The following is one of many entries from the Phantoms Fill The Southern Skies book. I am producing it here from the original manuscript file for visitors to sample and see if they would be interested in the full text available on Amazon.

Please respect the copyright owners – Jeff Lawhead, J.S. Lawhead and 23 House Publishing – and do not reprint or reproduce any portion of this text on any monetized formats and without permission. Reproduction for hobbyist or academic interest (as well as “fair use”) is ok as long as sources are explicitly cited. Contact me at Meteo.Xavier@gmail.com for any permission inquiries regarding this or any other excerpt.

The devil’s mischievous influence doesn’t end there, and it has been rumored for decades that he has marked territory in both Carolinas known as The Devil’s Tramping Grounds or sometimes alternately known as The Devil’s Stomping Grounds. For the sake of clarity, we’ll refer to the mysterious ring in Chatham County, North Carolina as the “Tramping Grounds” and the one in Lancaster County, South Carolina as the “Stomping Grounds”.

Both legends refer to a unique circle of dead earth where the devil is said to dance at night. The very laws of nature are warped inside each circle where nothing will grow, no ants, worms or spiders will be found inside, no sound can be heard from inside the circle, there is an intense assault of negative emotion when you get inside it, and if you leave objects inside the circle overnight, by morning it will kicked outside by the devil himself as he dances. Both rings are also said to have existed since the days of the Native Americans who used each ring for different purposes. In North Carolina, it is said the local tribes used it to hold tribal ceremonies and dances. The South Carolina circle’s legend goes further, suggesting the Stomping Grounds were the execution sites for both the Catawba and the Waxaw tribes, and that evil spirits also gather there to collect more souls for eternal condemnation.

The stories surrounding the blighted patches make up a very loose mythology, and there are further claims to the legend that are inconsistent and bordering on ludicrous. As I researched, I found that one person even alleged that he and a group camped inside the Tramping Grounds circle and were all separated in morning… with one person found more than a mile away! Even in this realm of study, that is a very extraordinary claim, usually something you would hear reported on the news if it really happened.

It may be that The Devil’s Tramping and Stomping Grounds fit more the mold of an urban legend, which can be similar to ghost lore, but may have certain elements of its mythological makeup that can be tested to verify claims. In this case, there are more definite parameters to the legend, as opposed to a haunted house where the ghost of a woman may appear in one of several forms in any part of the house on the occasional night if she feels like it, one could actually go to either the Tramping or Stomping Grounds and see if these abnormalities truly operate on a regular basis.

In 2011, a college group from Elon University in North Carolina set out to do just that. Two groups went out to test a majority of the major claims about the Tramping Ground and found that:

1. The ring being cleaned before daybreak is completely false.
2. The ring being incapable of growing vegetation is completely false.
3. The ring being completely deaf at night is completely false.
4. The ring being tramped by the devil himself is likely false, as one subgroup did hear footsteps they could not easily explain while another subgroup did not hear any.

And while the Devil’s Tramping and Stomping Grounds being distant twins might seem like a unique quality that adds more authenticity to the legend, to some at least, the truth is that there are similar ones all over the country – there is one fitting that description much further south in Lake County, Florida, for a start. In fact, compiled volumes of natural phenomena show that strange circles have been pervasive in human history for centuries. The crop circle craze that started in the mid-20th century is the most immediate thing that may come to mind, but even before that were reports of perfectly round discs of ice forming randomly in frozen bodies of water that spun slightly on their own accord. The devil’s fascination with circles even appears in an early account from Herefordshire, England in the Summer of 1678 when a farmer quarreled with his hired hand over a payment for cutting his crops. The farmer refused to pay his asking price and said he would rather the devil himself do the job. That night, a red, fiery glow was seen in his field, and the next day there were perfect circles cut into his crops. A woodcut of that scene called the “mowing devil” became quite famous.

All the same, the two rings make for a great ghost story to tell late at night and many kids who hear about them at friends’ houses or scout trips often remember them fondly. While it’s important to separate fact from story in any serious inquiry to the subject, folklore today isn’t about facts, it’s about fun. It’s fun to hear stories about real life places with fantasy realms hidden somewhere in there.

