Introduction

Our lives, all of them, are alluvial landscapes, shaped by the streams of energy flowing around and through us, eroding and replenishing.

This book is a fictional memoir, arranged in roughly chronological order, of the author’s passage through time, which began in this iteration at Riverside Hospital in Paducah, Kentucky, on the banks of the Ohio, in the midst of currents flowing since before light and breath.

The perspective of this book is that our seemingly time-linear lives flow mostly on one side of a fragile, sometimes transparent veil, separating us from other dimensions, realities, and entities, all part of the same flow. These stories are meant as my witness to the conversations, artifacts, and energies flowing through that veil. From any single-dimensional perspective, these stories might seem beyond reality, and from that viewpoint, of course they are.

The first six stories of this book, and the last, are centered at my family’s country grocery store, in the small rural community of Ragland, at the western edge of McCracken County, a mile from the Ballard County line, in the Ohio River floodplain of Kentucky’s Jackson Purchase Region. They retrace my early wanderings along its roads, rivers, and lakes, often unconscious of the deep and rich spirit world that abounds there. All the stories and their characters have real connections to locations, artifacts, and family—the currents, objects, and personalities that flowed through my youth.

Location

Far Western Kentucky, where I spent my first eighteen years, has a dual archeological and physiographical personality that can be correctly considered to be part of both the lower Ohio River Valley and the Lower Mississippi Valley. What is not as ambiguous is that the rich delta land lies at the greatest confluence of rivers in North America, where all the flows come together.

The Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers empty into the Ohio just before it goes around the big sweeping curve called Monkey’s Eyebrow and empties into the much smaller (30 percent smaller) Mississippi at Cairo, Illinois. There is nothing about far Western Kentucky that is not connected with its rivers.

The Ohio and its many tributaries were the main arteries of the young nation, through which the commerce of the republic flowed. If the river was the original superhighway of its day, then its many landings were its truck stops and logistics depots. Many roads of the area still bear the names of their termini, either at nineteenth-century riverboat landings or at one of the many oxbow lakes spawned by the river: Carrico, Ogden, and Joppa Landings, or Crawford, Turner, and Shelby Lakes.

Many of the narrow old farm roads are named after the ancestors of families who came down the river, settled, and still live there: House, Helm, Warford, Matlock, Grief, Reid, Vaughn, and Lanier. Each one recalls a face, a story, and a ghost.

Family

My history is inextricably and mystically linked with the river. My Great-Great-Grandfather Starks died in 1864 at Fort Anderson, on the banks of the Ohio River, during the Battle of Paducah; eighty-six years later, I was born at that exact spot, in Riverside Hospital, built over the foundations of the old fort. My father’s family came down the Ohio from Virginia after the Revolution.

My mother’s father was taken by the swollen river when I was a year and a half old; his mother’s family had come up the Mississippi from New Orleans after crossing from Le Havre, France.

Except for my mom, all the women in my early life were widows. I did not have the privilege of knowing a single grandfather or great-grandfather; they were beyond the veil before my second spring. I always had the feeling that all of them were somehow with me, watching, whispering, protecting, keeping me from their mistakes. I am an amalgamation of them all. I have many of their physical and emotional attributes: deep-set eyes, big veins in my arms and hands, square jaw, thick and early grey hair, as well as their mannerisms, demeanor, and general goodwill. The physical similarities are confirmed by pictures; the personality traits were frequently referenced by relatives and reinforced through a plethora of surrogate grandfathers, lifelong friends of my forebears whom I’ve long suspected of having sworn some secret oath to my elders to take a hand in my education. These aged local denizens lectured around the Warm Morning Stove in the winter and on the sheltered front porch bench the rest of the year. Whereas grandmothers are often uncomfortable offering up memories and stories of their dead spouses, the old guys on the porch, safely out of earshot of the widows, exhibited no such reticence. The truth was always told on the porch!

In compensation for my lack of male elders, I was blessed with good timing and a full complement of grandmothers and greatgrandmothers. To say that I had a close connection with each of them would be an understatement.

The day after I turned ten, Great-Grandma Thompson started the tradition of departing near my birthday, a tradition that three of the remaining five grandmothers would honor. The nearly annual event had a sobering effect on my birthday celebrations, my psyche, and my understanding of timing and other realities. These departures did not come to me cushioned as after-the-fact news from afar; they unfolded as up-close, day-by-day transitions of dear childhood friends. Only one of them did not spend her last months next door at Granny Parker’s house or across the road from the grocery in the little block house we called the Grandma House.

From all my ancestors I have a vast treasure of the things that carry their spirit, the instruments of their daily lives: rings, snuff boxes, biscuit cutters, branding irons, hand tools, horse bits, doilies, and quilt frames, to name just a few. I listen to their voices almost daily through their letters, diaries, recipes, and notes in the margins of books and Bibles. I sleep under their quilts and mark the passing of time by shadows and the chiming of their clocks. I open all the blinds and walk around my house in window light, navigating in the evenings by their lamps to understand their world, their light. I shave with their brushes and straight razors and carry their pocket knives and watches. I sew on their old Singer machines and talk to them across time. All are my loving guardian angels.

