Sunday, October 30, 2011

halloween stories ... or not

My daughter and her BF WHERE going to stay at our land six miles NW of Yorktown after going to Western Days... her BF got the heebie jeebes when they went there, so they didn't.

Dakota could have been right... a little local lore...

Our place north of Yorktown is in the area of what some locals call crazy man woods.
The story goes that years ago a family lived in the area and had a "strange" son, probably a treatable disorder these days, but anyhow, they couldn't handle him so they kept him chained and in a cage. He would escape now and then and prowl all around the area, peeking in at and scaring other family s, stealing things and just being a pain in the ass, this was in the late 1930s.

My family bought the land in about 1984 or so. And we met our neighbors...

Felix and Anne Respondeck, a brother and sister that still lived in the house they were born in after their parents had passed away. Felix took care of their cows, drove his pickup to town and bought what they needed. Anne probably never left her little piece of land. You have to understand that neither one of them had every married and lived together in their parents house all their lives. Strange in these days but not so much in crazy man woods I guess.

Anne use to come prowl around our house at night. How did we know? Easy, she didn't own a pair of shoes and in the morning we would find bare footprints in the sand, the soil there is sandy.

She would come over during the daylight and stand at the yard fence and yell "Ello", she did have a accent, and be invited in to ask whatever she wanted. She didn't even know how to use a telephone, my mom had to show her. ANYway...I talked to her one day, this is what she told me...

"There is this old woman, a witch, who lives over there (pointed north), she can make herself look like a 20 year old and she goes to the bars in town and talks men into coming home with her, then she kills them, then she turns old again. She has 23 dead bodies in the house attic, she keeps them."

She also claimed that because her brother Felix had had a stock pond dug on their land, that the digging had set loose 16 dead spirits who now run around screaming, wanting to be buried again. Ohh and the long dead Indian that tormented her until she found his comb and gave it back to him.

I admit, staying there alone I have had a uneasy feeling before, but not ever time.

So was Dakotas fear justified or not?

It is not for us humans to glimpse the other world, or is it?