And in the mountains, there is no shortage of hidden realms waiting to be discovered by an unassuming traveler who has no idea what he or she might be in store for…

Images used in this post do not belong to me or 23 House and are not part of the original manuscript. They were pulled from Google Images or Snappy Goat and only serve as graphical decoration. They are not being used for any monetizing purposes whatsoever.

The following is one of many entries from the Phantoms Fill The Southern Skies book. I am producing it here from the original manuscript file for visitors to sample and see if they would be interested in the full text available on Amazon.

Please respect the copyright owners – Jeff Lawhead, J.S. Lawhead and 23 House Publishing – and do not reprint or reproduce any portion of this text on any monetized formats and without permission. Reproduction for hobbyist or academic interest (as well as “fair use”) is ok as long as sources are explicitly cited. Contact me at Meteo.Xavier@gmail.com for any permission inquiries regarding this or any other excerpt.

Another story from the Uwharries is a much darker tale of the hardships families had to endure before the new eras of Appalachian living could replace the old ones. Stories like The Hearse Wagon often describe in very fine, morbid detail how these mountain lifestyles could quickly fall apart when tragedy strikes.

Cromer and Cora Calvert lived like most reasonably normal couples did in the Uwharries in the old days. Cromer was a mountain man through and through and could often be found hunting and roaming the hills as he pleased. There was no more satisfying lifestyle in the entire world as far as Cromer was concerned, and he found time to enjoy it even as Cora produced for him children to raise. Life was good for the Calvert home in the mountains.

Then, one day, as Cromer and Cora were in their middle years, Cora became sick with an incurable illness, and all the doctor could do for them was advise Cromer to make his wife’s last days as comfortable as possible. Cromer was heartbroken, like any man would be, but his heart was torn into two halves for two loves: his wife and his hobbies, and he could not be there for both.

To make it even more unfortunate, Cora’s illness was very slow to claim her life, but quick to deteriorate her from a sprightly and lovely woman into a bedridden shadow of her former self. Her mind raced with the fears of death. Her personality turned arsenic and unreasonable, abusing Cromer for any reason she could find, lashing out at the children and the neighbors who visited to try to brighten her day, and making sure everyone around her could be as miserable as she was. She would often wake up screaming in fear that the “hearse wagon” was coming to get here any day now.

Once a free man who could hunt, hike and explore as much as he wanted, now Cromer was a prisoner to this vile husk that used to be his wife and he would be chained to her for several years. The thought of catering to this woman who was going to die any day now anyway eventually became too much for Calvert to bear, and he took matters into his own hands by smothering Cora with her pillow until both their agonies ceased. It was a struggle, and the last thing Cora said before she died was an oath that, someday, the hearse wagon would come for him too.

Her funeral came and went without anyone suspecting Calvert of foul play. Not long after her death, he resumed his activities in the mountains, overjoyed for the shackles to be broken at last, but he only enjoyed them for a short time as, not long after she uttered her curse, Cromer started hearing sounds outside the house that sounded like a wagon pulling up to the door, waiting for a few minutes, and then speeding away. Many late evenings, Cromer would hear, as clear as day, something pulling up to the door, but he would never see anything. Interestingly enough, other visitors who stayed with Cromer also heard the sounds of a wagon driving through without ever seeing it.

Cromer’s life continued on a slow, downward spiral for which he never recovered. In his loneliness, he married Cora’s younger sister (so much younger, in fact, she was apparently able to produce him a new brood of children) and this at least kept him from losing himself completely to despair as he got older, but even that would be short-lived as he, too, became ravaged with illnesses that twisted him up from the inside and out. He became a bitter husk just like Cora. The hearse sounds continued all the while and he knew that any one of these nights now, it was going to stop and it wasn’t going to leave without him.

Finally, one night, the infernal clomping of the otherworldly coach became so loud that Cromer suffered an anxiety attack while his second wife was preparing his pillow and collapsed on the floor, having succumbed at long last to his first wife’s curse. The sound of the ghostly wagon was heard driving out of the yard, and this time, it would be gone for good.

Images used in this post do not belong to me or 23 House and are not part of the original manuscript. They were pulled from Google Images or Snappy Goat and only serve as graphical decoration. They are not being used for any monetizing purposes whatsoever.

The following is one of many entries from the Phantoms Fill The Southern Skies book. I am producing it here from the original manuscript file for visitors to sample and see if they would be interested in the full text available on Amazon.

