We had our first real cold snap where I live this weekend. The changing and falling of the leaves will receive a boost. Certainly it's truly starting to feel like fall, and early fall always reminds me of Halloween. My ex-wife's second favorite holiday (right behind Christmas) was Halloween. She always made much of it. In fact, as the day - or rather the evening - hastens toward us, I thought about her this weekend.
She and I were high school sweethearts. How well I recall those long, long phone calls when I was sixteen and she was a year younger. She was something of Goth, loved to wear black, loved horror, (as I said loved Halloween, a celebration of the day when the veil between the living and the dead was thought of as being at its thinnest), and oddly enough her stepfather worked at a local monument company and his main job was placing monuments and stones on graves. She had a whole bag full of weird and eerie tales he had shared with her.
I remember seeing her stepfather being interviewed on the news one evening. He and a coworker had arrived at one of our many rural and not-so-frequently-visited cemeteries for the purpose of placing a gravestone. However, they soon came upon two male corpses lying on the ground. One of them, he told me later when I spoke to him about it, was lying in a position indicative that he was running when he fell dead. My sweetheart's stepfather went down the road to a payphone to call the police.
He: "Hey, I came to the so-and-so cemetery and I've found some dead people."
Police: "Yeah, sure. Now quit playing with the phone."
He: "No, really, And these people aren't supposed to be dead."
Evidently he had a bit of a problem convincing them he was serious, but finally he got them to come investigate. Her stepfather stayed during the preliminary investigation and spoke to a news crew who had heard the call on the police radio. It seems that was a drug deal that turned bad. The two victims had been shot, one as he was attempting to flee. The police found several hundreds of dollars hidden in the belt of one of the dead.
"Now if I had known that was there..." Her stepfather told me.
She told me another story that I found interesting when I was teenager. Horror buff that I've always been, of course I have the morbid curiosity that goes with it. And it so happens that one time in the course of his work her stepfather had the opportunity to take part in an exhumation for the purpose of relocating the grave to another cemetery. A young lady had been deceased for twenty or so years and she was being dug up. My sweetheart's stepfather was talking the deceased's father who was attending the exhumation. The casket was taken to a maintenance shed where the funeral director and the workers changed coffins for the body for the trip to the new grave. Her stepfather recalled that the lady's father observed that apart from a sinking of the forehead, she looked just as she had the day she was buried some twenty years before. I found that interesting, I confess, having wondered about the rate of decay down there in the grave. Her stepfather added that the stench of rot was so intense that he and the workers burned their clothes afterwards.
But perhaps my favorite story that she used to relate to me - and we spoke about it often during late night/early morning phone calls when it was dark and cold - concerned some devil worshippers her stepfather had encountered on Lookout Mountain. This was occurring, he said, at a location known to locals as Arrow Rock. (The Native American influence is strong in these parts.)
This was at a time in my life when even though I had began to investigate problems I had with my childhood religious beliefs, I still attended church and certainly believed in both a personal God and Devil. It got no more horrifying to me than thinking of people devoting themselves to evil. And, mind you, this was a few years before the Satanism panic of the 80s.
When I got older I tried to investigate the devil-worship stories. I never found Arrow Rock. It must have been an informal name. There was no newspaper accounts that I have yet been able to discover. The only source I could find was my sweetheart's stepfather, now deceased. But he always seemed trustworthy in his tales. No matter, I suppose. These stories provided my young adulthood with a touch of creepiness that I've not forgotten.
Halloween was off-limits to my brothers and me when we were young. It was religious thing. Our Pentecostal faith with its active demonism ruled out such things. It was only after my parents' divorce and we left Pentecostalism that my mom eased up on this and we were able to take part in the fun. I remember being a skeleton the first time I went trick-or-treating.
Now I get accused of being a Goth because of my habit of dressing in black, my interest in thanatology. all things dark and creepy, and, of course, Halloween. Sometimes I think my ex-wife is the only one who ever really understood me.
No comments:
Post a Comment