A Season of Encounters

For many years, my father’s side of the family owned large tracks of cultivated and forested land bordering the Ogeechee River in rural Screven County Georgia. During my childhood, I spent as much time with my daddy and granddaddy in the forest while they cleared scrub oaks to make way for Loblolly pines as I did up at the farmhouse across the highway, exploring the barn and the chicken yard, climbing the fallen pecan tree, searching for feral kitties under the house, and visiting with my great aunts and my grandmother…

I wasn’t afraid of much, other than the yellow-jackets that liked scuppernongs and Kiefer pears as much as I did,… or the fire-ants on the lantana, and maybe, of getting spurred by the rooster, stuck in the blackberry bushes with the snakes or coming home with chiggers and deer ticks in my hair. I did get lost in those woods one time after wandering off in search of Cousin Eugene’s ‘bee tree,’ rumored to be somewhere near the peat-bog, in the vicinity of an often-visited fat-lighter stump, and yea, that was pretty scary!

A winding creek named Henderson Mill Branch flows from the wetlands on the north side of the highway. As with Jarrell Pond to the east, speculation is those wetlands may be similar in formation to what’s known as an ancient Carolina Bay, and fed by natural springs. Traveling under a tiny bridge on the highway, the creek runs perpendicular to the former continuation of Cameron Road—a sandy shady lane, now gated and closed to the public, that used to lead to the Central of Georgia railway-junction settlement of Cameron, just up from the Ogeechee River. That creek still meanders to the East of the lane and the large tract of field and woodlands that my daddy once purchased from the aunties. It was sold in the mid-eighties after his stroke.

Past the front field, a long ways into the woods, was a smaller area of swampy wetlands, also fed by a natural spring. When I was ten, Daddy contracted with a backhoe crew to dig out a pond with a dam and spillway that channeled the overflow in the general direction of the river. After stocking it with bass, bream, and catfish, he added a wooden dock, bought a small fishing boat, and over the course of several years, built a slab-based, two-bedroom structure less than five hundred feet from the water.

Constructed with the help of a local man named Bill Williams, a skilled carpenter and my daddy’s lifelong friend, the modest frame house with its great-room fireplace and basic corner kitchen perfectly complemented the locale that become a sanctuary from Daddy’s work-a-day world and taxing role as a public accountant. An avid sportsman from his youth, he hunted and fished, and he cooked, in fact, our family of five— he, ma, sis, bro, and me, enjoyed almost everything he brought home, and Mama let him prepare it. He grilled venison steaks in the fall, and made Southern-style bird suppers with grits in the winter smothered in savory quail or dove gravy, … and there were always plenty of fried fish with hushpuppies on the side. In those days, I hated the chopped onions he mixed into the batter, but looked forward to the fried red-breasted bream and large-mouthed bass— fresh and frozen they were regular entrées, as well sassy catfish stew with oven-baked cast-iron cornbread for soppin’. The birds and the fish were a chore to clean, but they were also, as we say down South, … mighty fine-eatin’!

Now, out at the auntie’s farmhouse in Screven County, they always set a place at the table for my granddaddy on my daddy’s side, but he preferred to eat on the bench in the back yard, … and when he wasn’t cleaning typewriters and fixing office equipment, he was roaming the woods, motor-boating the great ‘Geechee, or just paddling around the pond. And he liked to feed the fry off the dock while he was sitting there fishing, and, believe me— he didn’t miss much! Alone one summer evening, cane-pole in hand, he spotted a young alligator’s eyes shining above the lily pads. He named this newest resident up from the swamp, Oscar Albert, and told us all about him. The critter eventually grew so much they had to call the game warden to relocate it.

The year I brought my dog Sweetie Pie— “Sweetie” for short— to stay at the pond house, Granddaddy said he was the smartest dog around, the best snake-router ever, but it was a good thing Oscar Albert was gone, that even the smartest of hounds would be no match for a big hungry gator.