Please respect the copyright owners – Jeff Lawhead, J.S. Lawhead and 23 House Publishing – and do not reprint or reproduce any portion of this text on any monetized formats and without permission. Reproduction for hobbyist or academic interest (as well as “fair use”) is ok as long as sources are explicitly cited. Contact me at Meteo.Xavier@gmail.com for any permission inquiries regarding this or any other excerpt.

It is difficult to imagine the history of the Southern Appalachian Mountains without coming into images of the coal mining industries from the mid-19th and early 20th centuries. The United State experienced a huge industrial boon after the Civil War lead by machines hungry for coal. Early settlers found and noted many ripe veins of coal in the vast Southern mountain ranges. Many other minerals, like gold, talc and copper, were eventually discovered as well, and mining corporations were just as eager to get their hands on them, too… at any cost.

But life as a miner was almost no life at all, and the history of mining is as dark as the energy source they dug for. It was virtually a prison for the crime of being impoverished as many poor families sent their patriarchs to dig for money, and they wouldn’t go back home for months to years at a time. Many times, they never came back at all. A miner in the old days worked seven days a week, ate and slept in the filthy conditions he worked in and rested only when he needed his strength to mine some more. Safety regulations and workers’ rights wouldn’t be acknowledged for decades to come and management, at best, couldn’t be trusted. When you put all that together, you have a recipe for disaster as unfocused, weak and sloppy men make mistakes that cost lives.

A mine is just about the purest darkness there is in the mountains, and so nearly every abandoned one that can be found is rumored to be haunted from top to bottom with the souls of dead miners who never made it back out. One of those is known simply as The Cavern Near Plant #5 in Georgia, which has reports of several spirits wandering around the tunnels and surrounding hills.

One story recounts two mine workers who were working on a dozer very deep inside the mine. As they took a break, they saw a man coming towards them wearing a very different set of clothes than the rest of the men. He passed them and seemingly went about his business. The two workers did not recognize him and went to their supervisor to ask who he was. When they described him, the supervisor became pale with a wild look on his face. He knew the man they were describing… he had been crushed to death more than thirty years before.

Another rumor is that the deepest tunnel in the mine, one that had been closed off for years due to a cave-in, is haunted by the spirit of a worker who was killed when the rock came crashing down. Sounds of someone tapping against the rock from the inside reverberate throughout the tunnel walls and remind the men why even the bravest and toughest of them refuse to ever go down there.

A much stranger report happened outside The Cavern one night to a miner’s wife. This miner worked a shift so late that his lunch whistle went off at 2:00AM. His wife often got up with him and prepared his lunch, but this particular night he was in a hurry and accidentally left his lunch behind. His wife then drove up the mountain to deliver it to him, and as she got closer to the entrance, she started to feel very scared without knowing why… until she got to the top of the road, over the railroad tracks, and looked into the valley below. The entire area beneath her was enshrouded by a green mist that twisted, turned and warped itself. It looked like a large cluster of spirits.

The details of this particularly disturbing account end there, but it would beg the following questions – was that a congregation of those who had died inside the plant, or was it a different entity altogether that could be fueling the disturbances in the area? Ghosts roaming around the mountains are quite common occurrences in folklore, but to come across a whole shroud of them covering the entire lowland is a different story altogether that no good can come from.

Almost to illustrate this point was one more shocking report that nearly ended in disaster. One man was operating a dump truck while the other was operating a bulldozer until he hit a tunnel wall. As the other man came to help, they both saw the wall collapse and reveal a hidden cave behind it. They went inside to look and saw a number of crosses stuck into the ground. These were grave-sites, but for who? Why would someone bury a number of people inside the mine and then hide it behind a cavern wall?

But before they could look closer to find some clues for this mystery, the bulldozer behind them started up on its own and came after them. One of the men rushed onto it to turn it off, but it refused to turn off. The other man was frozen in fear and just barely managed to get out of the way. The two got outside the grave-site and watched the bulldozer plow through the crosses and into the rear wall, causing the entire hidden cave to collapse. Whatever was inside there did not want to be discovered and was willing to kill just so it could remain locked away from the world.

Whether any of these reports connect to reveal a very dark presence inside the mine is up for speculation, but not conclusion. Some things in history are probably better left undiscovered, and if stories alluding to the true depth of the mining tragedies in the South are as ghastly as these, we may not want to tread any further.

