High Strangeness: Rambler's Skeleton (1913)

[Detail from "Danjuro V as a skeleton and Iwai Hanshiro IV as Princess Sakura in the Play 'Flower of Edo: an Ichikawa Saga,'" by Katsukawa Shunsho, 1783]

Just in time for All Hallows' Eve, and thanks to Rabbit, a spooky tale from our friend the Rambler [sic throughout]:

This story is used as an illustration of one on a most respected citizen of Pittsboro. This gentleman has a summer house not far from town and occasionally stays there at night. A few nights ago he became very interested in a story he was reading. He had pulled off his shoes and was enjoying himself hugely, when, without warning, came a voice from somewhere, saying: "Sam Jones! Are you going to die here or in Pittsboro?" Sam Jones looked up expecting to see someone but he did not. Again that same voice was heard, asking the same question. This time he saw the skeleton of a man standing at the window, the mouth at work, and the arms swinging to and fro. Who would have stayed around such a place? Not I. Neither did Sam Jones. When he reached town he was nearly out of breath, and a pale, deathly look was on his face. He had run the whole distance, a mile or more, in about three minutes.

Was there a Sam Jones, or someone to whom this pseudonym was applied? Was he the victim of a practical joke? It's not beyond the realm of possibility that ol' Rambler was somehow involved, high on "Life's Elixir." Pittsboro, after all, has always been a place that requires us to make our own fun. Tweaking one of Chatham's "elites" still has its pleasures. The piece from which this passage was extracted, dated 1 October 1913, contains other, more colloquial, ghost stories. This one is so unusual that it suggests either a real paranormal occurrence or, more likely, a rascally Rambler at work.

Attention: will the owner of the skeleton or a descendant of "Sam Jones" please contact the blog. Thank you. Oh, and please give generously this Halloween. One of those little skeletons at your door might be real.

High Strangeness: Watch the Skies!

[UFO image from crowdedskies.com.]

More Blood Fall goodness on the way, I assure you. But let's contemplate what else exists in Chatham's skies. I'm delighted to let reader Martha share her story with you, as it was emailed to me:

My sister and I were driving back from Chapel Hill late at night after seeing a movie I think. I want to say it was Good Morning Vietnam. It wasn't horribly late, but late enough, and in those days far fewer people lived out Jones Ferry Rd. in Chatham County so there was very little traffic. Just after we crossed over University Lake and were heading out of town, we noticed a very bright white light in the distance hovering at tree level. We talked about what it could be and speculated about it being the new WUNC TV tower that had gone up across from Story Book Farm. At the time, the large white tower was rather new and it was an eyesore because it blinked so brightly. However, the bright light on this evening was not blinking. As we drove, the light stayed stationary in the distance. We passed Story Book Farm and the blinking tower and the bright light was still ahead of us. Of course, now we were really wondering what was up. A helicopter with a search light on it. maybe? That was the best we could come up with, but given that is didn't move at all it seemed somewhat unlikely. When we came to Frosty's we pulled into the empty parking. The store was closed for the night. We stopped the car and turned the car off. The object with the bright white light shining down was right above the intersection of Crawford Dairy Rd. and Jones Fairy Rd. We rolled down the windows and it was completely silent. So silent you could hear the crickets and cicadas making their summer racket. Definitely not a helicopter. As we both sat there and looked at this thing (I recall it as being rather triangular-shaped like something from Star Wars, but my sister recalls it being saucer shaped), I'm not even sure we said anything to each other. We just stared. And then quickly, the light went off, the engines of the ship powered up (but weren't horribly loud when they did), and it took off really fast into the sky. It all lasted probably less than a minute or so.

So that's it. Never seen a UFO since. And have never figured out why one would be hanging out where this one was. Talk about boring. Maybe it was looking for the Big Hole over off of 54 and was checking the map.

She added this, in response to my queries:

The engines I guess sounded like jet engines gearing up, but not nearly as loud or deafening as that. And it took off very fast. The "ship" itself was not that large. Larger than a trash can though. Maybe the size of a reasonably sized room in a house. 50 X 50 ft? 30 X 30? Not small, but not huge by any means.

What are we to make of this? I don't know. The trash can reference is to a story I related to Martha, in which some friends of mine were chased by a trash-can shaped object as they drove their van to the beach. The object rose up from under an overpass and pursued them at speed for some miles before disengaging.

High Strangeness: Blood Fall (1884)

[Photograph of Francis P. Venable from the UNC Virtual Museum of University History.]

On a clear day in 1884, it rained blood on a farm in Chatham County.

"Pooh!" scoffs the Gentle Reader. "Nothing weird ever happens around here, except the '70s." Ah, but I can prove it.

The event had an eyewitness. There were other, more gentrified witnesses of the immediate aftermath. And none other than UNC chemist Francis Preston Venable (pictured) published an article, "'Fall of Blood' in Chatham County" in the Journal of the Elisha Mitchell Scientific Society.

The March 6, 1884 issue of The Chatham Record took a dubious tone in its article "A Shower of Blood:"

We do not ask our readers to believe the following wonderful statement, but merely publish it as it is told us. The wife of Kit Lasater, a negro who lives on the farm of Mr. Silas Beckwith in New Hope township, states that, about 2 o'clock on Monday the 25th of February, while she was at the bars near her cabin a shower of blood fell around her from a sun-bright sky!

We are pleased to note that The Record elected not to include any gratuitous details of "negro" eye-rolling and hair-straightening. They couldn't resist, however, this zinger at the end:

We are informed that a reputable physician of the neighborhood visited the spot and said it was blood.

It's not inconceivable that a tenant farmer, no doubt proficient at slaughtering hogs and chickens, would easily be able to recognize blood. Nevertheless, every neighborhood should have a "reputable physician."

