Appalachian History

This is the story of the hainted house down by Mrs. Grundy’s house.

Well children, I’ll begin the evening of the quilting bee. When John and me was first married, the married women of the neighborhood all belonged to a club called the Quilting Bee. They met the first week after we’s married and invited me to join the club.

Well, I went to the Quilting Bee and all met at Mrs. Shutt’s, Aunt Mary as everybody called her. She lived in the house that is called the Hainted House now. This was one winter evening and Aunt Mary had a great big fire in the fireplace. We was sitting around the fire piecing quilt tops as fast as fingers could fly. The talk was flying thick and fast as fingers, or faster.

Then Granny Tucker began to talk about secrets. Granny Tucker said, “No one ever kept a secret all their lives without telling hit,” and she said if one person ever knowed anything that nobody else knowed that they always told one other person, at least, before they died.

Well, Aunt Mary rose and said, “I don’t believe this, for I have kept a secret all of sixty-five year without telling hit.”
We hushed and listened to her. Everybody knowed she was wanting to say something special.

“This,” Aunt Mary went on to say, “is my secret. All you kind people remember my good husband Tom, and have wondered why he left me to make a living alone. The fact is he never left me at all. He is still here---right in this house. Fact is Tom is in this very room.”

At this the women looked nervousness around. Aunt Mary never cracked a smile. She waited a second and then went on. “No, don’t look, for you can’t see him. He hain’t alive. He is dead, for I killed him with my own hands sixty-five year ago. I have kept my secret for sixty-five year, and if it wa’n’t for you---“ pointing at Granny Tucker, “I wouldn’t have never told it. Oh, well, it makes mighty little difference anyway. I may as well tell you the rest of it.

“Tom come in one night---the very night he disappeared---and told me he was tired of living here and wanted to move west. I didn’t want to go, and then Tom told me he had a good bit of money saved. I didn’t know he had. Well, he said it amounted to about a thousand dollars in all. I was already mad, and I became very angry when he told me this. I decided, with the place and that money, I could do without Tom purty well, and before Tom knowed what I was doing I grabbed the poker and hit him over the head. He fell, and I bent over and found he was dead.

Dear Reader: Please take a close look at the original version of this photograph. You’ll notice that the blue blob you see in the fireplace is NOT something I added! Trick of the light, OR…?

“Tom had been working on the fireplace and I put him in the opening that was there, and I finished the fireplace, a little at a time. Some of you know I went to my sister’s and stayed after I told that Tom had left me, and by slipping back and fixing a little at a time I soon had Tom sealed in. He is there now. If you don’t believe me, you can open the fireplace and see for yourselves.”

The tale broke up the Quilting Bee, and the women went home and sent their husbands back to find if what Aunt Mary told was true. Part of the men dug out around the fireplace and tore it down, and sure enough, there was a man’s bones behind the jamb rock. The law come to take Aunt Mary away but when they begun to look for her they found she was gone. Finally, they found her dead in the attic. She died the night she told her secret.

People tell now that you can hear Aunt Mary and Tom fussing about midnight if you will go and stand outside the house. No one will live there now. It is believed that the house is hainted.


"The Hainted House," from South from Hell-fer-Sartin: Kentucky Mountain Folk Tales, compiled by Leonard W. Roberts, Univ of Ky Press, Lexington, KY, 1955

Halloween’s tomorrow. Here’s a little haint tale for the occasion from Putnam County, Tennessee.

About one mile and a half east of Cookeville the Buck Mountain Road is crossed by the old Sparta-Livingston Road. Turning to the left here and going about a quarter of a mile in the direction of Livingston one reaches the scene of the noted ante-bellum mystery. The large and dismal swamp that once covered several acres on either side of the road is now only a memory, due to the propensity of modern man to clear, drain and cultivate the soil. But the name, "Booger Swamp," still clings to the spot after nearly three-quarters of a century.

One dark night in the early fifties a well-known minister of the gospel, whose name is not essential to our story, was passing this lonely spot on horseback, when suddenly an apparition appeared before him—or, at least, he said it did. After a great deal of discussion and several futile efforts to induce the spook- seeing brother to retract his story, he was finally arraigned in a formal church court and tried, convicted and expelled from the ministry. According to his story, the apparition was a pure white body floating about a yard above the ground and "about the size and length of a weaver’s beam," to use his exact language. It made some effort to communicate with him, but his horse became unruly and dashed away.

A History of Putnam County, Tennessee by Walter S. McClain, Cooksville, Tenn., Quimby Dyer & Company [c1925]

A "haint" is an unsettled or angry dead spirit; the term, like "hag," is of Germanic-British origins. A haint can range from a ghost to an undefinable something that scares the bejeevers out of you. In the same way a haint tale covers everything from a ghost story to a yarn about an odd event. A haint tale doesn't even have to be scary; some are quite funny. But there are two common ingredients shared by every haint tale. One is that it must involve frightening a character, the listener, or both. The other is that it must include the supernatural, or supernatural overtones. Sometimes it can be a normal event perceived as supernatural, but the paranormal must get mixed in there somehow or other.


source: http://tinyurl.com/24xeun