Читать книгу Jeffrey's Favorite 13 Ghost Stories - Kathryn Tucker Windham - Страница 8

Fayette County, Alabama

Many communities in Alabama have local legends about strange images that have appeared on tombstones, mysterious markings with no logical explanations.

There is, for example, the story from Red Level about a man who, many years ago, was riding horseback when his horse ran away, and the man’s head got caught in the forks of a low-hanging tree limb. He was killed instantly. The image of a man hanging from a tree limb appeared on the rider’s tombstone soon after his grave was put in place, the story goes.

Other areas have their own images of devils’ heads and black cats and grinning skulls and such that have formed on tombstones. Each of these supposedly supernatural pictures has its own story, a story told and retold, changing gradually with the retellings.

Some of these silhouettes are associated with romantic events, tragic love stories of long ago. One of the best known of this type is the figure of the young girl that appeared on the tombstone of Robert Musgrove over in Fayette County many years ago.

The Musgroves were among the pioneer settlers in northwest Alabama, moving there from the Carolinas with the final wave of emigrants in the 1820s. They brought their household goods and their farming equipment in wagons, jouncing along over the rough roads hewn through the wilderness. They came to stay.

Some members of the family stopped in Walker County while others continued their journey into northern Fayette County where they settled along Luxapallila Creek.

Just as there were differences in opinion among the family as to where to settle, there were sharper differences in loyalties when the War Between the States came along. Many Musgroves served proudly in the Confederate forces while many others remained staunch Unionists. It was a bitter and bloody time with deaths from ambush, torture, hangings, house burnings, and beatings reported frequently (and many not reported at all) in those isolated, wooded hills.

The scars of that conflict had not yet begun to heal when Robert L. Musgrove was born in September 1866. As a boy, he heard stories of death and plunder when armed guerrilla bands enforced their own brands of justice, and he listened to the names of his own kinsman cast as heroes and villains in those outrages.

As did the other youngsters in his neighborhood, Robert helped his parents with the work on their farm, found time to roam in the woods and along the creek, and attended church at Musgrove Chapel every preaching Sunday.

Members of Robert’s family were dedicated Methodists, and, very soon after their arrival in Fayette County, they built a log church which they named Musgrove Chapel. The benches were uncomfortable, and the one-room building was hot in the summer and cold in the wintertime, but the Musgroves filled those rough benches to hear The Word proclaimed, and if their bodies suffered, their souls were revived.

Or so they told Robert.

Robert, looking down the benches at the Sabbath gatherings of Musgroves, wondered if his kin had in truth been involved in the atrocities he heard about. He tried to imagine what the men looked like when they were younger.

Musgrove men, old timers recall, were invariably handsome. They, most of them, were tall and muscular, and they moved with the ease and grace peculiar to the outdoorsmen they were. They had ruddy complexions, dark hair, and bluish-grey eyes. It was a pleasing combination.

As he grew older, Robert Musgrove became the handsomest of all the clan. On those rare occasions when he went to town—to Winfield or to Fayette Courthouse or even as far away as Tuscaloosa—it is reported that every woman who saw him walking along the streets stared after him as long as he was in sight and then sighed, “Aaaaahh,” softly and longingly.

Robert, they say, never even noticed those stares or heard those sighs. Though he, his friends said, could have had his choice of any beauty in northwest Alabama or northeast Mississippi, Robert wasn’t interested in girls at all then, not seriously. His mind was on trains.

Ever since he saw his first train (there is a difference of opinion over whether this event occurred in Tuscaloosa or in Columbus, Mississippi), Robert Musgrove was obsessed with interest in steam locomotives.

He purely fell in love with trains. “I’m going to be a train engineer,” he announced. Trains were all he ever thought about. An engineer was all he ever wanted to be.

As soon as he was old enough (maybe earlier since birth certificates and child labor laws and such had not been heard of then), Robert got a job on the railroad. He started as water boy for a crew laying tracks, some folks recall, but Robert didn’t object to the hard, menial labor. The only thing that mattered to him was that he was working on the railroad.

