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This is Halloween week, and it seems to be a good time to feature some truly spine tingling stories and music. Not horror stories, but crime stories, the telling inspired by old folk ballads.
FWIW, we have a full moon this week, on Saturday night, October 31.
I was in a Books-A-Million store in Mississippi when I first encountered Sharyn McCrumb’s work. Her book, She Walks These Hills was on prominent display. I flipped through it and knew immediately I had to read it.
It is the story of an escaped convict with dementia and the spirit of a young woman. Both are trying to find their way home to a place that no longer exists. The place names alone pulled at me: Roan Mountain, Northeast Correctional Complex prison, East Tennessee State University, and many others places with which I am intimately familiar.
Strangely, rocks on Roan Mountain play a role in this novel. The embedded green serpentine in the stones on the ancient Roan Mountain massif can be found snaking its way up the Appalachians, in outcroppings across the north Atlantic, on into in the Scottish Highlands.
“Oh, Son, hardly anybody wants to leave. These mountains are more than just a place for folks around here.”
“Mountains have long-lost kinfolk on the other side of the Atlantic. The bloodline that marks that kinship is a vein of a green mineral called Serpentine.”
She Walks These Hills was my introduction to Ms. McCrumb’s muse. She gets inspiration from old folk ballads, many of them from Scotland and Ireland. This one is no different:
Sometime later, I met Sharyn McCrumb at the Grandfather Mountain Highland Games. She was signing books and chatting with passersby. I took the time to introduce myself. We had a long talk about the mystery of Frankie Silver, who was hung for the murder of her husband, Charlie Silver. Frankie was a small slip of a girl, still a teenager, when her young husband went missing. Later, body parts started turning up all over the surrounding landscape. Evidence suggests Charlie was likely abusive, and she whacked him with an axe.
Charlie was buried as they found him, so he has three graves in the family cemetery at the Silver Baptist Church in Kona, NC.
The question became, how did this small young woman manage to butcher Charlie and dispose of his body without help. The Ballad of Frankie Silver tries to address that question.
Incidentally, Frankie was the first woman to be hanged in North Carolina. The year was 1831, so the hanging was a public event. When the Sheriff asked Frankie if she had any last words, her father shouted from the crowd, “Die with it in ye girl...”
If Frankie had intended to say anything, she held it back.
Her family took her body after the execution. They buried her next to the Yellow Mountain Road near Roan Mountain. Her grave is marked and still there.
I have been to visit the three graves of Charlie Silver at the little Baptist church, seen in this video. It is a somber place.
Her most recent book is The Unquiet Grave.
“The well-researched history of West Virginia’s Greenbrier Ghost, the only case in America in which the testimony of a ghost convicted the killer.”
It involves the work of Dr. James Boozer, the first black psychiatrist in the area. He treated attorney James P. D. Gardner, who had been hospitalized following a suicide attempt. Dr. Boozer got his patient to talk about his life and law practice over more than four decades. Some of this story emerged from those “talking therapy” sessions.
James P. D. Gardner was the first black attorney in that area. He practiced law in West Virginia for more than forty years. Gardner defended a white man on trial for the murder of his young bride. That was an unusual case in which the State’s case was based on the testimony of a ghost.
Zona Hester Shue was a beautiful young woman, 24 years of age. She died, allegedly from injuries sustained in a fall. A month after the funeral, Zona’s mother insisted she had been murdered. The prosecutor was not happy with Mama’s pressure, but the body was exhumed anyway. The autopsy confirmed what Zona’s mother said; she had been murdered.
When asked how she knew, Zona’s mother replied, “She told me.” Zona Hester spoke to her mother from the grave, confirming her cause of death, and who killed her.
The husband, Erasmus Trout Shue, was tried and convicted on the testimony of his late wife, speaking from the grave. He died in prison of the flu, during the influenza epidemic of 1900.
The single most horrific story told by Sharyn McCrumb was inspired by the old ballad, The Rosewood Casket.
Randall Stargill's four son's came home to their mountain farm as their father is dying. He left orders for them to build to build a coffin for him. This study in family dynamics requires the brothers who don’t see eye to eye on much of anything, to construct a casket of the rosewood their father has left them for the purpose.
Nora Bonesteel, easily the most interesting recurring character in all McCrumb’s books, is a woman of Scottish ancestry. Like many of her forebears, Nora has the gift of “second sight.” You will find people on both sides of the Atlantic with this gift, which at times may seem to be more a curse than a gift to those who have it. They may “see” things they prefer not to see.
Nora Bonesteel recalls the little girl she “saw” playing in the area when she herself was a child. Later, Nora brings a small rosewood box, with instructions that it be buried with Randall Stargill. What happens next takes the story to another level. The little rosewood casket contains the bones of a child. How those bones came to be in that little casket is a horror story in and of itself.
What makes it even more painful is the fact those bones are based on a true crime story from these hills: The Legend of Nance Dude.
In the winter of 1913, Nance Dude was found guilty of causing the death of her 2-year-old granddaughter by sequestering the child in a cave in Haywood County, North Carolina. Nance Dude was easily the most hated woman in the Eastern United States at the time.
I worked with Sharyn on her Ballad of Tom Dooley. She had some trouble making the sociopathic Anne Melton realistic, so we worked on some dialogue and the ending of the book. She jokes that I am Anne’s therapist, which is how she introduces me if I go to one of her book signings.
Finally, Sharyn McCrumb has a keen sense of the human condition, along with a rapier wit. Some of her quotes that I like:
“If You Sent American Beer Out To Be Analyzed, The Lab Would Probably Phone Up And Say, 'Your Horse Has Diabetes’.”
“Elvis is bound to be dead. Look at all the vultures in his vicinity.”
“Trying to act normal is the most unnatural behavior of all.”
Wednesday Lagniappe:
If Ever I Return, Pretty Peggy O was Sharyn McCrumb’s first effort at a novel based on a ballad.
This is for my own Deadhead Princess, Sockpuppet, and all the Deadheads out there.
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