A True Ghost Story

Whistling Past.

I know, because it happened to me. Let me preface this recollection by pointing out that I'm a bit of a skeptic when it comes to 'phenomena.' While I'm firmly convinced that there's a spiritual realm that touches the physical one and that we're all created to be aware of that, I'm not in a hurry to subscribe to the notion that there are unquiet shades of the departed lurking around ready to freak the holy hell out of us. That said, I got the holy hell freaked right on out of me one autumn afternoon in 1992. I was living in an extremely rural part of western Tennessee, near the small community of Olive Hill, just a few miles inside the Hardin County line. The road that fronted my farm descended off the ridgetop from Highway 64; patchy blacktop lasted about a mile into 'the holler' and then gave way to about sixteen miles of dirt and gravel cutting through rich bottomland between Indian Creek and Dry Creek. About a quarter mile from my driveway was an old logging road that had been improved by some unknown landowner far at the top of the ridge behind my property and for a short distance, the woods at the very back of my thirty-nine acres ran along bordered by that road. I was in the habit of riding my mountain bike up that slope occasionally and then turning at the top for a very fast and jittery slalom down the clay-and-chert surface, ending with a sharp right turn adjacent to a little Mennonite church that sat just off the main road. One particular day, around this time of the season and thirteen years ago, I was just beginning to toil up that road with the little church on my right and an old fencerow with a monstrous stand of blackberry bramble overgrowing it on my left. Very suddenly, I heard (or thought I did) a single word spoken: it was a name, and I thought I understood it to be 'McEachern'...I knew a family by that name back in south Georgia...but there was no one anywhere around, and in any case, the voice I heard was soft and conversational, not shouted as if I had overheard it from a distance. I can't explain exactly why but I felt compelled to stop my bike and pull off the side of the logging road for a moment. I was very uneasy and looked off into the woods, wondering if there was someone just off the road in the thick stands of maple, oak, and hickory that grew heavy up in those hollers. I didn't see anyone. I did see something I'd never noticed before: about twenty feet into the woods, an old and unkempt collection of headstones, partially enclosed by a rusty knee-high ironwork fence. As it happens, I'm fascinated by old cemetaries and I didn't waste any time hopping over the little barrier and wandering slowly among the old, worn markers, my experience of just a moment before dismissed as nothing and fading away. Most of the headstones were too worn for any words to be made out, with just a few mossy, curved indentions to suggest that once upon a time, someone marked someone's passing with these little monuments. There were two headstones near the corner of the little plot farthest from the logging road that seemed to be in better shape than the rest...even in the shade I could see from several paces away that there was legible writing on both. When I knelt beside the first one, I felt as if the ground tilted sharply underneath me and my hands tingled and grew damp. There, in a smart and stylish serif lettering was a single word...a name. McLern. When I repeated it out loud, I knew straightaway that was the name I had heard in my head at the bottom of the hill. I had never encountered that name before and haven't encountered it since, except in my memory of that day. Two McLern brothers lie under those two headstones in that little cemetary in Hardin County, Tennessee. I don't remember the name of the brother farthest from the road, but James was the man's name whose grave I knelt beside first. If memory serves he was born in 1814 and died in 1878. His two daughters penned this poem and had it engraved on his marker: 'Rest, dear father, our steps wake thee not Here by thy grave, a consecrated spot Sweet be thy slumber in the narrow cell And soft thy pillow; father, farewell.' Did something of James' spirit remain, strong and willful enough to speak his name into my consciousness that day? I only know that having heard his name, I'll never forget him.