Granddaddy told lots of stories about the wild creatures he came across, and he was also known to embellish, but his tales were told with a twinkling eye and meant to delight more than frighten. He never mentioned the Georgia wood booger, nor the local swamp-witch, nor the eerie lights that used to move around the far side of the pond in the wee hours, nor did my daddy— eventually, I found out about them myself. Of course, if something doesn’t bother you, you tend to take it with a grain of salt, ‘specially when the ones doing the talking have buddied-up to a few beers or draughts of whiskey to escape whatever else was on their minds.

Anyhow, like I said, I wasn’t raised to be afraid of much, …but I did learn how to whistle, and like King Solomon says in the Bible, “to everything … there is a season.”

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During my college days, I had the pleasure of living out at the pond house— at times by myself with the dog for company, at other times, with friends. On one chilly winter evening, two friends and I were coming home from town in my Maverick. As we turned off the highway onto the one-lane dirt road that led through the field toward the pond, we felt like we were being followed. At first, that was all it was— just a feeling. Night was falling, but the view from both sides of the car was wide open. There was nothing out in front in the high beams, nor in the red taillights behind. Nevertheless, about halfway through the field, and quite out of nowhere, what seemed like an invisible ‘presence,’ apparently forceful enough to make itself known, ran up close to the driver’s door, and playfully bounded alongside as we drove … at fifteen miles an hour.

Near the spot where the field ended and the woods began, I had to stop to unlock the gate, push it open, drive the car through,…then, close the gate and relock it. Whatever was following us also stopped, and it waited, and when we started moving again, it continued to track behind us through the woods all the way to the house. At that time, my daddy hadn’t yet added the screened-porch as pictured above, and you could drive straight up to park out front, which we did— along with a quick two-step out of the car and a fast-bolt to the door. Talk about a ‘weird-out!’

Once inside, discussing what we thought we’d encountered, the three of us agreed it seemed like some kind of large animal and hopefully friendly, because as crazy as it sounds even now, for all we knew, it was a baby woolly mammoth, the size of a bison, surely nothing smaller than a big lumbering wolf. Given we were stone-cold sober, and not drunk or ‘high,’ the idea that we’d each received such a distinctly similar impression all at the same time was disconcerting. We hadn’t seen anything to identify it, but we felt it. The best way to describe it may be to say, the “spirit of the thing”… had weight.

Reluctant to let Sweetie out, though he’d been inside all day, I cracked the back door enough for him to slip through and nervously awaited his return. One of the friends finally mentioned the possibility that our collective ‘perceptions’ may have been prompted by our fireside ‘read-aloud’ from H. P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness and Other Tales of Terror some nights before. “I mean, baby mammoths?” He snickered.

We laughed. Maybe so, and come to think of it, the temperature outside was dropping— it was time to rekindle the fire, and get on with the evening, so we throttled our imaginations, and slept okay that night.

Then, as if the first episode weren’t crazy enough, what took place several nights later was totally bizarre. Again, the galloping ‘phantom’ joined us in the field, paused at the forest gate, and accompanied us to the house. The moment we entered, however, another invisible entity, only smaller like a bat or a bird, flew out of the cold fireplace and frantically jumped from wall to wall. Again, we didn’t see it. We felt it. At that point, whatever it was outside seemed to have a serious burst of kinetic energy. Abandoning its post somewhere beyond the front door, it barreled around the house pulsating like an electric train while the smaller thing cowered in the top-most corner of the ceiling shielded by the rafters as though it were afraid— not of us, but of the jolly romper outside.

As we stood there wondering how it might be possible to collectively imagine not just one, but two spectral ‘freak-shows,’ the frenzied activity stopped, and was replaced by a complete and eerie stillness, inside the house, and out. Had the ‘conflict’ simply ended? Who knows?

I don’t recall how well we slept that night, but the curious ordeal was over. We never encountered those two again, nor did we sense anything more that winter— not at the house, nor in the field—at least, not that we discussed. Then, due to circumstances beyond our control, at the beginning of Spring quarter, my friends and I had to move back to town, and Sweetie had to stay at the pond.

But that wasn’t the end of the strangeness out there. No sir-ree!

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