Images used in this post do not belong to me or 23 House and are not part of the original manuscript. They were pulled from Google Images or Snappy Goat and only serve as graphical decoration. They are not being used for any monetizing purposes whatsoever.

The following is one of many entries from the Phantoms Fill The Southern Skies book. I am producing it here from the original manuscript file for visitors to sample and see if they would be interested in the full text available on Amazon.

Please respect the copyright owners – Jeff Lawhead, J.S. Lawhead and 23 House Publishing – and do not reprint or reproduce any portion of this text on any monetized formats and without permission. Reproduction for hobbyist or academic interest (as well as “fair use”) is ok as long as sources are explicitly cited. Contact me at Meteo.Xavier@gmail.com for any permission inquiries regarding this or any other excerpt.

Earl Johnson’s Pig Parlor was the name of a farmhouse owned by a reputedly wealthy farmer in the northern mountains of Georgia during the early 20th century, and every Saturday evening it was where he and four of his good friends met, from 1916 to 1921, for a poker game.

Each of the five men was flush with cash from successful business ventures and reasonably well-known in the area, and it is said that, of the five, it was Earl that could be considered the local eccentric tycoon. While most people tending to farms in the Appalachian mountains would want, or need, a large family around to help work the land and provide much needed company while living nearly isolated up in the hills, Earl apparently lived all by himself with no living relatives that could be found. He also lived all by himself without any electricity and had to play the poker games by the light of a few lanterns. Certainly a man with his money and means could find a way to get electricity installed up there, yet, for some reason, he chose to do without.

Finally, it was said that, like many eccentric tycoons with a touch of paranoia about them, Earl did not trust banks and kept all of his money somewhere at the Pig Parlor, obscured from prying eyes and away from any hands that didn’t belong to him. Exactly why Earl wanted his lifestyle set up this way or how these rumors got out is not known, but they would all contribute to the horrifying demise that secured his legacy.

One Saturday night, as Earl and his four friends were enjoying a typical poker outing, with cards on the table and moonshine in their blood, a group of men, who might have heard the local gossip about the Pig Parlor and used it to plan a robbery, stormed the building and killed all five of the players.

The next day, the authorities arrived to a slaughterhouse – all five men weren’t just lying on the floor dead, they were decapitated. Earl and his friends were attacked by someone ruthless enough to take the time and effort to behead five men just to get some money. Who these murderers were, and whether any secret stash was ever found will forever remain a mystery… and that would only be the first mystery of the Pig Parlor.

Some years later, as the farmhouse and property had decayed in its violent abandonment, people started reported that strange lights were seen in the farmhouse on Saturday nights at the same times the men would usually start their poker games. Kids and adults alike would go up to the old Pig Parlor, wait until 9:00PM or 10:00PM, and then see five lights shining in the dark (four lights from inside the farmhouse and one out on the deck, swinging a lantern). These lights are said to be the ghosts of the five slain men who wouldn’t let even death deter them from their weekly poker game.

According to the legend, it seems the one on the porch holding the lantern is actually the lookout for the other four so they won’t be ambushed again… though what they could possibly be afraid of at this point could be the third mystery surrounding the Pig Parlor.

Images used in this post do not belong to me or 23 House and are not part of the original manuscript. They were pulled from Google Images or Snappy Goat and only serve as graphical decoration. They are not being used for any monetizing purposes whatsoever.

The following is one of many entries from the Phantoms Fill The Southern Skies book. I am producing it here from the original manuscript file for visitors to sample and see if they would be interested in the full text available on Amazon.

Please respect the copyright owners – Jeff Lawhead, J.S. Lawhead and 23 House Publishing – and do not reprint or reproduce any portion of this text on any monetized formats and without permission. Reproduction for hobbyist or academic interest (as well as “fair use”) is ok as long as sources are explicitly cited. Contact me at Meteo.Xavier@gmail.com for any permission inquiries regarding this or any other excerpt.

Love as a marital bond is one of the largest driving forces in ghostly legends that derive from the grave-site – after all, they only vowed to part at death… that didn’t mean they wouldn’t try to come back. Love is an inescapable force to which all things are subsequent. It is a force beyond logic and reason, and when that bond is shared, it creates an illumination that divides the darkness and leads us through the path of life. When that bond is broken, the darkness may consume us and end that path without warning.

