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Tar Heel Ghosts
An amazing assortment of twenty-three stories and ten "short shorts" comprise this popular selection. More than merely entertaining, Tar Heel Ghosts captures the "spirit" of North Carolina's past.
North Carolina's ghost stories have infinite variety. There are mountainous ghosts and seafaring ghosts; colonial ghosts and modern ghosts; gentle ghosts and roistering ghosts; delicate lady ghosts and fishwife ghosts; home ghosts and ghosts that just want to be noticed. Mysterious signs and symbols appear--small black crosses, galloping white horses, strangely moving lights, floating veils, lifelike apparitions, skulls, dripping blood, and "things that go bump in the night." At least one North Carolina ghost got himself into a court record, and other ghostly phenomena have attracted scientific investigation.
These stories have a marked realistic North Carolina flavor. The reader finds mountain cabins and antebellum mansions, Indian trails, water wheels, river steamboats, railroad trains, slave labor on plantations, revenuers and stills in the mountains, a burial in St. James Churchyard in Wilmington, Winston-Salem before the days of Winston, Raleigh in the 1860s, Fayetteville during World War II, and even a new suburb haunted by old spooks.
North Carolina's ghost stories have infinite variety. There are mountainous ghosts and seafaring ghosts; colonial ghosts and modern ghosts; gentle ghosts and roistering ghosts; delicate lady ghosts and fishwife ghosts; home ghosts and ghosts that just want to be noticed. Mysterious signs and symbols appear--small black crosses, galloping white horses, strangely moving lights, floating veils, lifelike apparitions, skulls, dripping blood, and "things that go bump in the night." At least one North Carolina ghost got himself into a court record, and other ghostly phenomena have attracted scientific investigation.
These stories have a marked realistic North Carolina flavor. The reader finds mountain cabins and antebellum mansions, Indian trails, water wheels, river steamboats, railroad trains, slave labor on plantations, revenuers and stills in the mountains, a burial in St. James Churchyard in Wilmington, Winston-Salem before the days of Winston, Raleigh in the 1860s, Fayetteville during World War II, and even a new suburb haunted by old spooks.
178 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1954
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
October 21, 2023
The Tar Heel State of North Carolina has centuries of history behind it, and therefore it should be no surprise that the state has its share of ghost stories. And readers who are looking for a Halloween-time set of cheerfully chilling stories that have a regional bent would do well to turn to John Harden’s 1954 collection Tar Heel Ghosts.
Harden was a leading North Carolina journalist; a Chapel Hill graduate, he worked at newspapers in Burlington, Raleigh, Charlotte, Salisbury, and Greensboro. His experiences across the state led to his maintaining an informal collection of North Carolina ghost stories, and Tar Heel Ghosts was the second of two books in which he shared with readers the scary stories that he had unearthed.
Much has changed since 1954 when it comes to how tales of the supernatural are told; an expectation, nowadays, sometimes seems to be that there will be sufficient gore to challenge the “gross-out” tolerance level of even the most jaded viewer, reader, or listener. But Harden doesn’t follow that sort of bloody path. Rather, the emphasis is on stories that awaken a delicious chill and leave the reader uncertain as to the causes and effects of any given ghostly manifestation.
“A Haunted House,” a story that originally appeared in the Raleigh News and Observer, takes place in a location that “is not to be disclosed”, but Harden regards it as “the representative haunted house story of North Carolina” (p. 52). The occupants of the house, a family referred to as the “Storyteller” family in order to protect their anonymity, are said to have purchased this otherwise “mellow, delightful old place” in spite of the prior occupants’ warnings that frightening and “inexplicable things” have a way of happening in the house, and that “rumor said some member of every family occupying the house died there” (p. 53).
Consumers of modern haunted-house stories, from The Haunting of Hill House to The Amityville Horror to The Shining to Walt Disney’s The Haunted Mansion, know what to expect. The Storytellers laugh at the former occupants’ superstitious fears, only to change their tune when mysterious noises and visions begin to plague them – a process that culminates when Miss Storyteller wakes suddenly from a sound sleep, with a decided sense that someone else is in the room with her.
For a few moments she lay quite still, without opening her eyes, just to assure herself that she was fully awake. The impression of a presence near her persisted. She became sure that if she opened her eyes she would see it. So she opened them.
