Читать книгу Dredging the Choptank - Kimberley Lynne - Страница 12

May 20th

Read Folklore

I read Flowers’ history book before his folklore book; that was a mistake because most of the ghost stories lurk in the latter.

I showed the history book to my kirky friend Debbie and told her the story of calling Olivia and Flowers as we drank coffee in her Rodgers Forge living room; Debbie’s a caffeine addict. She serves coffee. The sun shone brightly through the blinds and etched a barred pattern on the Oriental rug. Birds chirped in the maple in the front yard; cars whooshed by. We seemed far enough away from marsh country to discuss its ghosts. I handed her the history book. “Check out the sea monster sketch,” I said smugly.

“Oh my God, Mary.” She giggled. “It’s hand drawn.”

“I know; bless his self-published heart. No ghosts yet, though. It’s probably in his folklore book. I gotta find that. Guess I’ll look in the old Waverly bookstores. Aren’t ghost stories folklore? And not history?” I sipped her strong coffee. “What’s the diff?” I asked.

Debbie flipped past my marker in the history book and read the end. “I don’t think there is one,” she said slowly.

“I mean, is it all semantics?”

“Somebody made up both of them. Look. Here they are, Mary,” Debbie said.

“How’d you find them?” I asked her from the couch. Reading the history book was a like learning German to me: slow going. I had trouble remaining conscious during the Byzantine renditions of Maryland land grants.

“Skip to the Civil War,” she said. I’ve known Debbie twenty years. Her vocal tones were saying: skip to the Civil War, you idiot, as if to question, where else in this country’s patchwork history is our greatest concentration of phantoms?

“Of course,” I said, “The 600,000 ghosts of The Civil War. They were bound to surface.”

“There’s a headless ghost slave named Big Liz in the Green Briar Swamp,” she said. She read aloud the directions to Big Liz’s eerie corner of this world, south of Cambridge at DeCoursey Bridge. “She haunts a bridge off Route 50,” Debbie said, shaking her head and laughing. “You pull over and honk your horn and she shows up, holding her head in her hands.” Debbie knows Route 50 well; her parents own a Delaware beach house. “I don’t remember seeing a sign on 50 for a dead slave girl on DeCoursey Bridge Road.”

“Dorchester County doesn’t sign much. They don’t want foreigners like us driving the back roads,” I speculated.

Big Liz’s story inspired Debbie to want to go on a pilgrimage to Green Briar Swamp. “We have to see her, Mary,” she said. “She’s right outside town. We should go and explore.”

During the Civil War, Big Liz’s plantation owner, John Austin, forced her to bury some ill-gotten, Confederate booty in the densely-thicketed Green Briar Swamp. After she dug the treasure’s watery hole, he decapitated her, and she still haunts the marsh and guards his abandoned gold. According to local legend, the treasure’s still buried in the swamp. If you drive to the DeCoursey bridge, honk your horn and flash your headlights, then the wind will blow, and you’ll soon hear her shuffling step. The car engine will stall as she limps into view, shoulders stooped, cradling her head in her arms, her eyes glowing. You’re trapped, frozen, and can’t move as she draws closer and closer.9

“A swamp monster. That’s more like it,” I said. “She’s definitely going into the tour.” Still, I was a little peeved by this story. “Didn’t Big Liz notice that Austin was wearing a tobacco knife big enough to decapitate?” I asked Debbie. “Did he always wear it? Did he bring it to hack through the brambles?”

“And if she was big, why didn’t Big Liz fight back?” Debbie returned.

Instead, Big Liz exhibited a passive, abused woman streak that’s more frightening than her haunting. Did she crave death? Was that option better than slavery? Was there resignation? Did she secretly love Austin? Hate him? Did he bury her headless body? He would’ve been a fool not to try, even in a marsh where the tides and the crabs daily vacuum up all detritus.

“Read the folklore book, Mary,” said Debbie. “Find out. It’s your mission.”

“I’ll report back,” I promised.

The next day, I found the folklore book in a used bookstore in the Waverly section of Baltimore. I sank to the bald carpet and began to read beside the listing bookshelves. I was riveted. Customers stepped over me. Time flew by. The terrifying stories hailed mostly from just outside of Cambridge. The book’s jammed with many rocking-good ghost stories, so many that before one tall tale a paragraph postscript categorizes the myriad varieties of Dorchester ghost story. According to Flowers, spiritual visitations are driven by: task, collection of body parts, message delivery, reluctance to depart, protection of treasure, or being trapped in a time warp.10 That last one’s my favorite.

On the crooked floor of the old bookshop, in my periphery I saw a small, black shape zip around a crowded shelf. I blinked. Did I really see that? Did it come out of the shelves of local folklore? I stood suddenly, shaking my long skirt, fearing a cockroach.

“Some people in this area are afraid to leave their homes at night”11 reported folklorist Brice Stump about the residents of Bucktown, the closest village to the Green Briar Swamp. Green Briar Swamp is seven miles square of razor-sharp marsh grass and gritty, foul-smelling mud lined with thick huckleberry bushes. Some locals claim to have seen Big Liz’s image emerge from the tidal waters under DeCoursey bridge. Fishermen have drowned there, in several feet of dark water. Some locals claim to hear gunshots over the marsh in the middle of the night and seen headless bulls, pigs and strange lights over the cattails. Hunting dogs won’t go through the huckleberry bushes into Green Briar; they possess the sixth sense to remain outside its haunted boundaries.

Flowers’ folklore book describes an extended version of the Big Liz story, embellished with motive. I phoned Debbie to elaborate. “I called to tell you the Big Liz back story,” I said, feeling like a fledgling phantom storyteller. Big Liz discovered Austin’s Confederate smuggling ring and reported it to Union agents, and Austin murdered her for the betrayal.

