Vanleer Ghost

If I hadn’t been reading Nancy Drew that day, we probably wouldn’t have gone to the haunted house.

It was August and I was 11 and we were sitting on the long planked front porch at Uncle Walter and Aunt Carrie’s house, around the corner from the Charlotte courthouse square on the road to Vanleer. My father and Uncle Walter were in the porch swing, moving languidly back and forth. I was in a chair nearby, The Ghost of Blackwood Hall propped on my knees. My mother and Aunt Carrie were still inside, washing the breakfast dishes.

It was hot, of course. I wonder now why we always came to Tennessee in August. It seems we should have come in May, after school let out, so we could wait out the late-summer humidity at home in Oklahoma, where our boxy suburban house had all the modern conveniences, notably air conditioning. Instead, we spent the hot days on the porch, or visiting relatives, or driving past places from my father’s childhood — the small white Methodist church where his father had preached and where, as the family rebels, he and his cousin had spiked the church sacrament with moonshine. Or the Charlotte square, where my much-older cousin Bernadine owned the sort of grocery where old men sat around playing checkers.

Coming to Tennessee was time travel. I never knew how to explain that to kids back home, who bragged about their summer vacations to Disneyland or Six Flags or camping out West. My father, in his 60s, was the same age as other kids’ grandparents. His oldest brother, Uncle Walter — a big man who wore OshKosh overalls and liked to call me Little Cuss — was in his 80s. He and Aunt Carrie lived in a house with feather beds so soft you rolled into the middle when you slept. Their cook stove, probably new in the 1920s, sat up on spindly legs. They still had kerosene lamps, which they likely hadn’t used since Rural Electrification, but kept them just in case. My favorite item was a metal dipper they’d used to drink well water before they had the house plumbed. It still hung from a peg on the kitchen wall.

The Nancy Drew book had an old house, too. Blackwood Hall had rooms hidden behind secret doors and a translucent figure Nancy and her friends called a wraith, a new word to me — not the only one I would learn that summer. I had read it in the back seat all the way across Arkansas. Now, on the porch, I noticed my father eyeing the cover. “I think I’ll take Jane up and show her the haunted house,” he said.

Uncle Walter looked bemused. “What do you want to go up to that old house for?” he said. My father didn’t reply, but I think he wanted to show me a place where there was a real ghost, not one whose identity — a gang of crooks in the Blackwood Hall case — could be sleuthed out with a little moxie.

When my mother and Aunt Carrie came out, we piled into the car. It wasn’t far. My father knew the turnoff, though he had been a small child when Uncle Walter and Aunt Carrie lived there as newlyweds. The road led up a steep hill, overgrown with weeds and covered with rocks too big to call gravel. He steered slowly, keeping an eye out for the next pothole, as if daring the road to stop us.

Then it appeared at the top of the hill — tall, gaunt, austere. It was just a shell of a house really, the walls rough gray wood and the windows hollow, their glass long gone. It looked very much like I thought a haunted house should look.

In photos from that day, we wade through tall grass, trying to get closer. The rotted floors meant it wasn’t safe to go inside but we did peer in one window. Uncle Walter pointed out the big fireplace and what was left of a door at the base of the stairway—places they’d encountered the ghost all those decades ago. We looked up behind the house, toward some trees. I remember how quiet it was, as if there hadn’t been human voices there for a very long time.

That afternoon, back on their porch, we heard more details. They’d been young, looking for a cheap place to live. The old house — it was old even then — was for rent. But soon things happened. A chair near the fireplace would rock by itself — nobody in it, nobody near. Or they’d hear what sounded like a rock tumble down the stairway and hit the door at the end. They’d open the door but find nothing.

None of this was explained as if it were a story. It wasn’t meant to entertain, the way you might stay up late telling ghost stories on Halloween night. It was told as fact — an extraordinary thing that had happened to them long ago. Uncle Walter did most of the talking while Aunt Carrie looked straight ahead, her face somber. My mother told me years later she might not have believed it except for Carrie’s expression. “She thought you shouldn’t talk about these things,” she said.

