek run together, they say, there’s a valley the natives call Skeleton Hollow. (Although I suspect that our Arkansas cousins, like us Tennessee hillbillies, actually say "Skeleton Holler.") The holler got that name in the 1880s. Here’s how.
In October one year, a very small man, barely five feet tall, showed up in Big Flat. He gave his name as John Smith—which, even then, was recognized as a likely pseudonym—and told the people in town that he was a spectacle salesman, there to fit and sell eyeglasses. The townspeople, needless to say, were suspicious, particularly when they saw the double-barreled gun he cradled in one arm. Still, they directed him to shelter—in a barn behind the local store—and for awhile he worked from that barn. He would leave early each morning with his spectacle case and that huge gun. The gun was, to put it bluntly, strange, for it had mismatched barrels; one made to fire a ten-gauge shotgun shell, the other a .44 caliber. It was sizeable, too, a funny sight in the hands of the wee man.
Smith never seemed to make a sale, and one day he returned to town without the satchel in which he had allegedly carried eyeglass frames and lenses. After the satchel disappeared, he gave up even the pretense of being a saleman, although he still wandered around the hills a lot. He said he was hunting. The townsfolk thought otherwise, but held their peace. Smith was not fond of answering questions.
In the spring of the following year, Smith asked for, and received, permission to settle on a patch of land, way back in a limestone holler, owned by a local farmer named Ephraim Jones, in return for sharing a small crop. Jones gave him seeds for a garden, some laying hens, and a few pieces of farm equipment. Thereafter, Smith was not seen in town until late in the fall, when he came in and traded fresh produce for coffee, sugar and ammunition, and then returned to his little farm. This became a pattern; he’d come into town every other month for the next two years, but otherwise kept to himself.
In the waning days of winter in the second year, trouble showed up in the form of two big ugly galoots who wore pearl-handled revolvers on their belts and announced to anyone who would listen that they were bounty hunters. They tried to bully the townspeople into giving up any strangers who had come into the area. There hadn’t been any since John Smith had arrived two years earlier; but no one mentioned him to the pair. They didn’t trust them.
The two rode out of town, and were never seen again.
For that matter, neither was John Smith.
It was summer before anyone realized that the little man hadn’t been into town since the previous fall. Ephraim Jones went to check on his tenant, and found the garden overgrown, the chickens gone wild, the shanty Smith had built for shelter collapsing, and Smith gone—in a hurry, by the look of things, for the table was set for a meal and a pot of beans, long gone to mold, hung over the stone-cold hearth.
Jones was about to leave when he saw buzzards circling over a nearby area. He checked it out the following day, and found two skeletons, lying at the foot of a limestone bluff at the far end of the valley. Neither of them was Smith. Both men had been over six feet tall—in fact, just about the size of the two "bounty hunters" who had shown up early in the year. Close examination showed they had died of gunshot wounds, right between the eyes—wounds made by a .44 or .45 caliber weapon.
The townspeople believed that the two had been hunting for none other than the little man, John Smith, and that somehow Smith had disarmed them of their fancy revolvers, lined them up side by side, and executed them both with grisly precision.
The two were laid in nameless graves.
John Smith never returned to the area, nor were any remains identifiable as his ever found.
Skeleton Holler was left pretty much deserted after the discovery of the two bodies that gave it its name. Smith’s little farm vanished in the undergrowth. Nobody ever went there except, perhaps, for a few intrepid types bitten with the love of the back country. Those few reported that, on some late spring evenings, should you happen up on that place at the foot of a particular limestone bluff, you’ll see the ghost of a small man in raggedy clothes, laughing soundlessly as he presses the barrels of an odd gun to the forehead of a kneeling, trembling, sweating, much bigger man. Another big man is already lying dead, off to one side. The little man fires—soundlessly—and the big man falls—soundlessly. And the three figures vanish—