He was as proud as a man could be when the Georgia Pacific Railway Company opened a line to Fayette in 1883, the first railroad in his home county. Until that time, Tuscaloosa and Columbus, Mississippi, had been the nearest rail terminals to the county seat.

“Now some of my kinfolks can find out how important railroads are,” Robert commented. To him, railroads were still the center of his universe.

Robert returned to his family home every now and then, when he had time off from work. If his visits were on Sunday, he always joined his kinfolks and friends for worship services at Musgrove Chapel. After church, when worshippers gathered in cluster to talk a bit before heading home, Robert took pride in telling them about his railroad career.

The St. Louis and San Francisco Railroad was Robert’s road, the one he worked for. He had a good boarding place in Memphis, Tennessee, and he was assigned to the run between Memphis and Amory, Mississippi. Robert worked as conductor, brakeman, fireman, and after a good many years passed, he achieved his lifelong ambition: he became a railroad engineer.

Robert, associates say, treated his engines as though they were living, loving things, as though the engines understood his respect and affection for them. And the engines responded to Robert Musgrove’s attentions.

“His engines could do almost anything. They seemed almost to anticipate his expectations, as though they were trained animals instead of masses of metal,” they said.

After Robert became an engineer, he relaxed a bit and began diversifying his interests. He discovered, among other things, that girls are nice. And he wished he had made that pleasant discovery earlier: Robert was already well into his thirties then.

For a while, Robert had many girlfriends. He was still quite handsome, as all Musgrove men are handsome, and his career as an engineer made him even more attractive to women. So Robert enjoyed his popularity. He had a good time with his female admirers in Memphis, and he delighted in his feminine friends in Amory. There were also a good many young ladies between those two cities whose company Robert Musgrove treasured.

He wasn’t quite sure when or how it happened, but a beautiful young woman in Amory captured his heart. It wasn’t long before he was thinking of marriage and a home and a family—brand new thoughts for him. Robert had lost none of his enthusiasm for railroading, but love had opened new vistas of joy.

Miracle of miracles, the woman he loved also loved him. When he asked her to become his wife, she accepted. It was spring, the loveliest spring Robert Musgrove had ever known.

He acted like a love-smitten youngster, associates recall, even when he was at work. “Listen to my whistle,” he said to his fireman. “Listen. Know what it’s saying? It says, ‘I’m in love. I’m in love.’ I’m going to blow it all the way from Memphis to Amory!” He wanted the whole listening world to know about his happiness.

Then, one dreary night in April 1904, Robert Musgrove was killed in a head-on collision with another train between Memphis and Amory.

A man on horseback brought the sad news to his family in northern Fayette County.

Arrangements were made to hold Robert Musgrove’s funeral services at Musgrove Chapel, the church where he had worshipped in childhood. His body was sent by train from Memphis to Winfield, the nearest rail point to Musgrove Chapel. This was before the days of automobiles, so a caravan of wagons met the funeral train at Winfield to transport Robert’s body and the contingent of his friends who accompanied it out to Musgrove Chapel.

Robert’s boyhood friends drove some of those wagons. As they waited at the Winfield station for the train to arrive, they talked about Robert, their memories of their good times together.

“Hard to believe Robert is dead,” they said again and again “But if he had to die, it’s good to know he died at the throttle of his train. He would have wanted it that way.”

When the train pulled into the station, the friends walked quietly to the baggage car, lifted Robert’s coffin out, and placed it in the lead wagon. Then they spoke to Robert’s railroad friends who had come to his funeral and made sure that these visitors were comfortably seated in the wagon for the ride in the country. Among the mourners who came on that train was the young woman to whom Robert had been engaged. She rode to the church in the wagon driven by W. L. Moss.

“She was a beautiful young woman. So sad,” he recalled years later. “I’ll never forget how she looked all dressed in black.”

Other people who met her remember thinking how tragic that she should be forced to wear the doleful black of mourning instead of the joyous white of a wedding dress.