Sure enough, a young girl was bending over her. She estimated the girl to be fourteen or fifteen, and a total stranger. Only the girl’s head and shoulders were visible from where Miss Storyteller lay quite still on her bed. Her expression was wistful and sad “like that of a child who wanted something and couldn’t have it.” The face was pale, almost waxy. The eyes were closed. Details were so clear, even in the semi-darkness, that Miss Storyteller could tell that the child’s hair was dark auburn, and seemed to be damp and hanging in ringlets about the face. (p. 56)
Miss Storyteller wants to learn more, and tries to follow the girl, but then “the figure moved silently around the foot of the bed and toward the window”, after which it “suddenly vanished” (p. 58).
The familiar archetypes of the ghost story are here – specifically, the idea that the ghost makes their return because of some unfinished business from when the person was alive – and the reader will not be surprised to know that a cycle of illness and death subsequently threatens the Storyteller family. The reasons behind the ghost’s visits to this representative haunted house of North Carolina are never made clear.
“A Ghost with a Mission,” from Davie County in west-central North Carolina, returns to that theme of a ghostly spirit returning from the grave in order to take care of unfinished business. The background for the story is that one James L. Chaffin made in 1905 a will that left all of his money and provisions to the third of his four sons, disinheriting his three other sons and making no provision for the care of his wife.
But it would seem that after his death in 1921, James L. Chaffin may have found himself having second thoughts about this demonstration of probate favoritism. By 1925, the second of the Chaffin sons, James Pinkney Chaffin, began having vivid dreams of his father standing silently by his son’s bedside. These visits led up to one in which the elder James Chaffin “was wearing a familiar black overcoat. And it was on this particular visit that the apparitional father spoke to his son for the first time. James said that his father took hold of the front of his overcoat, pulled it back, and said: ‘You will find my will in my overcoat pocket.’ And with that speech he was gone” (p. 101).
The father’s overcoat, it turns out, was in the possession of oldest brother John Chaffin in nearby Yadkin County. James and John examined the overcoat and found, not a will, but a piece of paper bearing the inscription “Read the 27th chapter of Genesis in my daddy’s Bible” (p. 103). That chapter, with its story of how Jacob took away the inheritance that should have gone to his older brother Esau, figures importantly in the resolution of the story, along with the Chaffin family Bible that was still in the possession of James L. Chaffin’s widow.
I enjoyed the compelling twists and turns of this story, along with the way it was firmly grounded in authentic details of real-world life in Davie and Yadkin counties. And author Harden, who would have spent plenty of time during his journalistic career covering stories from courthouses, seems impressed that this particular ghost story became part of a court case over the Chaffin inheritance: “[H]ere is a singular account of ghostly intervention that is well-buttressed by testimony, a chain of events that are a matter of record, simple and sincere acceptance on the part of the people concerned, and evidence in the form of actual court records” (p. 106).
And another fun “haunt” story comes from near Madison, in northern North Carolina, not far from Greensboro and High Point. “The Headless Haunt” tells the story of a weary traveller who seeks shelter at “a big, comfortable-looking house” with a roaring fire in the hearth and a dining-room table set with delicious-looking food. But no one responds, for a time, to the visitor’s calls of “Hello.” But then the visitor hears the clearing of a throat, and turns from the fire to meet his host:
Standing in the hall was a man. He was fully dressed, in fact stylishly so. He stood erect, almost at military attention. Thumbs hooked in vest pockets framed a simple chain of yellow gold from which hung a glittering something that looked like a Phi Beta Kappa key. The appearance was that of an attorney or a politician, and the stance had a professorial dignity.
There was just one very startling thing about the man. He had no head!
Where a head might have been, or once had been, was a raw, red cross-section of stumpy flatness. (p. 153)
The visitor is shocked and horrified, of course – more so than the reader, who had some idea of what to expect when they took up and began to read a story titled “The Headless Haunt.” But the reader then shares the visitor’s further surprise when this headless man turns out to be nothing like the terrifying Headless Horseman from Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”:
[The traveller] heard a voice. It had a soft, firm, worldly ring. The sound of the voice, the enunciation, told a story of education and experience and culture. There was no apparent source of the words as spoken.
“I beg your pardon,” the voice said, “I hope I haven’t startled you too much.”
At this point, the erect but headless figure bowed gently forward from the waist….
“You are welcome to the warmth of my fire and to the food of my table. Any hospitality of which I am capable is at your disposal. I hope your shock at seeing my condition will not keep you from accepting these modest favors. If you will be my guest, then I have a favor to beg of you. Please sit.” (p. 153)
The reader is intrigued at once by how the courteous and gentlemanly deportment of this ghost contrasts with his ghastly appearance. And, as it turns out, this ghost story, like so many of the others included here, involves the settlement of unfinished business. This headless gentleman suffered cruel injustice in life, it turns out, and the visitor has the opportunity, by righting an old wrong, to help the ghost end his days as a “haunt” and find at last the peace of death.