Such is the story of The Cursed Tombstone from Eastern Kentucky, as darkness consumed Southern man Carl Pruitt and turned him into an invisible and unstoppable killing machine.

In 1938, Carl came home after a long day at work completely unaware it was the last day of work he would ever have. He expected his wife to be cooking their dinner as she always did about the time he returned, but this evening, the kitchen was empty and she was nowhere else to be found in the house… or so he thought, until he opened the door to their bedroom and found her in bed with another man.

Carl was not able to exact his rage on the quick lothario that scrambled to the front door with his clothes falling behind him, but his wife had nowhere to go. Insane with a million questions running through his mind at the speed of light, Carl grabbed a chain from nearby and strangled his wife to death. When he was able to see through his blinding fury, he saw what he had done to his once-lovely wife and what that was going to mean for him. Carl committed suicide before dawn the next morning.

His wife’s family was not able to sympathize with Carl’s plight and they refused to forgive him for taking her away from them. He was buried in a different county where he could rot for his sins by himself.

But barely a week after Carl was buried, a series of circles started forming around his tombstone. In two months time, the circles formed what seemed to be a cross pattern of chains around his burial plot. Visitors to the grave started taking notice, and being superstitious mountain folk, it wasn’t long before they started whispering rumors to one another about what could be going on there.

A month later, some local boys rode their bikes to the cemetery to see the tombstone they had been hearing about. One boy felt the need to throw a rock at the tombstone to prove how brave he was against curses and broke off a small piece of the edge. When they were riding back home, the boy who successfully chipped the tombstone suddenly lost control of his bike and slammed into a tree. The collision somehow snapped his sprocket chain and caused it to wrap around his neck with such voracity that he couldn’t get it off. It choked him until he was dead.

Many thought the boy died of an near-impossible freak accident, but not his mother. She was well aware of the tombstone’s reputation and went to get revenge with an axe. She struck it several times but, reportedly, was not able to damage it (which seems strange considering how easy it was for her son to chip it with a rock) and left the cemetery with a weight of disappointment on her shoulders. The next day, she was found strangled to death too, by some bizarre altercation with the laundry clothesline in her backyard.

Now the neighbors were getting worried and one of them tried to take it into his own hands to stop the curse. He went to the graveyard with three members of his family, driving past it by horse and buggy, and proceeded to shoot it with his pistol (a very odd choice of weapon for a stationary stone monument). He managed to break off some more stone from the edges, but the discharge of the weapon scared the horses and they took off wildly down the road. They came to a sharp curve; the neighbor fell forward and was strangled by the trace chains of the buggy, becoming the third victim of the curse.

What in the world was going on here? The townspeople were now terrified and went so far as to pressure their congressman to do something about it. Likely rolling his eyes and groaning at the request, he at least sent two policemen to investigate and try to pacify their fears. Neither officer took the assignment seriously and mocked the curse as they took pictures and trod on the scene. When they left, one of the officers saw an orb of light following them from the cemetery in the rear view mirror. The driver lost control of the car and hit a chained link between two posts, throwing both out of the windshield. The passenger officer survived, but the driver did not. He got caught in the chain and was nearly decapitated from a mortal wound the chain inflicted on his head and neck.

The last death attributed to the tombstone came years after, as another emboldened citizen tried to break the curse by breaking the slab in the 1940s. He was also found strangled around a chain somehow.

It seemed like Carl’s writhing anger would never be satisfied. Even in death, he could not find the answer for why the love of his life betrayed him, and the darkness that festered with his twisted soul fed on his anguish until it needed more. What could stop this very literal of chain of disasters from continuing?

The fate of Carl Pruitt’s tomb today is not know for sure. Some accounts suggest that the infamy surrounding the murderous gravestone got so bad that every other person buried in the cemetery was exhumed and moved to another location until Carl’s tomb remained by itself and forgotten over time. Other accounts suggest that his lonely burial plot was finally destroyed once and for all during a strip-mining operation in 1958.

Amazingly, no deaths from the strip-mining account are reported. Was there just not a chain handy this time?

Images used in this post do not belong to me or 23 House and are not part of the original manuscript. They were pulled from Google Images or Snappy Goat and only serve as graphical decoration. They are not being used for any monetizing purposes whatsoever.