The small chapel was filled to overflowing that afternoon with people who cared about Robert Musgrove and who grieved over his death. The alter area of the chapel was crowded with flowers, formal floral arrangements from the city mixed with fresh blossoms (jonquils, pear blossoms, yellow forsythias, and such) cut from Fayette County yards.

The preacher used the Methodist ritual for the burial of the dead, and he read the Twenty-Third Psalm and John 14:1, “Let not your heart be troubled . . .” and he talked about how life is like a railroad. The choir sang “In the Sweet By and By” and “When They Ring the Golden Bells.”

Then all the people went out into the graveyard with the preacher leading the way and the pallbearers walking slowly and solemnly behind him.

After the pallbearers had lowered the coffin into the grave and the preacher had said the final words and the grave had been filled, most of the people left the graveyard and started home. They grieved about Robert, but there were chores to do.The scattering of folks who loitered after the burial saw Robert’s sweetheart kneel beside the fresh grave. She folded her hands and bowed her head, and she remained motionless in that attitude of prayer for several minutes. As she arose, people close by heard her whisper, “Robert, I’ll never leave you.”

Nobody now remembers her name, but nobody who witnessed the sad drama ever forgot how she knelt at the grave or her whispered promise of eternal love.

Several months after Robert’s death, his family had an impressive granite marker erected at his grave, an eight-foot obelisk. Robert would have liked it.

In the years that followed, worshippers at Musgrove chapel and families who lived nearby noticed that periodically Robert Musgrove’s grave was cleared of weeds and fallen twigs, and fresh flowers were on his grave.

The flowers were floral arrangements, not bouquets from local gardens.

“Robert’s sweetheart must have been here,” the observers commented. And they told again of the events surrounding Robert’s funeral, of how his sweetheart whispered, “Robert, I’ll never leave you.”

Years passed, and the periodic evidences of care for Robert Musgrove’s grave continued. Then, as time went by, some woman in the community noticed that there had been no fresh flowers on Robert’s grave in a long time. She commented to a friend on the long absence of flowers.

“Well,” the friend replied, “just think how many years it has been since Robert died. His sweetheart must be dead now, too. If she’s not dead, she must be too old and feeble to visit the grave. She kept her promise for many years though, didn’t she?” Then one Sunday in 1962 as worshippers were coming out of Musgrove Chapel at the close of the morning service, someone glanced over into the graveyard.

“What’s that on Robert Musgrove’s tombstone?” she asked. “It looks like a shadow of some kind.”

Several people, prodded by curiosity, walked into the cemetery to get a closer look. There on Robert Musgrove’s tombstone they saw the distinct silhouette of a young girl. Her head was bowed and her hands were folded as if in prayer. The silhouette was so distinct that the viewers could see her hair piled high on her head. Even the curve of her eyelashes was quite plain.

“It’s Robert Musgrove’s sweetheart!” an older man in the group exclaimed. “That’s just the way she looked when she knelt on Robert’s grave and promised, ‘Robert, I’ll never leave you.’ I was just a boy, but I saw her and heard her—and I’ll never forget it.”

News of the image of the young girl on Robert Musgrove’s grave marker spread quickly throughout that part of Alabama, and curiosity seekers by the hundreds swarmed to the country churchyard.

The invasion of strangers upset members of the Musgrove family, and they tried to remove the image from the stone. But though they scoured and rubbed and scrubbed, the image would not come off. Finally they sent to Birmingham for a stonemason to sandblast the figure from the granite.

With the image gone, the unwelcome visitors stopped coming to the cemetery, and talk in the community turned to other things.

But the image returned, as plain as ever. Again the story of the lover’s promise was told, and again the throngs of strangers came to look and wonder.

The stonemason returned to clean the stone. When he left, the tall marker was as white and unsullied as the day it was put in place.

With the figure gone from tombstone, the crowds again lost interest in the grave and in its link to the supernatural.

But, they say, the likeness of the grieving sweetheart slowly returned on the surface of the tombstone until, once again, it was as well defined as it had been the day it first appeared.

“She loved Robert very much,” the tellers of the story say. “Her love was as strong as her promise, ‘Robert, I’ll never leave you.’”