I went to visit the extended family of my stepmother. They live in the Deep DEEP South, with family going back generations in their area. I won’t name the exact place but it is the zone that gave rise to both The Free Masons AND the KKK. 😅 So needless to say, there’s a lot of history to the area, and it ain’t all good. 😅
One night I go out joyriding with my step-cousins, who I can honestly say were just the sweetest guys I probably ever hung out with, so respectful and genuinely interested in showing me around their stomping grounds. Once they’d shown me around for a couple hours, telling me wild tales of the folklore and actual history of the area, they said “Hey, you wanna see something really crazy?”
I said “Heck yeah!”
So we drove way out into these woods. They refused to tell me anything until we reached the mystery destination. These woods were very thick with deciduous trees, all growing very skinny and straight, trying to reach the light. Eventually we stopped in an area that was all skinny, straight trees on our left side and a sheer cliff face towering upwards on our right. There was a lot of moonlight that night, so we could see, along the cliff face were these huge black circles all in a row.
My cousin started explaining that in daylight you can see that they’re not black circles, like painted on which is kinda how they looked in the dark. No, they were caves that had been dug out of the side of the cliff during the civil war. The local slave owners had used them to “dispose of” hundreds of slaves.
This next part is almost too horrible to say, but they drove these poor souls into those caves, then set them on fire and unalived all of those who tried to run back out. The blackness we saw was the permanent char on the cave interiors. They wanted to save ammunition, and they did NOT want “their slaves” to be freed by the (now-winning) Union Forces.
My cousin was telling me all of this, and the atmosphere in the car suddenly got reeeeally heavy. All our baby hairs started standing on end, goosebumps all around, and just a strange thickness in the air. Suddenly we all looked at the car clock and realized it was only a few minutes til midnight.
I said “Guys, I really think we should get out of here. I don’t want these spirits to think we’re disrespecting them.” They all eagerly agreed and we turned the car around to leave. As we drove the small road out through the dense forest, for the first mile or so, I could see, quite clearly, hundreds of spirits, many of them children, none of them with a stitch of clothing, running through the trees along the road, keeping pace with the car (which would be impossible for a living human).
It broke my heart but it also terrified me. I told the others but they were too afraid to look. But I looked. I cried for them, and I said a prayer for their souls, apologized for their horrendous treatment in life, apologized for our intrusion, and begged safe passage. Eventually they just sort of evaporated. I’ll never forget the shapes of their countless bodies, and the feeling I could almost hear their voices.
Someday I hope to return there and study the history more closely.