Capering Ghost In Cemetery & The Headless Man, Debunked

 Capering Ghost In Cemetery,

 Headless Man Recall Old Days 

(Written for The Daily Item by Dr. Charles M. Steese) 

March, 1953

The "ghost" appears in folktales more often than anything else. Our superstitious ancestors seemed more than willing to believe that the "departed" were wont to return to haunt those who remained on earth.  The children were told hair raising ghost stories not only in the early days, but as late as the forepart of the present century.

 Let someone die a violent death whether by his own hand or that of an enemy, or by accidental cause and within a short time his "ghost" was sure to return to the scene of his earthly activities. These tales all had the effect of creating a horror of the dead and of the things surrounding death. No one would have thought of walking through a graveyard at night any more than they would have walked through a burning forest.

 While all of us know today that there are no ghosts, and that when one is dead they are "dead for a long time," nevertheless the ghost stories of yesteryears are interesting due to the fact that they all had their origin from something real and not from an apparition.

 How often have the noises made by the broken chains dangling from the necks of stray domestic animals struck terror to the heart. especially at night.  Then too, how many of us have seen the "swamp lights" at night and felt sure we had seen a ghost.

Recently I was talking with Sheriff John Middlesworth at, his office in the Union county court bouse and somehow the subject of ghosts came up. The Sheriff recalled a ghostly appearance from his boyhood which illustrates just what we have in mind.

 One night several boys were walking along a road which ran through a cemetery. The night was dark, but by the pale moon light one of the boys noticed something white bobbing up and rfown in the middle of the graveyard.  He called the attention of the other boys to what he had seen, and they were all terrified to hear a low wailing cry, not once but many times repeated. You may be sure that they fled at once from the vicinity of the graveyard and indeed did not stop running until they had reached their homes. The next morning the fathers of several of the boys went to investigate and to their surprise found that a full grown lamb had wandered into the cemetery and stumbled into a freshly dug grave from which it was unable to escape. This at once killed what would have been a fine ghost story. 

Another ghost of local interest was the headless man who was seen sitting at the approach to a bridge every Sunday night Many people declared they had seen this ghost and for years many more believed the story. Only recently the "ghost was laid" when it was reliably established that a confirmed old bachelor of the community was wont to wait by the bridge for his girlfriend every Sunday night, and not wishing to be recognized by others pulled his coat up over his head. The woman in question in her old age, long after the death of the bachelor, told the truth about this particular ghost. 

A ghost noise also very common in earlier times was a squeaking door hinge. We know now that all that would have been needed to settle this ghost would have been a little Three-In-One oil.

 The Indians were great believers in ghosts which they called "spirits ".  To the Red Men, appearances by departed animals and birds were more common than those of warriors who had gone to their happy hunting ground. 

Religious education has done much to remove the. superstitious beliefs about these reverants. Today when we hear the term "ghost" mentioned, we usually laugh instead of turning pale.

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