A Season of Visitations

The first weekend of June 1972, my daddy was going to Screven County and said he could help me put some things into storage if I wanted to drive out later after class. I’d started summer school with a lighter schedule, though again, I’d be forced to drop out, but on this pleasant Friday, I seemed to be holding my own. Clothes, books, and other possessions I’d abruptly left at the pond were now boxed and shuffled into the rear bedroom, and it was time to go through them. Daddy would be leaving after supper, but since the folks up at the farm house were just a call away, I packed with the intention of staying a night, or two, depending on how I felt once I got out there.

Late spring was a special time in the country. It was already hot, but nothing like the steam furnace of July and August. The dirt lane through the field was dry and dotted with spindly weeds. The rows on both sides of it were ankle-high with corn and soybean plants. From the gate on, flowering chickweed and ripening blackberries lined the berm. The woods were lush with fresh undergrowth. The fragrant pines sported new cones. As you neared the pond, you caught glimpses of the water up ahead through the trees, glistening in the afternoon sun—without a doubt, you could smell it.

From the dock they heard the car. Barking loudly, Sweetie ran to meet it. Granddaddy hailed me with his boat paddle. Daddy waved and pointed to a new aluminum storage shed he’d hauled out and placed near the northwest side of the house. He’d scheduled a time to pour the concrete for a covered carport and was plotting to add the screened porch to the front of the house in the future.

As usual, I parked my yellow Maverick at the front door, and Sweetie followed me inside. The back bedroom’s stack of boxes might take time to clear, but the front bedroom looked the same. My tie-dyed linen curtains still hung in the rollout windows—the dayglow blues, greens, and sunburst reds and yellows, were as vivid as ever. Carolyn and I, and one of my trailer mates had hand-dipped them two summers ago. They’d turned out so well that we’d gone on to dip every plain cotton shirt we could find, and much like the sand candles, the results were most gratifying. When I moved, the curtains came with me, in fact, they’d go where ever I went, at least for a while. Eventually, the trailer in town, now occupied by Daddy, and my brother, would also make it to the pond.

I tossed my bag onto the bed, and the dog and I went to the dock. Daddy and Granddaddy had already caught a mess of fish, enough to fry for supper, so we set off on a quick hike to the far side of the dam. From there, you could see .. and hear … everything. And if you sat quietly and waited long enough, above the sound of water falling into the spillway, you could hear all of critters that had gone silent upon your arrival start-up talking again. By dark, their conversations would drown-out everything else, but today was not the day to wait around to listen.

It was easy to sort through the clothes in the back bedroom. I wore the same ones over and over—jeans, jean shorts, tee shirts, tennis shoes, sandals—most of which were already in town. But there were plenty of knickknacks and keepsakes to repack. And record albums, forty-fives, eight-tracks, cassettes, I’d been collecting since grammar school. Letters, cards, posters, and photographs, and stacks of hardcover and paperback books – textbooks, art and music books, how-to manuals, novels, and newspapers and yearbooks, and publications like The Great Speckled Bird, National Lampoon, Mad, and Rolling Stone. These had come directly from the trailer. I hadn’t planned on unpacking them until I had another ‘home’ in which to put them, but right now, it wasn’t happening. Besides, I had to get well first, and evidently, I’d succumbed to some mighty worrisome ailments.

As I sat cross-legged on the floor, I came across a little book entitled Thought Forces—Essays Selected From The White Cross Library written by Prentice Mulford and first published in 1913. My London friend, Chris, gave it to me the day before the Amesbury accident. I’d meant to give it back before I left the ward at Salisbury, but I never saw him again. Much like The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale, only written many years earlier, it speaks of the strong influence that personal thoughts have on physical and spiritual wellbeing, stressing the importance of learning to control one’s thought-life as a matter of life and death. These were ideas worthy of serious consideration—far more than I’d presently given them, I’m afraid. I’d just cherry-picked the parts I liked.