There was more. Food began to disappear from their kitchen cabinet. They’d wake to find the cabinet open, everything inside gone. Uncle Walter put a padlock on it, but that made no difference. He tried different locks — he liked to tinker with things — but the next morning it would be open again, empty.

Then one morning, when spring had come and the weather was warm, they’d taken their rugs out back to hang them up and beat the dirt out. They had no vacuum cleaner, nothing like my mother’s big Electrolux that roared as she pulled it around our house. They were standing, Uncle Walter said, by the ash hopper. That’s a detail I’ve remembered, a souvenir of that day. I suppose ash hopper caught my attention because I didn’t know what it was — a hollowed-out log where you dumped ashes to use later for making soap, its alchemical potential connecting me to the ordinariness of their long-ago lives. Plus, I liked its sound. It seemed more interesting than wraith in Nancy Drew.

As they beat the rugs, they became aware of a woman standing nearby. They both saw her. Uncle Walter said she wore a dust cap, and Aunt Carrie spoke up to say they thought she was “Old Aunt” somebody — a name I don’t remember. They started to invite her in, but when they turned away and turned back, she was gone. They looked all around outside the house and through the nearby woods, but there was no trace of her.

It was too much. They moved, first to Dickson and then to the house where I knew them, with its feather beds and kerosene lamps — the house where they would live the rest of their lives.

That might have been the end of it, had a couple not had a flat tire on the road in front of their house. Uncle Walter helped the man change the flat while Aunt Carrie invited the woman inside.

“Where are you headed?” Aunt Carrie asked her. The woman said they were on their way to help her mother move.

Another question or two revealed that the woman’s mother lived in the house on the hill. “Why does she want to move?” Aunt Carrie  asked. “It seems like a nice house. It must be cool up there in the woods.”

The woman said yes, that was true, but the house was haunted. She described the same experiences — the chair rocking, the sound of a rock rolling downstairs. Only then did Aunt Carrie tell her she knew—that they’d once lived there as well.

In all the years since I first heard this, I have not thought of it as anything but true, though some of what happened might be explained away. A draft could have rocked the chairs. Perhaps animals moving beneath the house could create the sound of the rolling rock, though it seems unlikely they would make the same sound repeatedly.

The empty cabinet is, in a way, the most intriguing detail. It suggests a literal “hungry ghost,” driven by insatiable desire for actual food, which it took. It makes me wonder now if the hillside were “haunted” by a living woman who had escaped demons in her home life. If she could scare off tenants, she had a free place to live. On the other hand, tenants brought food, so it might make sense to keep them around.

I have no explanation for the woman by the ash hopper, though maybe that isn’t the point. It’s tempting to fit ghosts into a “ghost story,” to make them into manageable parts of the world we understand. Such tidying up robs us of a connection to mystery. Neither my aunt and uncle nor my father tried to explain away the ghost. I heard no speculation about who she might have been. A ghost was a ghost. That simple.

Still, it’s natural to want to tell about these things, which is, after all, what I’m doing now. That year, I tried to write a story about it on the way back to Oklahoma. In my version, The Ghost on Blackwood Hill — two letters changed from the Nancy Drew title — friends named Sue and Lillian were driving around Vanleer in their red convertible when the ghost ran down the hill toward their car. My father suggested the name Lillian — another sort of ghost from his own life, but it was a long time before I knew that. I wasn’t finished when we got back home. Somehow it all dissolved in our air-conditioned house with its modern stove and television set and fluorescent-lighted supermarket around the corner.

At school that fall, I tried to tell about visiting the haunted house when we shared stories of our summer vacations. Another kid said he’d seen a haunted house at an amusement park. It had scary lights and spooky sounds — the best haunted house he’d ever seen. Was mine as good as that, he wanted to know.

If I said anything, I don’t remember.

 

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