Not all of the 33 stories included in these collection are equally appealing; some suffer from a frustrating lack of closure, while others reveal outdated social attitudes from the time in which they were collected. But all display Harden’s storytelling verve, along with his genuine enthusiasm for these ghostly bits of North Carolina regional culture.
Tar Heel Ghosts was originally published by the University of North Carolina Press at Chapel Hill, and is a good example of how the UNC Press, while publishing plenty of the scholarly monographs that are de rigueur for a university press, has also made a point, throughout its history, of printing regional material that would appeal to a general as well as an academic audience. Particularly, though not exclusively, for North Carolina readers, Harden’s book is quite suitable reading for the Halloween season, or for any time-of-year in which one may want to savor a fun, light-hearted scare or two.
Harden was a leading North Carolina journalist; a Chapel Hill graduate, he worked at newspapers in Burlington, Raleigh, Charlotte, Salisbury, and Greensboro. His experiences across the state led to his maintaining an informal collection of North Carolina ghost stories, and Tar Heel Ghosts was the second of two books in which he shared with readers the scary stories that he had unearthed.
Much has changed since 1954 when it comes to how tales of the supernatural are told; an expectation, nowadays, sometimes seems to be that there will be sufficient gore to challenge the “gross-out” tolerance level of even the most jaded viewer, reader, or listener. But Harden doesn’t follow that sort of bloody path. Rather, the emphasis is on stories that awaken a delicious chill and leave the reader uncertain as to the causes and effects of any given ghostly manifestation.
“A Haunted House,” a story that originally appeared in the Raleigh News and Observer, takes place in a location that “is not to be disclosed”, but Harden regards it as “the representative haunted house story of North Carolina” (p. 52). The occupants of the house, a family referred to as the “Storyteller” family in order to protect their anonymity, are said to have purchased this otherwise “mellow, delightful old place” in spite of the prior occupants’ warnings that frightening and “inexplicable things” have a way of happening in the house, and that “rumor said some member of every family occupying the house died there” (p. 53).
Consumers of modern haunted-house stories, from The Haunting of Hill House to The Amityville Horror to The Shining to Walt Disney’s The Haunted Mansion, know what to expect. The Storytellers laugh at the former occupants’ superstitious fears, only to change their tune when mysterious noises and visions begin to plague them – a process that culminates when Miss Storyteller wakes suddenly from a sound sleep, with a decided sense that someone else is in the room with her.
For a few moments she lay quite still, without opening her eyes, just to assure herself that she was fully awake. The impression of a presence near her persisted. She became sure that if she opened her eyes she would see it. So she opened them.
Sure enough, a young girl was bending over her. She estimated the girl to be fourteen or fifteen, and a total stranger. Only the girl’s head and shoulders were visible from where Miss Storyteller lay quite still on her bed. Her expression was wistful and sad “like that of a child who wanted something and couldn’t have it.” The face was pale, almost waxy. The eyes were closed. Details were so clear, even in the semi-darkness, that Miss Storyteller could tell that the child’s hair was dark auburn, and seemed to be damp and hanging in ringlets about the face. (p. 56)
Miss Storyteller wants to learn more, and tries to follow the girl, but then “the figure moved silently around the foot of the bed and toward the window”, after which it “suddenly vanished” (p. 58).
The familiar archetypes of the ghost story are here – specifically, the idea that the ghost makes their return because of some unfinished business from when the person was alive – and the reader will not be surprised to know that a cycle of illness and death subsequently threatens the Storyteller family. The reasons behind the ghost’s visits to this representative haunted house of North Carolina are never made clear.
“A Ghost with a Mission,” from Davie County in west-central North Carolina, returns to that theme of a ghostly spirit returning from the grave in order to take care of unfinished business. The background for the story is that one James L. Chaffin made in 1905 a will that left all of his money and provisions to the third of his four sons, disinheriting his three other sons and making no provision for the care of his wife.
But it would seem that after his death in 1921, James L. Chaffin may have found himself having second thoughts about this demonstration of probate favoritism. By 1925, the second of the Chaffin sons, James Pinkney Chaffin, began having vivid dreams of his father standing silently by his son’s bedside. These visits led up to one in which the elder James Chaffin “was wearing a familiar black overcoat. And it was on this particular visit that the apparitional father spoke to his son for the first time. James said that his father took hold of the front of his overcoat, pulled it back, and said: ‘You will find my will in my overcoat pocket.’ And with that speech he was gone” (p. 101).