Growing up, I was tagged, “multitalented, impressionable, serious-minded, strong-willed.” More likely it was a polite way of saying I chose drawing, story-writing, playing piano, reading books, and daydreaming over solving word problems, or paying attention in class, and I used to be late, a lot. Drawing was a special gift, but music played its part. By age three, I was singing and reciting narrations. At age nine, when my mama’s Aunt Mary left her upright Story and Clark at our house, I composed a little ditty and wrote it down note-by-note. My folks recorded me playing it on the piano, and sent it off to have it pressed into a record, but I played everything by ear—even after Mama took me to piano lessons, in fact, I didn’t learn to sight-read staff-music until I was in college. But when rock ‘n’ roll came along, I jumped on board, and it was the same with every other genre over the years—I loved them whether I ever managed to learn to perform them or not. Supposedly, righthanded, I played guitar upside down and backward, and when I played piano, my left hand always seemed to pick up what my right hand was still trying to figure out. You might say I was somewhat, ‘semi-ambidextrously impaired.’

My sweet mama was a music lover, and a singer. She sang at music club and church, and at times with local legend, Emma Kelly. At times, she sang with me—at church, Kiwanis Capers, and various social events. She started working at the college when I was nine as Assistant to the President, and moved to the music department when I was ten. I recall her bringing home a xylophone that we kept covered on the porch because there was no place to store it in the old music building on campus. They’d just constructed the new fine arts building the summer I started. My freshman class was first to set foot in it, but long before I got to college I knew a lot of music students, not to mention, Gran also worked at the college. All of the house mothers were her card-playing friends which meant there was no getting in trouble without the whole place knowing about it. On the other hand, my daddy did accounting work for everybody in town, and traded out services with many of his business clients including clothing stores, movie theaters, and restaurants. When I needed something, I just signed the receipt, and the amount was deducted from what the merchant owed. Some call that small-town privilege. I definitely agree, but believe me, my workaholic daddy paid for every dime and seldom complained when we took it for granted. I still think about that, a lot.

Anyhow,.. other books caught my eye. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry had been given to me as a birthday present. I’d purchased The Book of the Law by Alister Crowley, and Lady Sheba’s Book of Shadows by Jessie Wicker Bell at a bookstore while researching the topic of witches for an American Literature class and a term paper on the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, in particular, the short-story, Young Goodman Brown, a tale that first appeared anonymously in the April 1835 issue of The New-England Magazine, then under the author’s name in a collection published in 1846.entitled, Mosses From An Old Manse. When it came to piercing the darkness, Hawthorne might have gotten to me as much as Ray Bradbury, had I not been so distracted that quarter.

In one publication on the modern-day practice of witchcraft, the writer had coopted a line from The Little Prince that reads, “You’re responsible forever for what you have tamed.” While I agreed with the concept of individual responsibility, I questioned the idea that anything could necessarily be tamed. I got the “Do what thou wilt” part, too, but as fascinated as I was by the occult, had I ever found a coven to join, I’d have been more interested in communing with nature than controlling spiritual forces or mastering spells. I was into ‘vibes’ and herbs, not magic. Besides, beyond my Methodist upbringing, or what I’d picked up in Girl Scouts, International Rainbow for Girls, or even Campus Crusade for Christ, any serious leadings along ‘mystical lines’ had been temporarily and ideologically redirected.  

Down in Southeast Georgia, I was in high school when Buffalo Springfield came out with For What It’s Worth. An avid Bob Dylan, The Beatles, and Moody Blues fan since eighth grade, I may have loved the latest British ‘mod’ fashions and wore my hair long and straight like Mary Travers, but all I knew was that people out in San Francisco had morphed from folk music Beatniks into free-wheeling Hippies, and were running around with flowers in their hair, smoking dope, carrying protest signs, and calling for peace. For the most part, the Viet Nam war was a distant drum to my 1967 high school graduating class. Then, came ‘the draft.’