“Then why she’d follow him into the swamp, alone?” Debbie asked.

“It makes no sense. Did she have no choice? If she didn’t go, would she reveal her betrayal? There’s more. After the war, he died broke, and he never revealed the location of the gold.12 If I was dirt poor during Reconstruction when everything had gone to hell,” I said, “and I knew the location of a fortune in buried gold, I would’ve dug it up, ghost field hand or not.”

“Why didn’t he dig it back up right after he killed her?” Debbie pointed out.

Something must have happened to stop him.

There’s something murky about a swamp ghost that’s scarier than a drier one. Something about being soaked in 140 years of swamp goo turns a spirit spookier. Big Liz’s headless specter is covered in slime, like the Ghost Story ghost who hid under the lake for fifty years, waiting, dripping, oozing.

Flowers tells a story in Shore Folklore of discovering Big Liz’s gold in Green Briar; he dug up a metal box in the southern section that she haunts. Like previous treasure hunters in what locals call “the devil’s woodyard”13, Flowers abruptly was very aware of being watched; he was surrounded by the eerie sense of not being alone. He was equally suddenly “transported to another part of the swamp.”14 He was somewhere else sans shovel and hoe. He experienced a time and space jump. I got goose bumps reading it. He ran until he found his way out.

Flowers put himself into a story or he was testing the story out; either way, it took guts.

“Anyone who goes into that swamp with a flashlight and a shovel is asking for trouble,” said Debbie. “I’m not too sure I want to go now,” she admitted.

“Ah, come on,” I whined. “Who else will I get to go with me? Certainly not Karl.”

“Certainly not. Maybe you shouldn’t go at all.”

“I have to.”

Besides exploring the marsh interior, Flowers’ recipe to summon the headless undead is to park on the bridge and blow the car horn once. Vernon Griffin, in The Veil and More Folklore of the Eastern Shore, recommends blinking the lights three times and hitting the horn two times to summon the ghoul. Folklore collector George Carey suggests lights three times and horn six times. Some versions name her Big Liz and some Big Lizz with an extra Z. This is how legend evolves and becomes localized. In sorting through volumes of Eastern Shore folklore, I discovered several versions of the same story. I suspect it’s community-specific. I wondered how people conjured Big Liz before the car was invented. Make the horse whinny?

Dorchester County ghost stories have endured hundreds of years wracked with transformation. While the world outside the marsh whirled through change since the Civil War, Big Liz’s phantom still haunts the Green Briar Swamp. A traditional narrative is stabilizing to an area, and we rely upon unstable oral tradition to keep it constant. The Big Liz ghost story is over 140 years old, and yet people still honk in the marsh and dream her headless shuffle.

Each generation revises story for its own needs. My childhood friend’s fifteen-year-old daughter Ysabel lives in Easton, north of Cambridge in Talbot County. She’s heard of Big Liz. “There’s some ghost in Cambridge,” she told me, “On a bridge or something.” Ysabel was born in Santa Cruz and is wise beyond her years. She holds energy inside her slight frame and bounces a lot.

“Yeah,” I replied, “the headless swamp slave girl. You blow the horn and she appears, holding her head, her eyes glowing. Then you can’t start the car.”

Ysabel’s brown eyes widened. “Oh my God,” she breathed. “I thought it was just a story.”

“And every year some accident happens to the kids who try to conjure her. They drive off the road or get into some kind of car accident or they find themselves suddenly in another part of the swamp. Transported.”

“I’m not going now,” Ysabel said, twisting her hair. “No matter who asks me.”

“I’d think not,” her mother said.

Cambridge wasn’t talking so I started asking my friends about their ghost experiences. My seemingly pragmatic designer friend John has one ghost story with a similar spatial displacement as Flowers’ swamp tale. John’s from Silver Spring, Maryland and most of his dramatic scenic designs have arches in the set somewhere. He’s boyish and sweetly shy with occasional blue hair. Bored in a darkened rehearsal, I asked him to tell me a ghost story.

“I don’t know what happened. I really don’t,” he said quietly. “I was walking with my girlfriend through her parents’ neighborhood in Glen Burnie. She wanted to show me a spooky, deserted house at the end of a lane. The neighborhood kids had feared this house for generations.”

A chain link fence surrounded the dilapidated house. John and his girlfriend slowly walked by the fence, towards the gate. It was summer.

“I don’t know what happened next,” he said, his forehead crinkling, still trying to solve the mystery of the memory. “I remember feeling pulled. Suddenly I was at the gate, with my hand on the latch, and something in the yard wanted me in there. The sound of my girlfriend’s flip flops woke me, the sound of her flip flops slapping on the cement sidewalk as she ran for help.”

“Wow,” I said, considering the diabolical pull of the dead house. “Woke you.”

“Yeah, it was like waking up and finding myself several yards away from where I remembered I had been.”

“Freaky.”

“It was years ago in college,” he said, smiling. “But I still don’t know what happened.” Like Flowers, he was transported through space and time through a worm hole of sorts.

I had heard tales of haunted, abandoned houses that trapped people, but John’s was the first live account. All buildings hold energy; there’s no doubt about that.

As she was leaving my neighborhood, my ex next door neighbor confided in me that “the old man across the street” once told her that at the turn of the 20th century the first three houses on the street, including mine, were illegal abortion clinics. A doctor had lived in my house and performed safe abortions in my basement. I stopped her story. “Whoa, I don’t know if I wanna know this,” I said, glancing at the back porch for a clue. “I may never do laundry down there again.”

You can title search your house but you can never know what is soaked in the soil underneath it. Talk to your older neighbors. They’re closer to death. Think of the stories they must know.

Read folklore.