Why My Southern Appalachian Family Is Hainted (Yours May Be Too)

They say no decent story starts with waking from a dream. Yet, any other starting point for this ghost story would be a lie.

See, I come from a long line of haunted dreamers, seven generations of Appalachians who gasp awake at night, coughing red clay from our lungs. I know what you’re thinking. Seven is lucky in mountain superstition, no? Seven generations of blood spilt on Mother Mountain’s dirt. Seven generations baptized in her rivers that, if you listen closely, whisper Pangea’s 200-million-year-old secrets. Secrets that eventually oxidize our iron bones and turn them to rust. That or the humidity, I suppose.

The real secret is that there used to be more of us in the mountains, back before the Dollar Generals and million-dollar cabins took over the ridge. A lot of us have forgotten who we are. Maybe our Mamas and Daddys and Grannys and Pawpaws forgot to teach us the Mountain’s peculiar ways.

Still, that pinch of iron left in my bones might be why seven generations later, I lay my head on the grass in the dead of night, chin tilted toward Queen Cassiopeia’s lights. I can almost touch that constellation—stars tossed into the sky as punishment for offering her daughter up to the monsters as a sacrifice.

Shhh… some say monsters roam these woods, over yonder beyond the pines. Truthfully, I’ve never seen anything more than a bear with monstrous claws that Daddy’s slobbery hounds cornered in the root cellar. The worst it did was eat up all the dog food before Daddy scared it off with his shotgun.

But ghosts? Remnants of the dead are a different story.

It was 1980-something and Sunday dinner at Granny’s house. The aunties were setting out green beans from the garden and White Lily biscuits made from scratch. I think my cousins were outside playing kickball in the front yard. I wasn’t much for getting sweaty then. I’m still not now. Anyway, I’d stayed inside to sip a Coke and sit with my Great Grandma Ellie, who’d sneak me peppermint sticks to ruin my dinner and whisper ghost stories in my ear. 

Before I go any further, I have to stop right here. Grandma Ellie was not some demure rose, a genteel Southern lady. That ain’t how the Mountain builds us. The women in my family are well-mannered and kind. They can also chop the head off a copperhead with the good garden hoe, without so much as a cuss word or a flinch.

So, when Grandma Ellie began her stories, I listened well. She never said much about hainted places. We knew to stay away from those. But hainted people—you couldn’t ignore.

Grandma Ellie said she hadn’t always been old. She’d once been a young mother with a husband and a houseful of kids. On one fateful day, her son Emory had gotten sick and died. Being little at the time, I can’t remember all the details. But I vividly recall my sticky fingers in her hand as she told me she’d fallen asleep crying, only to wake with her limbs frozen and little Emory at her feet. She’d somehow managed to talk to him. She’d told him to go on. She’d be okay.

“Don’t tell the other kids about it,” she whispered when she finished. And to this day, I never did.

Later I figured out Grandma Ellie wasn’t my only blood relative marked as hainted. Daddy was too. Not so much by the clanging-chains kind of ghosts, but the kind that slipped in after he’d take off his damp socks and dirty work boots. When the cicadas and bullfrogs belted out their lullabies at night, we’d all fall asleep in that tiny ranch-style house. Then, around the witching hour, Daddy’s ghosts would start to rattle, pouring the smell of burning diesel down his nose, into his windpipe until he choked. I’d hear his panicked voice holler through the walls, drafted back into the jungles of Vietnam. Daddy earned a Bronze Star in those tropical woods, but even a medal couldn’t stop the haints from infiltrating his cobwebbed head. 

By the time I was grown, I assumed I’d gotten off pretty lucky—seventh generation and all that. No haints chattering in my head or flickering lights inside my house. That’s the thing about haints, though. They don’t send you launching upright in bed, rasping for air, until they’re ready to make themselves known.

Mine waited decades after Grandma Ellie was resting in the cemetery and Daddy’s haints had a new name, PTSD. A year had passed since Mama died, and I’d tried not to think about it much—Mama sleeping in the family graveyard under those plastic pink roses. That’s when I heard it: the first sigh of my ghost. It hadn’t happened with my head laid upon the grass, gazing up at Cassiopeia. It was a random night under the humid whirr of the air conditioner. Those Appalachian haints had followed me from that dirt road all the way to the McMansions of the suburbs.

I half-woke from a dream, sweat dotting my forehead and dread squeezing my backbone in its fist. An Arctic cold shot through me, and I tried to move, arms and legs locked with fear. I was right there in that place Grandma Ellie had described—the haziness between wake and sleep.

Across the room stood Mama, just like I remembered her. Blonde hair perfectly coiffed, and pretty face pale. She drifted toward me, but my muscles were paralyzed.

Closer.

Closer.

My heart thrashed against the cage of my ribs. Finally, I wiggled a single toe, and the others soon followed. I blinked. Mama was gone.

Mama came to me for weeks, in that lost breath between wake and sleep. Once I could control a single toe, I stopped being scared. Mama would hover over me, and I’d gaze up at her and study her the way I study Cassiopeia and her glimmering stars. Mama had also been thrown to the heavens, and me, anchored to my bed. Each night, I waited for her to say something, to break the cosmic spell. But even alive, Mama was a doer and a caretaker. She was never much for words.

At some point, a doctor mentioned sleep paralysis and hypnopompic hallucinations, which I shared with one of my aunts. She’d been dreaming of Mama, too. She said that one night she’d finally ambled out of bed and onto the couch. Flipping on the TV, she saw the local cable channel pop up. There was Mama singing out those old shape-note hymns she loved, recorded for some show about local churches before she died.

Not long afterward, Mama stopped coming around.

A few years later, my daughter would wake up at night, hearing an airy breath in her room or the tick of a non-existent clock. I looked her in those baby-doll eyes and told her the truth: we come from a line of haunted dreamers, generations of Appalachians who gasp awake, coughing red clay from our lungs. You can call it a hallucination or the trauma our ancestors bore. Or we can call ourselves hainted. Oh, not by the monsters over yonder in the pines, but by the people we’ve tucked inside our rusty bones.

The ones we love so wholly they haunt us.

The ones we will never forget.