By election day in 1968, many college students I knew were ready to vote for McGovern and angry about what went down at the Chicago Democrat Convention. Some of them idealized Students for a Democratic Society from afar, but hardly aligned with the Weathermen. They weren’t ready to call themselves revolutionaries just because they disagreed with how the government did things. I didn’t go to Woodstock in August of 1969 or to the Atlanta Pop Festival the following week, but I did attend a three-day music festival held outside of Hollywood/Palm Beach, Florida on Thanksgiving weekend. It was loads of fun, finally crashing in a big tent with twenty other people and getting doused with DDT—the music was great though. A similar billing of artists performed at each of these festivals, including Jefferson Airplane, The Rolling Stones, The Byrds, Janis Joplin with Big Brother and the Holding Company, Jimi Hendrix, Sly and the Family Stone, Johnny Winter, Country Joe and the Fish, Grand Funk Railroad, Richie Havens, et cetera. David Crosby, Steven Stills, and Graham Nash also performed with the addition of Neil Young… Something was definitely happening that year, and the next.

But when word reached ‘the faithful’ about the tragic fate of Diana Oughton in March of 1970, I remember thinking, “What a terribly useless thing—to blow one’s self up making a bomb!” After the shootings at Kent State, and the song, Four Dead in Ohio, I was livid, even scared, but I knew I wasn’t cut out to be a part-time disciple of Che Guevara and I certainly wasn’t out to hurt anybody… Amid the tragedy and social upheaval of those years, I cried the first time I heard, Wooden Ships, and for a long time, Joni Mitchell was my favorite artist, but remember, it wasn’t just a season of Apocalypse Now, and Easy Rider, but of Zeffirelli’s Romeo, and Juliet and Hiller/Segal’s Love Story. I related more to I Am A Child, Glad, and Moments of Soft Persuasion, than I did Volunteers.

When the Beatles finally came out with a ‘non-statement’ about the war, I agreed, I’d lost close friends in Viet Nam, and others were coming back with physical and emotional wounds. I was pretty sure though youthful idealism and enthusiasm work to express outrage and expose injustice, only practical solutions can bring lasting change, and there’s a steep learning curve. So I spent what time and energy I could in opposition to the Vietnam War, and in support of civil rights, women’s rights, and environmental issues, but I didn’t destroy property, or riot, or get arrested. I loved the music scene, not the expanding drug culture. Incidentally, long before the draft ended in 1974 and the military moved to an all-volunteer force, the local college administration back home had lifted the curfew restrictions for female students—even Jefferson Airplane, now Jefferson Starship, was starting to sound “commercial,” but by that time, I’d started listening to Bruce Cockburn anyway. C’est la vie.

Speaking of the Beatles, one of the last items I came across that day in the back room at the pond, was the single vinyl 45 rpm Apple recording of George Harrison’s Deep Blue released in 1971. It was on the flip-side of Bangladesh, but I first heard it on a juke box in a London pub with my friend, Chris. We’d just left a showing of the Candice Bergan movie entitled Soldier Blue—a film I’d somehow missed the year before for which I was hardly prepared under casual circumstances in a British theater. Anyhow, George Harrison was always my favorite Beatle. This acoustic ditty wasn’t My Guitar Gently Weeps, but it spoke volumes. The week that I returned to the art tour after the Amesbury bus accident, I happened to stroll into a tiny record store a block from the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, Italy, and there it was. I still keep it in its original sleeve.

Once I finished sorting the books and other publications and re-boxed them, I started on the papers, the photos, the what-nots, and the keepsakes. After deciding which albums, eight-tracks, and cassettes would come to town with me along with the portable stereo record player, the Yamaha guitar, and the clothes. In need of a stretch, I walked to the kitchen, poured a glass of iced tea, opened the back door, and as the dog dashed into the brush beneath the trees, I strolled to a familiar circle of pines with the small holly tree nearby. Ten feet from the house, this was the perfect spot to sit in a folding chair, read, study, play guitar, or just listen to the woods, and I did so often. Crickets sang there during the day, and birds. There was plenty of sunshine and beams of filtered moonlight at night. How often I remember thinking that if anybody from the ‘other side’ were interested in getting in touch with me, they’d need look no further. A squirrel scampered by and the dog tried to catch it. Reclaiming the moment, I finished my tea, set the empty glass by the door, and walked around the house to report to the dock that I’d finished ‘re-packing.’

