Spanish Moss and Friendly Ghosts
Revisiting a local folk legend from my childhood.
For a brief period when I was in the second grade, I was deathly terrified of ghosts. It all started when one of my classmates, Elizabeth was her name, brought in a book by local author Kathryn Tucker Windham called 13 Alabama Ghosts and Jeffrey. I didn’t have to read the book for it to creep me out as much as it did, not that I would have been able to anyway since I hadn’t fully graduated from picture books at the time.
Elizabeth, mean little girl that she was, seemed to delight in making me afraid of these ghost stories, even though she couldn’t fully read them herself. She showed me a photo in the book of a young woman with a vaguely person-shaped shadow behind her and said, with glee, “Look Arin! It’s Jeffrey!” At the tender age of seven, I was very gullible and afraid of pretty much everything, so, needless to say, it scared me. My other classmates tried to allay my fears by convincing me that ghosts weren’t real, and it almost worked, until Elizabeth fell out of her chair and exclaimed, “Ouch! Jeffrey pushed me!” At that point, I started crying.
From that point on, I avoided Elizabeth as much as I could. She wasn’t a very nice little girl, spectral fear-mongering aside, but after the Jeffrey incident, I wanted nothing to do with her. I was still forced to sit near her because our teacher assigned our seats, but I didn’t talk to her. That didn’t matter to Elizabeth, though. She knew I had become afraid of ghosts and she still tried to find ways to torment me.
“You know that gray stuff that hangs from trees?” she said, to no one in particular, “That’s where ghosts live.”
I knew she was just trying to scare me again, but I also knew she had to be right. The gray stuff hung from every tree in all of the cemeteries in Selma, and everyone knows that cemeteries are haunted. The gray stuff also hung from this huge oak tree in my own backyard. I couldn’t believe it: my house was haunted!
I tried to hold it together for as long as I could, and for a second grader, that meant about one afternoon. The next morning, as my mom was doing my hair, I started crying.
“What’s the matter, Arin?” She asked me in her mom voice.
“I don’t want Jeffrey to get me!” I said, between choking sobs.
“Who’s Jeffrey?”
“The ghost!”
“Honey, ghosts aren’t real.”
“Yes they are! Elizabeth told me!”
My mom took me by the shoulders. “Arin, no ghosts are gonna get you because you’re God’s child and God protects all his children. Now stop crying.” She smooched my forehead, wiped my face, and continued plaiting my hair as the theme song of The Fairly Odd Parents played on my old, dial-operated TV. When I got to school that morning, my mom talked to my teacher about the incident, and my teacher scolded Elizabeth for tormenting me and separated us.
My fear of ghosts didn’t end in the second grade. I think I still had some lingering fear of them all the way into high school. I made an effort to avoid the Travel Channel when channel-surfing because all of the ghost hunting shows that were featured and a new nugget of paranormal knowledge I had acquired from there: orbs. In reality, this optical phenomenon is called backscatter and it’s harmless air particles reflected in pictures by a camera’s flash. However, some Travel Channel paranormalist grifter convinced young me those little dust particles were actually spirits of the dead. Being that my family had many pictures in photo albums taken with cheap disposable cameras, and some of those pictures had a little backscatter, I, of course, freaked out.
At the end of the 5th grade, my class held an end-of-elementary-school luncheon at Sturdivant Hall, a stately Greek Revival-style mansion in the heart of Old Town. Beforehand, we were taught proper dining ettiqute — how to hold a knife and fork, which hand to hold them with, what angle to hold your arms when cutting into a piece of meat, how big that piece of mean should be when you cut it. During these practices, though, when we learned where we would be dining, rumors began swirling. "Did you know? Sturdivant Hall is haunted." This time around, at the ripe old age of nine, I kept it together a little bit better than when I was seven. I managed to keep my cool as I entered Sturdivant Hall, marveling at the opulent black-and-white marble floors. Not a peep came from me as I cut into my chicken fingers with my utensils in the right hands, my arms at the right angle. I didn't dare venture further into the manor, though. The place was haunted, after all.
Sturdivant Hall was far from the only place in Selma that supposedly harbored specters. There's the St. James Hotel, reportedly home to a lovely Victorian-era couple and their little spectral dog. The Old Live Oak Cemetary — you know, that place where that one Alabama lawmaker got caught having a birthday bash for Nathan Bedford Forrest (who isn't even buried there) and the place from where Jefferson Davis' chair was stolen — is apparently lousy with ghosts. I would also hazard a guess that Old Cahawba, a ghost town in rural Dallas County, is also probably haunted, just because it's old.
Come to think of it, the entire city of Selma is haunted. The ghosts of Jim Crow still linger heavy in the air following Bloody Sunday and the five-day-long protest that lead to the re-segregation of Selma schools, furthering a racial divide that continues to this day. A despair hangs in the air in Selma — not because of ghouls or specters, but because of economic downturn and worsening quality of life that has steadily progressed for my entire twenty-two years of living.
Nowadays, I’m not afraid of ghosts. I also now know what the gray stuff is: it’s called Spanish moss, and ghosts do not, in fact, live in Spanish moss because ghosts aren’t real.
The connection between Spanish moss and death actually seems to come from an old legend about a colonial woman named Alice Riley. The story goes that Alice and her husband, two Irish immigrants who started living in Savannah, Georgia in the mid-1700s, allegedly murdered their tyrannical employer — the first murder in the newly-formed Georgia colony — and were hung for it. Alice, who was pregnant at the time, was hung after giving birth and took three days to die. In Wright Square where she was executed, the trees bear no Spanish moss, which is unusual for Savannah. Because of this, it is said that Spanish Moss will not grow where innocent blood was spilled. How this legend morphed into "ghosts live in Spanish moss" is unclear. You have to admit, thoguh, the stuff is inherently spooky-looking. When you couple that with the fact that Southern live oaks decorated with Spanish moss can be found in cemeteries and old plantations across the southeast, the connection is easily made.
I feel a little silly now being afraid of Jeffrey in particular. According to Kathhryn Tucker Windham, Jeffrey was actually not very malicious. All he would do is make a little noise during the day and rearrange some furniture. In fact, I might actually benefit from having Jeffrey around. According to Windham’s daughter Dilcy, “There would be rearranging of furniture — and I’m not talking about just a chest of drawers sliding across the wall, this was honest-to-God interior decorating.” With the current barren state of my apartment, having Jeffrey around could certainly wow my guests.