Читать книгу Dredging the Choptank - Kimberley Lynne - Страница 8

After April 2nd

Haunted Hunting

Once, in a place that seems outside time, I wrote a ghost walking tour for a small town on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. As I collected local folklore, a Cambridge resident named Mr. Travis told me this ghost story that happened in his hunting lodge. Hunting’s popular on the Eastern Shore; it’s rural enough for its populace to still use weapons to catch dinner.

“It wasn’t much,” Travis said of the lodge. “Just a couple of bedrooms and a kitchen and a bathroom. Up on stilts because of all the flooding.” The house stood on its stilts on isolated Aisquith Island in the haunted, southern underbelly of Dorchester County. Aisquith hovers only a few feet above sea level, floating between miles of wet fen and the Honga River. Before the lodge was built, its low woodlands were the sacred ground of a Native American Indian graveyard. Before John Smith showed up in 1608, indigenous people had developed a millennia of civilization, and, in the history of this country, live conquering people plow dead people under.

Travis says he regularly hears children laughing when there’s nothing but cattails and marsh holes for miles, and every time he returns to the lodge, the salt shaker has inexplicably spilled over. Things happen there.

One of Travis’ friends stayed with his young son in the lodge. The son got up in the middle of night to get a glass of water in the kitchen. The mattress spring squeaked, and an owl hooted outside. In the living room, a strange man rocked in the rocker. He wore a plaid shirt and blue jeans and had a bl ack plait of braided hair. He was strange only because the boy didn’t know him. He thought perhaps the man was one of his father’s hunting buddies; the ways of the adult world were still a mystery to the boy.

“Hello,” said the boy. The rocker creaked. The man seemed to have shape and weight, like a living man.

The man nodded, and when the boy returned from the kitchen, the man was gone.

The boy tapped his sleeping father. “Where did the man go, Dad?” He asked. “The man in the living room. He looked so real.”

They searched the lodge house and found no one. They looked outside into the wavering, dark pitch of the Eastern Shore night. One lone green ball of light glided over the undulating marsh grass and then vanished. The son asked to leave.

There’s no sanctuary from the past; not even our living rooms are safe. I’m scared to look into my Baltimore living room late at night for fear of seeing even briefly into another dimension. My friend Korinne once slept on my couch and awoke to see a man seated in my arts and craft era sliding rocker.

“Didn’t that freak you out?” I asked the next morning, aghast.

“No,” she said, smiling and sipping coffee. “He seemed very happy to be here.”

“What’d he look like?” I stuttered.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said calmly. “Older guy, white, I think he was wearing a dinner jacket.”

I realized that my ghost stories and Travis’ ghost stories match the collective archetype, that they’re not singular but fall into the same pattern as the rest of humanity.

Korinne was born in Detroit and lives in New Hampshire. She has the long blonde hair of a mermaid and the terrible gift of prescience. She says that something big is going to happen to me, but something happens to everyone.