As evening approached, while I loaded my car with what I wanted to keep handy, Daddy carried the rest of my boxes to the shed and turned on the front yard floodlights. He’d already cleaned today’s catch and set the deep fryer up near the dock. While Granddaddy mixed hushpuppy batter and salted, peppered, and floured the fish, I picked out several red-breasted bream, and ran inside to slice them apart and cook them under the broiler as my new restrictive diet dictated. When I returned, the fishermen were busy chowing down. By the way, the broiled filets were delicious, but if you’ve never had cold-water, fresh red-breasted bream battered and deep-fried in old-fashioned lard, you’ve missed something—even the crispy tails are special!

Sitting there eating, talking, watching the wanning moon rise over the far side of the pond, it was easy to feel at ease. There was such a balance of light and dark in that place. No doubt certain threats existed, even as we lingered, but at such times, nobody thinks to entertain them. It was all so mesmerizingly simple.

My mama would later say that late one night during her brief stay, she saw lights moving through the woods across the pond and wondered who might be walking around over there. Granddaddy didn’t seem to know. Daddy dismissed them as swamp gas. But Daddy’s friend, Bill Williams, used to talk about “ghost lights,” (will-o-wisps, spook lights). Living up the highway, he’d seen them wandering the island of trees—an area of wetlands never cleared for cultivation. It was located in the field directly west of the dirt lane which served as the boundary between two parcels. My daddy’s was to the east of it. The western parcel belonged to his first cousin, Charlotte. The land further west of Cousin Charlotte’s, belonged to the B.H. Anderson family.

Though my friends and I had some weird encounters along that lane, we never saw Bill’s ghost lights or any others, and I never expected that anybody beyond our immediate family had. But recently, my friend Tom McElheny confessed that in the Fall of 1971—being country boys, —he, a college buddy, and a local from Screven County used to drive around on full-moon nights looking for ‘pines to ride.’ He knew me from school, but none of them knew who owned the property across the river in the next county when they found the stand of saplings my daddy had planted at the back of the field …. On one occasion, Tom and his cohorts saw a light, much like Mama had described—not like the searching beam of a flashlight, but the solitary, floating glow of a lantern, bobbing through the trees at the edge of the field, as if someone were walking in the woods. That area is North of the pond, and well above the spring. Fearing they might be caught and charged with trespassing, Tom said they ran back to the car and never returned. He also said it was weird enough to be ‘unnerving.’  Was it Daddy, Granddaddy, or Eugene out there at two o’clock in the morning? … Pot-growers? Moonshiners? Orbs?   

My sister, Carole, reminded me of something that took place that December in 1972, when she and Frank were home from school. Mostly, they stayed in town, but on Christmas Eve, the three of us were busy in the trailer, making candles and wrapping presents while Gran helped Daddy prepare food next door for tomorrow’s gathering. Around midnight, Frank left to sleep at the house. My sister and I slept in the trailer—I slept up front in my old bedroom; she slept in the bedroom at the rear. Speak of rude awakenings, the next morning all of the furniture in the living area had been strangely and quietly ‘rearranged’—like somebody had ‘pranked’ us, and not Santa. With just the five of us on the premises eleven miles out of town, the trailer wasn’t locked, but it was never locked when we were there. It wasn’t just why it happened that puzzled us, but how it happened, without waking either one of us. Those interior walls were paper-thin and I’m a light sleeper. Given that nobody ever admitted doing it, it’s puzzling still.