The father’s overcoat, it turns out, was in the possession of oldest brother John Chaffin in nearby Yadkin County. James and John examined the overcoat and found, not a will, but a piece of paper bearing the inscription “Read the 27th chapter of Genesis in my daddy’s Bible” (p. 103). That chapter, with its story of how Jacob took away the inheritance that should have gone to his older brother Esau, figures importantly in the resolution of the story, along with the Chaffin family Bible that was still in the possession of James L. Chaffin’s widow.
I enjoyed the compelling twists and turns of this story, along with the way it was firmly grounded in authentic details of real-world life in Davie and Yadkin counties. And author Harden, who would have spent plenty of time during his journalistic career covering stories from courthouses, seems impressed that this particular ghost story became part of a court case over the Chaffin inheritance: “[H]ere is a singular account of ghostly intervention that is well-buttressed by testimony, a chain of events that are a matter of record, simple and sincere acceptance on the part of the people concerned, and evidence in the form of actual court records” (p. 106).
And another fun “haunt” story comes from near Madison, in northern North Carolina, not far from Greensboro and High Point. “The Headless Haunt” tells the story of a weary traveller who seeks shelter at “a big, comfortable-looking house” with a roaring fire in the hearth and a dining-room table set with delicious-looking food. But no one responds, for a time, to the visitor’s calls of “Hello.” But then the visitor hears the clearing of a throat, and turns from the fire to meet his host:
Standing in the hall was a man. He was fully dressed, in fact stylishly so. He stood erect, almost at military attention. Thumbs hooked in vest pockets framed a simple chain of yellow gold from which hung a glittering something that looked like a Phi Beta Kappa key. The appearance was that of an attorney or a politician, and the stance had a professorial dignity.
There was just one very startling thing about the man. He had no head!
Where a head might have been, or once had been, was a raw, red cross-section of stumpy flatness. (p. 153)
The visitor is shocked and horrified, of course – more so than the reader, who had some idea of what to expect when they took up and began to read a story titled “The Headless Haunt.” But the reader then shares the visitor’s further surprise when this headless man turns out to be nothing like the terrifying Headless Horseman from Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”:
[The traveller] heard a voice. It had a soft, firm, worldly ring. The sound of the voice, the enunciation, told a story of education and experience and culture. There was no apparent source of the words as spoken.
“I beg your pardon,” the voice said, “I hope I haven’t startled you too much.”
At this point, the erect but headless figure bowed gently forward from the waist….
“You are welcome to the warmth of my fire and to the food of my table. Any hospitality of which I am capable is at your disposal. I hope your shock at seeing my condition will not keep you from accepting these modest favors. If you will be my guest, then I have a favor to beg of you. Please sit.” (p. 153)
The reader is intrigued at once by how the courteous and gentlemanly deportment of this ghost contrasts with his ghastly appearance. And, as it turns out, this ghost story, like so many of the others included here, involves the settlement of unfinished business. This headless gentleman suffered cruel injustice in life, it turns out, and the visitor has the opportunity, by righting an old wrong, to help the ghost end his days as a “haunt” and find at last the peace of death.
Not all of the 33 stories included in these collection are equally appealing; some suffer from a frustrating lack of closure, while others reveal outdated social attitudes from the time in which they were collected. But all display Harden’s storytelling verve, along with his genuine enthusiasm for these ghostly bits of North Carolina regional culture.
Tar Heel Ghosts was originally published by the University of North Carolina Press at Chapel Hill, and is a good example of how the UNC Press, while publishing plenty of the scholarly monographs that are de rigueur for a university press, has also made a point, throughout its history, of printing regional material that would appeal to a general as well as an academic audience. Particularly, though not exclusively, for North Carolina readers, Harden’s book is quite suitable reading for the Halloween season, or for any time-of-year in which one may want to savor a fun, light-hearted scare or two.
August 27, 2020
I suppose every state has their ghost stories and growing up in NC, I have heard many stories about ghosts, but a number of these were new to me. I enjoyed the book and it made me want to seek out additional ghost stories, I had a book of ghost stories from New Orleans when I was a boy, but when I left home for the Navy, it disappeared, would like to read again.
August 19, 2015
It was fun to reread a book from my childhood. The stories are mostly pretty good, even though they are vague as to the specifics of where the ghosts are, mostly. It made me want to research some of these tales more. Definitely worth the read if you live in NC.
December 19, 2008
A good, true to heart ghost story book about actual occurrences.
October 19, 2012
Read this several times. I'm always interested in North Carolina (since I am a Tarheel).
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews