The Pond House – Part One: 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 outlined the eastern edge of a parcel of mainly wooded property that my daddy had purchased from the aunties. It traveled under a little bridge up on the highway then flowed close to the remaining sandy lane of old Cameron Road, meandering south, past an area of wetlands to the west that were fed by a natural spring. When I was ten, Daddy contracted with a backhoe crew to dig out a pond and build a dam with a spillway that channeled the overflow back toward the creek as it made its way down to the river. After stocking the pond with bass, bream, and catfish, he added a wooden dock, bought a small boat, and over the course of several years, built a slab-based, two-bedroom house set less than a hundred feet from the water.

Constructed with the help of a local Black man named Bill Williams, a skilled carpenter and my daddy’s lifelong friend, the modest frame structure with its great-room fireplace and basic corner kitchen would become a sanctuary from Daddy’s work-a-day world and his 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 most everything of what he brought home, and Mama would let him prepare it – grilled venison steaks in the fall, Southern-style bird suppers with savory quail or dove gravy with grits in the winter, and there were always plenty of fried fish with crispy hushpuppies on the side. Red-breasted bream and large-mouthed bass, whether fresh or frozen, were regular entrées, as well as hot and sassy catfish stew with oven-baked iron-pan cornbread for soppin’. The birds and the fish were a chore to clean, but they were also, as they say, … mighty fine-eatin’!

Now, out at the auntie’s farmhouse in Screven County, they always set a place at the table for my granddaddy, but he preferred to eat outside, 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 Daddy’s 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 it. 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 – 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 – I eventually 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 you’ve buddied-up to a few beers or draughts of whiskey to escape whatever else was on your mind.

Anyhow, like I said before, 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, three of us were coming home from town in my Maverick. As we turned off the highway onto the little 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. Darkness was falling, but both sides of the road were still wide open to view. There was nothing out in front in the high beams, nor in the red taillights behind. Nevertheless, about halfway, 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.

A bit 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 so-called ‘perceptions’ may have been prompted by a fireside reading from H. P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness and Other Tales of Terror some nights before.

“I mean, baby mammoths?” he joked.

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

But if that first episode wasn’t strange 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 any others that winter – not at the house, nor in the field, at least not that I know of or that we talked about. Due to circumstances beyond anyone’s control, after the quarter ended, my friends and I moved back into town, and Sweetie stayed on at the pond with Granddaddy.

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

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