Frank doesn’t talk about ghost lights or rearranged furniture. He talks about the night in August of 1973 that he and J.D. were alone at the pond. inside the trailer, drinking beer, and listening to music, when all of a sudden the thing rocked like something big had hit it. The jolt was so violent he says the player-needle jumped, and skidded across the record. Maybe a tremor? Maybe the place sits on a fault-line? Rather than step outside with a flashlight, he says they sat in dead silence waiting to see if somebody might come crashing through the door.

Granddaddy left the dock that night with a covered plate for Eugene, saying he’d be back in the morning. I went inside with the dirty dishes to wash while Daddy cleaned the fryer. After puttering around the shed a while, he came in to say goodnight, and as as usual, mentioned the gun by the hearth, and the shells under the counter. Not that he thought I’d need them, he just reminded me they were there.

Around ten o’clock, I turned on the television, flipped through the channels, and found some Prime-Time movie I can’t recall until The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson came on. Near midnight, Sweetie wanted out again, so I opened the back door and stepped a ways past the awning to wait. The air was cooler now. A little breeze swayed the pines—their tops were lightly gilded. The floodlights were off. The mercury lamp at the head of the lane only partially illuminated the front of house, and though the stark florescent light over the kitchen sink afforded some visibility, I couldn’t hear much past the window unit air-conditioner except for the occasional sound of Daddy’s bug zapper, and the rattle of dog tags in the underbrush. Sweetie was stalking something. I called him, stepped back to the awning, and reaching inside the door, flipped on the porch lamp to keep the back side of the house from total darkness.

Once we were inside, again, I locked the door, and bolted it, turned off the television and the air conditioner, and double-checked the main entrance. Walking to the front bedroom, I turned on my bedside lamp, rolled-out the windows to let the cool air in, and was instantly greeted by the chorus of high pitched crickets, toad trills, chuckling Leopard frogs, tenor tree frogs, and baritone bullfrogs. You’d hear them in the winter, too, on milder nights when they emerged from the leaf litter and swamp mud, but their songs were never as loud with the windows closed. Now, it was as if they’d been channeled into the room with full surround sound. No doubt, they’d sing ’til dawn. It was part of the magic of being there—near the water, in that house, in those woods, in fact, one of the most comforting parts. For a minute, I stood at the front window listening. Then I pulled both sets of curtains closed, grabbed a quick shower, and climbed into the bed I’d left three months earlier with a magazine I’d decided not to pack. Sweetie was as content to have me near as I was to watch him settle into his familiar spot on the floor. With the bedside lamp burning, and the magazine still open on my chest, I nodded off.

Sometime later, I awoke. The magazine had slid to the floor, and thinking to turn off the lamp, I rolled over, and glanced around. The dog was also awake. His tail wagged slightly, but otherwise, he didn’t move. He was listening—to what I didn’t know. Then, I realized the crickets had stopped chirping. The frogs weren’t singing. Suddenly, in their place, came what sounded like the faint, slow but steady sliding-shuffle of feet through the grass, one by one, growing louder, more distinct. A moment later it stopped … right in front of the roll-out window. The dog’s ears pricked forward, but still, he didn’t move, or make a sound. Relieved to have closed the curtains, I sat straight up in bed, took a deep breath, and said, “Who’s there? Who are you?” I didn’t shout. There was no answer. I reached for the lamp, and clicked it off. For a full minute, Sweetie and I waited quietly in the dark until i finally raised my voice. “I don’t know who you are, but it’s time for you to leave. Do you hear me?” Again, there was no response, and another full minute passed before the sliding shuffle sounded again, only now, it was backing up and slowly moving away from the house. Then it was gone.

I jumped up and quickly rolled in the windows, hurried to turn on all the lights in the house and the floodlights outside, and grabbed the shotgun. Near daylight, I fell asleep on the sofa next to the phone. My brave watchdog never barked. Had this simply been an intruder, Sweetie would have been right on it. He barked incessantly at strangers, and was as loud as he was fierce. Had Daddy, Granddaddy, Eugene, or any member of the family needed to enter the house, why not use a key, or bang on the door? Even one of my former pond house mates or a friend from school would have announced themselves. At that time of night, it’s a lengthy drive out to the country just to show up and shuffle around.

