At first there seems to be a low mist rolling over the burying ground and then suddenly, to your amazement, the mist or cloud dissolves itself into shafts or pillars of the height of the white figure of Devil Anse above the grave. They form in line and now one figure, the taller, moves ahead of all the rest. Six there were following the leader. You see distinctly as they move slowly through the crumbling tombstones, down the mountain side toward the creek.
“Devil Anse and his boys,” repeats the trembling Molly, “going down into the waters of baptism. They ever do of a foggy night in the falling weather. And look yonder! There’s the ghost too of Uncle Dyke Garrett a-waiting at the water’s edge. He’s got the Good Book opened wide in his hand.”
Whether it is the giant trunk of a tree with perhaps a leafless branch extended, who can say? Or is nature playing a prank with your vision? But, surely, in the eerie moonlight there seems to appear the figure of a man with arm extended, book in hand, waiting to receive the seven phantom penitents moving slowly toward the water’s edge.
After that you don’t lose much time in being on your way. And if anyone should ask you what of interest is to be seen along Main Island Creek, if you are prudent you’ll answer, “The marble statue of Capt. Anderson Hatfield.” And if you knew him in life you’ll add, “And a fine likeness it is too.”
The Winking Corpse
On the night of June 22, 1887, the bodies of four dead men lay wrapped in sheets on cooling boards in the musty sitting room of an old boarding house in Morehead, Rowan County, Kentucky. Only the bullet-shattered faces, besmeared with blood, were exposed. Their coffins had not yet arrived from the Blue Grass. No friend or kinsman watched beside the bier that sultry summer night; they had prudently kept to their homes, for excitement ran high over the battle that had been fought that day in front of the old hostelry which marked, with the death of the four, the end of the Martin-Tolliver feud.
While the bodies lay side-by-side in the front part of the shambling house, there sat in the kitchen, so the story goes, a slatternly old crone peeling potatoes for supper—should the few straggling boarders return with an appetite, now that all the shooting was over.
It was the privilege of old women like Phronie in the mountains of Kentucky to go unmolested and help out as they felt impelled in times of troubles such as these between the Martins and Tollivers.
The place was strangely quiet. Indeed the old boarding house was deserted. For those who had taken the law in their own hands that day in Rowan County had called a meeting at the courthouse farther up the road. The citizenry of the countryside, save kin and friend of the slain feudists, had turned out to attend.