First of all, let me give you a little background for this story.
This took place many years ago in Arkadelphia, Arkansas. Henderson State
University was still Henderson College. On the bordering property was a small
cemetery. It was very old, with many more ancient graves than recent ones.
As Henderson expanded, the small cemetery was
in the way. It was near where the girl’s softball field is today. Henderson
needed that land, so it was decided that the land would be taken, public domain
and all that, and the graveyard moved.
Almost nobody was still around to make an
issue of that.
Except for one older woman, whose whole family
was in that cemetary.
She protested to
anyone who would listen, but in the end, the land was taken. She apparently had
no money to hire a lawyer. The graves were moved out to a larger older
cemetery, some miles out west of Arkadelphia. It has been told that she sat in
her beat up old truck right beside that cemetery as her family was dug up and
moved, never speaking to anybody, and glaring at anyone who came close.
Nobody saw much of her for a long time.
Then one day, it was noticed that she was
hauling lumber in her old truck, stacking it right beside that cemetery fence,
where her loved ones now rested. After a large stack was finished, she
could often be seen hauling it, plank by plank, into the woods on the west side
of the cemetery. Everybody who knew her said she was a very strong and determined
woman, and were not surprised when a small shack appeared, just outside that
fence. She built a little rail around on top, and could sometimes be seen
up on top of her shack, in her rocking chair. As far as could be determined,
she now lived in that shack.
Stories were going
around that she had just gone off the deep end when her whole family was dug up
and moved. She seemed to dedicate her life to watching over her loved ones,
every day. I suppose she was guarding them, making sure they were not disturbed
again.
She didn’t own that land, but it occupied just
a very small part of a very large wooded tract of land there. Everyone felt
sorry for that poor woman, and the owners just left her alone.
Time went by.
Unfortunately, she was not always left undisturbed. Stories circulated about
the crazy old woman out by the cemetery. When one drove down that dirt road
beside the cemetery at night, she could often be spotlighted in the headlights
as one made the turn, just sitting on top that shack, just rocking.
Seems a group of young
men about college age eventually decided to have a little fun with her. They
started out by hollering at her, taunting her, until eventually she would
disappear into her shack.
Unfortunately, other young people got in on
the fun by walking out into the cemetery, hollering at her that they were going
to dig up her family again. Lots of people had heard her story by now. When
they did this, she usually would start screaming. It was the most highly pitched
scream anyone had ever heard and she would still be screaming when they tired
of the game and left. The few people remaining in Arkadelphia who knew her said
she had developed a very unnaturally strong hatred for anyone around college
age, starting when her family was dug up to allow HSU’s expansion. Nobody
seemed to know if any of the young people harassing her were students or not,
but to her it didn’t matter. She just grouped all young people together, and
hated them all.
One Halloween, a group of particularly mean
young guys decided to go scare her. They parked their car a good ways
back, walked very quietly up to the shack. On signal they started pounding on
the walls and hollering at her. She was dozing off up on top in her chair, and
when the ruckus started, she got up quickly. She was screaming that particularly
high-pitched scream and ran for the roof access hole. She fell against that railing and broke
through a section of it. In falling to the ground her neck was broken. She
was buried right beside her family.
But this is not the end of our story.
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Continued next Friday
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