In the light of day, I wasn’t sure what to think. Had I ‘dreamt a dream’ last night? After all, I was still sick. Maybe, my senses were off, in overdrive, or just overloaded. When Granddaddy came that morning, I decided to let it rest, and as I hadn’t slept, I cleaned up, packed up, and drove back to town. By the following weekend, I was down for the count, out of school, and in and out of bed, again. But, I rallied. I moved to Gran’s, started work, ended up back in the hospital, and fled to Vidalia to get well. Needless to say, I didn’t make it back to the pond until August and then it was only to get things out of the shed to take to Miss Irby’s. Did I forget sitting in the dark with my dog wondering what was on the other side of those curtains? Nope, I did not. I don’t imagine I ever will. I wasn’t raised to be afraid, but I was mighty stumped that night.

I don’t know what took place in my absence. I never thought to ask, but I was there in the summer of 1976 when another visitor came. This time it wasn’t in the wee hours of the morning. It was early evening and still light. My sister’s first husband, Chuck, was helping J.D. move a television out the trailer. Granddaddy and Daddy were on the dock, and Gran and Daddy’s second wife, Joan, were inside the house making supper. I’d gone to check on Chuck and J.D. They were coming down the steps with the television, when there was a noise on the far side of the trailer, and—Blam! Blam!—something banged on it, twice! Startled and confused, we froze, until the assailant took off in the direction of the old Opie place, tearing through the woods like a galloping heifer. As Chuck and J.D. hurried to set the TV on the ground without breaking it, I ran to get Daddy. He arrived with the shogun and fired into the thicket, but by that time, whomever or whatever it was, was gone. For real, it wasn’t any of us, or Daddy, or Granddaddy, and Eugene was two years in the nursing home. So, who was it? A prankster? A deranged local? The swamp witch?

Up until recently, I’d have never seriously considered the possibility that anything, beside humans, might have roamed those woods fifty years ago. Of course, anybody could have, and depending on how resourceful they were, nobody would’ve known they were there. It’s doubtful that could happen now. The current owner who purchased the property back in the early nineties cleared out the old forested areas to the west and south and had them replanted with timber to harvest.

I’m not saying I believe every theory, or that I’ve drawn any conclusions. I did read, however, that a couple from Statesboro driving home from a holiday display out Lakeview Road saw something cross the road in front of their car back in December of 2019. The eye-witness report reads:

“My wife and I were returning from TMT Farms Christmas display when a bigfoot crossed the road in front of us. At first I wasn’t sure what I saw but my wife asked me if I saw that. It was a big creature, 7-8 feet tall, and crossed the road from left to right in 4 steps. It crossed the road and made its way into the woods.” —`Bigfoot Field Research Organization (12/20/2019)

Bigfoot? According to the report, this happened near Blitch just south of the Ogeechee River. That’s just a few river bends West of Dover and the old river landings East of U.S. Highway 301. Years ago, regardless of the weird things that took place up from those swamps on a regular basis, if anybody had told me a creature like the one in the Patterson-Gimlin film of 1967 might really exist in the continental United States beyond the great Northwest, I’d have said they were crazy. But a while back, an interest in ‘missing persons’ led me to follow the work of researcher-writer-film-maker Dave Paulides. Along with his series of 411 documentaries, Dave’s also produced an eye-opening film called American Sasquatch. With every state in the union claiming to house a Big Foot, Hairy Man, Grass Man, Swamp Ape, or Wood Booger, it does make you wonder. Ask Bob Gimlin, himself—he’s 94 now, and talking.

Speaking of, my granddaddy used to talk about the critters of the ‘Geechee’ like they were his old friends, and like I said, Granddaddy’s tales were told with a twinkling eye and meant to delight more than frighten.

Maybe, he was onto something...

Thanks for reading!

© 2024-2026

Copyright ©2024 – 2026 Cynthia Farr Kinkel. All Rights Reserved.