READERS TALES
Strange Stuff in North Alabama
My name is Red and I live
in North Alabama on our old family homestead. The old house was made in the late
1800's and sits on 100 acres in a privately owned and inaccessible 5000 acres
surrounded by an old wildlife refuge of about some 38000 acres. The layout of
the land here is very unforgiving in the fact that it has high cliffs, jungle
like forests, and no way to enter into the valley floor but on foot. There is an
old road that was forgotten better than 90 years ago and has since grown over
with trees and ground cover that runs the distance across this vast expanse of
land with no houses, no telephone poles, and no other roads. It used to be the
main road between what is now two major cities here in N Alabama.
Much has happened on this
old road "Back in the Day". In the 30's and 40's , moonshiners used parts of it
to hide their stills and small trails were cut to get to and from these stills.
Many men would come to get their liquor for the evening with women that were not
allowed to go to the stills as it was deemed "Not Lady Like" to go with the men
to purchase the brew and would wait at what is now our home or in the general
area of the top of one of the cliffs here. There have been many murders and many
shallow graves here as we find human bones quite often on walks and while
camping. This brings me to why I am writing you.
We have known for a long
time that strange things happen here and in the valley below. Every now and then
we witness a grey mass that has no real shape to it pass through the house. We
have no idea what it is but it always leaves a cold breeze in it's wake. The
animals refuse to go in or near the hallway when this thing appears and they
stay away for days after it shows up. The cat hisses and arches her back. The
ferrets sit and stare at the doorway to the hall and the dogs whine, bark , and
have urinated on the floor at times.
Almost always there is
shortly after this mass another event that takes place in our home. The back
door makes the sound of opening and you can follow the sound of boots walking
through the kitchen, into the dining room and living room and into the hallway,
then down the basement staircase and into the hollow of the house under where a
room deep under the house was filled in with dirt and rocks years ago.
The hole that went to the
room goes straight down around 35 feet and is covered with a huge block of
cement that has to weigh around one thousand pounds or more. While watching TV
last year with the family we heard and felt some sort of scraping and then a
house shaking thud. My oldest son and myself searched it out and found the
cement had been moved and shoved up against the wall that is part of the
foundation of the house. There beside the hole was a large pile of dirt and
rocks that had not been there before. We found it just minutes after hearing the
noise. That's when the really strange things started to happen and continue to
this day.
On just about any evening
you can go outside and hear people talking, having conversations about
everything from the weather or their plans for the evening to how much cotton
someone's family plans to harvest this season. We hear one woman talk about how
long and bumpy the ride out was and how she wishes her "Bo" would fix the seat
on the buggy. We live in a place where your voice carries but there is no one to
find talking. There are no lights here except in the house after dark yet there
is sometimes lights flickering in the barn and down one of the trails just below
the barn that leads to a nice bluff overhang and it looks out over the valley
into Tennessee.
If you go to the barn and
get in the loft you can see the women walking around waiting for their men to
return with their shine for the evening. They are not transparent but as plain
as day except for the fact that they are not there. You can hear the wagons
going up and down the old road where there is nothing but trees now. You can
hear the horses and men talking and laughing.
Three weeks ago we started
hearing children playing in the basement and the other evening while my wife was
watching TV and I was on the PC, a small child walked into the living room from
the hallway and looked around and then made eye contact with me. It sent a chill
down my spine. When I asked my wife if she had seen the child, she said that it
was our youngest son. At this same second she spoke our son's name he came in
from the kitchen where he had been making himself a sandwich. There are other
things as well but, that is for another time. We are working on a camcorder now
to get these things on tape for our old age as well as proof we're not nuts.
-Red.