Travels

You may consider chapters 7–16 of this book my traveling ghost show. My ghosts have always traveled with me, saving me from precarious situations naively blundered into. These stories are walkabouts, spirit quests, adventures on paths where spirits might be expected but are still always surprising and harrowing; the interactions depend on which of my spiritual allies and guardian angels were on duty at a given moment.

At eighteen, I started weaning myself from Western Kentucky. Having a proclivity for literature, science, and tinkering, I was fortunate to get a small physics scholarship from the operators of the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion (atomic) Plant, and went off to the Purchase’s only major university, Murray State, coming home in the summers to earn spending money. Murray had yet to offer a degree in my chosen field, engineering, so after my sophomore year I transferred to the University of Kentucky and permanently moved away from Ragland, though never away from the river.

I’m not sure where I got my penchant for travel; perhaps it was the pictures and stories from a treasured 1952 set of the World Book Encyclopedia that has been with me since before memory, or the fact that the only long trip my family ever took was a week-long car ride with three other families to Pensacola, Florida. More likely it is the spirit of the river in me, always on the move. Whatever it was, I have an insatiable wanderlust, a quest for exploration and alternative perspective that has endured my entire life.

That ever-moving spirit and perspective has often led to other dimensions, and encounters with their resident entities. Despite being open to the possibility, such a transport or meeting is almost always disconcerting both initially and in retrospect. Afterward, it becomes unnerving when the notion starts to seep into your consciousness that the encounter was likely not happenstance, that you and the ghost have for years been on a collision course, foreordained, inevitable, and maybe even necessary. Scarier still is the realization that your reaction to an encounter might be the result of a lesson from a dream … or a previous incarnation!

Finally, let me address one remaining issue. I am surprised and confused by the paltry amount of ghost stories from the area in which I grew up; after all, it is not without a history that would seem likely to spawn such stories. The mysterious Mississippians inhabited it so long ago and disappeared so thoroughly that the Native Americans living in the area when Europeans came, the Chickasaw, had no knowledge of them. It would seem logical that there should be spirit remnants of them wandering about, but there appears to be a protective screen between us and their stories, their knowledge. There are of course many isolated instances of untimely deaths, murders, and lynchings that one would expect to birth ghosts, but few have come forward with those stories.

There were at least two racially motivated lynchings in Ballard County around the turn of the twentieth century. C. J. Miller, an African American accused of murdering two white girls, was tortured and lynched by an angry mob in Wickliffe despite the protestations of the girls’ father, who claimed the killer was a white man. A decade later, Tom Hall, accused of wounding a white man, was similarly dragged from his jail cell and lynched. Cairo, Illinois, at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi, has a long history of racial violence, perhaps best illustrated by the 1967 case of a nineteen-year-old soldier, Robert Hunt, who was found hanged in the local police station while home on leave. The incident was ruled a suicide.

Of course, I am making one personal and purposeful omission; it pains me that when I type the name of my and my parents’ high school, Heath, into any intuitive search engine, it supplies the word shooting before I can finish typing. I have far too many connections to families on both sides of that tragedy to make comment. Those ghosts are not for me to deal with.

Otherwise, the eight Kentucky counties comprising the Jackson Purchase seem to have been shielded from the massive loss of life that often breeds ghosts. All the big battles of the Western Theater of the Civil War were fought just outside its boundaries. The blood of five hundred Union soldiers of African descent, shot as they tried to surrender at Fort Pillow, stained the Mississippi for two hundred yards, but that was far downriver in Tennessee. The battles at Fort Donelson and Fort Henry, on the Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers respectively, were also in Tennessee. The closest river disaster was when the USS Essex lost thirty-two sailors on the Tennessee River after a Confederate cannonball struck her boiler.

In contrast, Grant crossed the Ohio at Paducah in 1861 on the longest pontoon bridge of the war without casualties, and the Battle of Paducah in 1864 had less than fifty dead—but they did include my great-great-grandfather, inside the fort, and Colonel Albert P. Thompson, a hometown boy whose bad timing and slacker angel allowed him to position his head at the same intersection of time and space as a Union cannonball. The only casualities of the Black Patch Tobacco War at the beginning of the twentieth century were tobacco barns, warehouses, and plant beds. Even the massive 1811 New Madrid Earthquake, estimated to be the largest ever in North America, which created Reel Foot Lake and made the Mississippi flow backward, is known to have killed only one person, in Missouri.

My own theory on this general lack of human carnage and its resultant dearth of lingering spirits is that the area is sacred, preserved by some divine intervention as the critical pumping heart of the continent. To encounter spirits in this unique area requires fortuitous timing, because the departed energies of their souls cannot long linger. Even those trapped in the dark sloughs or those with reason and intent to tarry are eventually flushed out, down to the great combining seas where they are evaporated, reconstituted, and recycled back into the flow.

River Watch