The following is one of many entries from the Phantoms Fill The Southern Skies book. I am producing it here from the original manuscript file for visitors to sample and see if they would be interested in the full text available on Amazon.

Please respect the copyright owners – Jeff Lawhead, J.S. Lawhead and 23 House Publishing – and do not reprint or reproduce any portion of this text on any monetized formats and without permission. Reproduction for hobbyist or academic interest (as well as “fair use”) is ok as long as sources are explicitly cited. Contact me at Meteo.Xavier@gmail.com for any permission inquiries regarding this or any other excerpt.

A simpler story with a more pronounced history is the story of Alice Flagg from Murrells Inlet, South Carolina in Horry County, a seaside town near Georgetown County widely touted as the “seafood capital of South Carolina”. It was once famous as a fishing town and known for its numerous Southern plantations, including the Wachesaw Plantation that was once owned by the Flagg family in the mid-19th century.

The Flaggs were a wealthy and traditional Southern dynasty led by Dr. Allard Flagg after the death of his father, the previous patriarch of the clan. He and his mother oversaw the affairs of the family as they all lived in the seaside family home, the Hermitage. Besides Allard were two other children, Dr. Arthur Flagg and Alice. Both doctors were courting two sisters of the Ward aristocrats from the neighboring Brookgreen Plantation. Alice herself became fast friends with the Ward sisters when they came over to the Hermitage during the courtship, but while she enjoyed the exquisite revelry they often had, her heart was set in more modest means with a man named John Braddock.

Braddock was not a rich man, nor was he any more renowned that any other turpentine dealer of the day. He was an honest, unpretentious, simple worker who met Alice while shopping one day in town. Later, he come to call on Alice at the Hermitage, but Dr. Allard, bewitched by the caste system of the wealthy, found the man to be wholly unsuitable for his sister and turned Braddock away from the property. When Alice learned of this, she confronted her brother and they had a major argument where he forbade her from having contact with anyone “beneath the notice of a Flagg.”

But Alice was rebellious, and invited him back to the Hermitage a few weeks later to go for a ride in his horse-drawn carriage. Soon after this, Braddock gave her an engagement ring. At the same time, Dr. Allard was conspiring with his mother and brother to find ways to “civilize” Alice, and the minute he saw the ring Braddock had given her, Allard demanded Alice remove it and give it back to her simple beau with regrets. Alice agreed only temporarily, meaning to put a ribbon through it and continue to wear it without being seen.

Not long after that, Alice was sent to school in Charleston where she continued to pine for her betrothed. She did not enjoy the change of scenery and the distance from her lover was difficult to bear.

Then, one night, as she was attending a ball at the St. Cecilia Society, Alice fell ill with what came to be diagnosed as malarial fever. Dr. Allard was called and he came to Charleston to take Alice back to the Hermitage. She laid in bed, delirious, while he packed her things, and took her back on a difficult, jostling and jolting journey that made her illness even worse. It took four days to reach their home and Alice fell into a coma.

At some point, Dr. Allard found her engagement ring and flew into a silent rage. He blamed Braddock for his sister’s illness – if it hadn’t been for him, she would never have contracted the fever. He went outside and threw the ring into a nearby creek.

The next morning, Alice awoke and clutched for the ring that she held, on the ribbon, near her heart… but it wasn’t there. Whatever she was left of her mind scrambled furiously and she clawed herself trying to find it. She called for it with what was left of her voice, but it did not return. Her reason for living was gone, and so she had nothing left to live for. She slipped back into a coma and soon died.

Today, Alice’s story is one of the most famous ghost stories of South Carolina, as her presence is still seen and felt not only in the Hermitage, but at her grave-site as well at the All Saints Waccamaw Episcopal Church. She may be seen near her grave-site, clutching her chest and continuing to look for the ring she lost alongside her life more than one-hundred-and-sixty years ago. Some people say that if you walk backwards in a circle around her grave (between eight to thirteen times) and call her name twice, she will appear before you, still trying to find that ring.

She may even tug or pull yours off if she’s jealous of the one you’re wearing…

Images used in this post do not belong to me or 23 House and are not part of the original manuscript. They were pulled from Google Images or Snappy Goat and only serve as graphical decoration. They are not being used for any monetizing purposes whatsoever.