More white men came to behold the wonder. SA Holleman visited the next morning, later describing the scene to Venable:

The space covered was about fifty by seventy feet, and nearly in a rectangular form. The drops were of sizes varying from that of a small pea to that of a man's finger and averaged about one to the square foot...Some fell in the bushes and coagulated upon the limbs.

The "reputable physician" must have been a certain Dr Robinson, who, according to Venable, "made certain simple tests which satisfied him that it was blood." Venable's next sentence is more explicit: the sample passed the Robinson Sniff Test.

Samples of bloody sand got into the hands of Holleman and another doctor, Sidney Atwater. Atwater brought the samples to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for analysis.

"It was looked upon rather as a joke and no analysis was made for some time," Venable noted.

But when preliminary tests were conducted, something happened that must have made Venable's prodigious mustache curl up with a hilarious "tweeter" sound:

The blood was real.

To be continued.

Do you have stories of UFOs, ghosts or other weirdness that you'd like to see covered in the High Strangeness corner of the Chatham Rabbit? Email me: pborowest@yahoo.com

High Strangeness: The Four-Footed Tribe

I was gratified to receive an email from a reader yesterday which sent me scampering through a thicket of North Carolina folklore.

Down near Robeson creek, so the story goes, a witch once lived back in the woods, on the creek that runs by Johnny Burke road. Two hunters were out in this area long ago, and one shot a deer. The blood trail led them back into the woods to a tiny house. There they saw a little old lady, sitting on the porch in her rocker. To their horror, she had a gunshot wound in her upper right chest area--exactly where the deer was hit. My correspondent heard this story as a child, some 40 years ago, and it was already old news then.

It was instantly familiar to me, however, and after some searching I found my friend Roger Manley's "Weird Carolinas," which put me on the right path.

It's worth noting that deer were a rarity at this time, before some well-meaning people (no doubt related to those who thought planting kudzu would be a good idea) re-introduced them after Jordan Lake's completion. (We can thus conclude that deer should be considered fair game either because of paucity or abundance.)

The story of the unfortunate witch is reminiscent of a romantic explanation of how Daniel Boone found his future bride by wisely refusing to shoot a blue-eyed "deer" during a nighttime fire hunting excursion.

There are also echoes in the legend concerning the fate of Virginia Dare. Spurning an Indian suitor, she was turned into a white doe, and later killed. (It's impossible not to recognize an unsubtle example of white female exceptionalism here; an inverted riff on Public Enemy's "too black, too strong"--"too white, too frail." What's the first white girl to do when surrounded by amorous savages? Change species!)

The albino deer, a convenient metaphor for Ms Dare's uniqueness, has much deeper roots in North Carolina Indian folklore about the "four-footed tribes." It was, if we are to believe what we're told, the chief of the deer tribe, and responsible for ensuring that hunters made proper atonement for their kill. As soon as a deer was hit by an arrow, he was there, and "asked the blood" on the ground if the hunter had made the proper apology to the victim. If not, the blood trail would lead to the murderer, who would then be cursed with rheumatism. To atone is to make ourselves "at one" with those we have injured, as witch woman suffers the wounds of her surrogate, or as hunter "covers up" the bones of the dead with offerings to appease the bereaved.

It pains me to conclude that, in all probability, the story of the Deer Witch Woman was calculated only to spook the crap out of an impressionable lad. "It scared me that day in the woods," my correspondent confided, "especially when [my friends who told me] took off running like they just seen the little old lady." But that story, told by children, is a variant on stories told about the first colonists, even older stories told by the aboriginals who co-existed with them, and ancient stories told before humans ever set foot in this wondrous land of Caroline, as our collective ancestors scratched curious images on sacred rock walls and explained the world, one to another.

[I'm always on the lookout for Chatham strangeness--folktales, ghost stories and the like. Email me with yours: pborowest@yahoo.com]

High Strangeness: Against Tramping

I admire my friend Rabbit.

He was kind enough to invite me to post on this blog. My desire is to inhabit a separate territory; my own section of pasture. In order to be a good, complimentary neighbor, I need only to stay away from Rabbit's strengths--"research" and "good writing" come to mind. It's a relief, really, to not take on such responsibilities.

My own niche will be a parochial overview of what the English charmingly call "high strangeness." Essentially, various anomalies have been visited upon the region and its inhabitants: ghosts, mysterious lights, a shower of blood. I will try as best I can to draft a psychogeographic map of Chatham's paranormal terrain, avoiding only the canonical and clichéd.

I need your help. Folklore, superstition, and rumor will be gratefully received and included in the topography. Email me: pborowest@yahoo.com

In honoring Rabbit's role as iconoclast, my first goal is to expose that appalling fraud known as the Devil's Tramping Ground. Noteworthy only in its lameness, let us agree to never mention it again.

If we allow the conceit that Old Nick has appeared in Chatham, he certainly doesn't waste his time kicking empty FunYun bags out of a crappy little circle of land outside Siler City. No; if anything, he would come visit us only to lay down, rubbing his temples, temporarily overwhelmed by the manifest ascendancy of his agenda worldwide. After recovering, he might indulge himself to polish, with long, deliberate strokes, the ready rifle of our Civil War Memorial. The "Our Confederate Heroes" epitaph must surely be the kind of subterfuge that would make his eyelids flutter, if only for a moment.

It cannot be doubted, if we stipulate his existence, that he merrily led the blasphemous parade on several occasions to the various lynching trees in town, up to the corner of Midway and Hillsboro, or down old Lockville Road, hooting on his pipe triumphantly.

But the Devil's Tramping Ground is dull, varnished with stupid. Away with it. We can do better. We have done better. Allow me, in the posts that follow, to demonstrate.