The Tell Tale Haint

Inspired by Jezebel’s annual ghost story contest.

It was the early aughts, during a 15-month dry spell I spent in between real jobs, when I inadvertently woke the ghosts of Columbia while writing a book about her historic houses.

My five-year stint in Columbia was shaping up to be a deceleration point for me, a necessary respite from a life in the fast lane after surviving years of child rearing followed by rampant debauchery on the Outer Banks.

The book I was writing would be my second about historic architecture. The first took a year to compile and this one was supposed to follow a similar timeline. But that year stretched into five. Combined, the town became my Macando—a surreal, familial experience, one riddled by history and genealogy—and my time there, not unlike Garcia Marquez’ 100 years of solitude.

Columbia sits on the Scuppernong River in northeastern North Carolina. The house I rented was one of only nine that lined Water Street, facing the river. Built by Jesse Lockhart, it was famously occupied by its notorious second owner, retired sea captain, turned Scuppernong River ferryman, Captain Bob Knight, his wife and their six children. It had been renovated a number of times over its 110-year history. The main block was designed like a two-story farmhouse assembled from intersecting gables.

At the far end of the short hallway, a single story breezeway linked the house to the detached kitchen. Over time, like other homes of the same vintage, the breezeway was enclosed and the detached kitchen became the laundry room.

Behind Capt. Bob’s house was a sizeable back yard that he gardened with pride. When I lived there, my crops sunk into the dank, wet soil seemingly swallowed up one night. That or Mother Nature’s children had their way with my squash and tomato plants, one.

The yard was hedged. At the fringe where night light beams faded into darkness was a short cut the local menfolk would use of an evening during which they stopped by for a whiskey or two. One gentleman caller used that route to knock on my door, offering his personal brand of Columbian cocktail: Bacardi rum and 7-Up.

Occasionally, I would use the short cut when taking my dog Cody for his nightly constitutional. Cody was a black and white paint—part lab, part pit bull—I inherited when my daughter went to art school. He and I slept in the front bedroom. It had a bow window overlooking the river. The sun set over that river bathing the room in a pink tinged afterglow. And so did the moon when it was full, shine its light on Cody curled into a circle at the foot of my bed like something you might see in a Wyeth painting. One night he growled in his sleep. About a month later he stood up and barked. One weekend in February my daughter arrived during a three-day school break. Next morning over coffee she said, “What was that pounding last night?”

Until that moment, I hadn’t realized that I had heard the noise myself, and so apparently had Cody.

“It sounded like someone knocking on the wall,” she said.

One month to the day later, Cody and I awoke to a rhythmic pounding on the kitchen wall.

One.

Two.

Three.

Four.

Five.

Then nothing.

I was paralyzed in my bed, but the next day I began to wonder where the sound might be coming from. My best guess was the bank of cabinets that lined the length of the kitchen. I mentally peeled back the layers of the home’s infrastructure and reckoned there might have been a back door there at one time. A back door into the breezeway. What I could not explain but seemed to innately understand was the knocking was a cry for help, though I didn’t know from whom.

In the process of writing the book, I learned that one of Capt. Bob’s sons, his third eldest, had left home as a young man and never returned. The last known glimpse of him had been boarding a ship in New Orleans. As the story goes, he sent his mother holiday cards at Christmas, Easter and Mother’s Day. Though he never signed them.

Was he knocking? I started to ask for him to show himself to me.

Using an old wooden door stretched over two stools and posed at the far end of the kitchen looking through the old breezeway and into the short hallway, the glazed front door framed a view of the triple trunk bald cypress tree that anchored the front lawn and Capt. Bob’s old ferry landing on the river.

One morning, William reluctantly appeared along this sightline as a young child dressed in white wool shorts, a middy shirt and a loose navy blue tie. As if to say: “OK? Now leave me alone.” Then vanished.

Moving forward, I suspected the monthly pounding was not his.

It persisted. Always between 2 and 3 a.m.

One.

Two.

Three.

Four.

Five.

Then silence.

I started thinking and saying aloud: “I promise I’ll find out who you are and what happened to you.” Probably a mistake on my part, but I was very curious. In the spirit world this line of thought is akin to saying: “Hey! Y’all come on in!”

Not long after, walking Cody on a foggy evening along one of the town’s back streets, I saw the sinister apparition of an exceedingly tall man wearing a black cape and a stovepipe top hat. Under grainy half-light cast from a street lamp, he crossed about a block ahead of us. Leaning forward from his lower back, two or three long strides in, he disappeared into the fabric of the night.

“Better keep your dog inside,” a townsperson warned me one day. “Somebody spotted a bear up a tree down the end of your street.” The bear in question was rumored to be a black bear weighing anywhere from 350 to 500 pounds.

My neighbor’s grandson, Buck Woodard, told me if I encountered the bear while walking Cody at night, I should just let my dog off the leash and let him go. That the bear, if it was a mama bear protecting a cub, would go for Cody, and that I would more or less have to offer him as a sacrifice to save my own life.

Not long after the bear rumor, Cody and I started our nightly stroll. I opened the sliding glass doors at the rear of the house and we set off down the driveway toward the river, turned left onto the sidewalk and passed Van’s house, then Ron and Willa’s and finally Karen and Craig’s on the corner. We walked down Bridge Street for several blocks, then turned on North Broad and came up Martha to Elm.

As we passed beneath the motion detector light in front of the Kiwanis Club building, I thought about the short cut. There was enough light from the clubhouse for me to see the edge of the hedge. As we were making our way toward the hedge hole, a large black mass appeared from the opposite corner near Hazel Davenport’s yard. At first I thought it was a large dog.

No leash. No collar that I could see in the half light.

Aloud I said: “Whose dog are you?”

Then I remembered the bear. I froze. Cody stopped in his tracks.

Noiselessly, the black mass drifted closer. My eyes strained through the darkness to see inky black, wavy fur, it was about four feet high, maybe two feet wide. 

Closer and closer it came.

When it was about a yard away, I realized it was more like smoke. I could see through it. It. Had. No. Face.

It was not a bear or a dog.

My heart pounding through my rib cage, I wheeled Cody around and we took the sidewalk back to the house, never looking back. Inside, I could scarcely breathe.

Buck showed up a couple of days later.

I told him the story of the big black thing with no face.

“That sounds like great grandmaw,” Buck said. “She hung herself in the shed next door.”

My heart sank. The very idea that a woman would take her life in that gruesome way not caring who might find her or when.

I would later learn more details from Dick Knight, the youngest of Capt. Bob’s sons, who knocked on my front door one day and relayed the story as it had been told to him.

Emma Davenport hung herself during the daytime. “Right over there,” Dick said standing in the old breezeway and pointing toward Hazel’s house. “Tried to drown herself in the river once, but her grandson Hugh saved her. She was deeply depressed and withdrawn since her daughter drowned in Hawaii.”

It is commonly believed that Emma’s son-in-law killed her daughter because he was having an affair with another woman. After that, Dick said, Emma wouldn’t have anything to do with anyone who lived on Water Street.

Except for me.

The nighttime pounding stopped as suddenly as it began but it by no means stopped the loose spirits from showing themselves to me whenever they think I just might be the one they’re looking for.