The Telltale Lilac Bush and Other West Virginia Ghost Tales

Introduction

Introduction ANYONE WHO has ever lived in West Virginia, or even traveled through the state, can easily see what an ideal place it would be for ghosts. It is an unending sequence of hills and valleys, with a backdrop of other mountains in the distance. Over all these mountains and valleys is a wilderness of shrubbery and trees so that genuinely lonesome places exist in almost all sections of the state. Hundreds or even thousands of ghosts could gather nightly on West Virginia's hills or sigh from the treetops, and few living souls would know the difference. But West Virginia has more than a ghostly setting. As everyone knows, a ghost presupposes a murder, or at least an unusual death, and West Virginia has had no lack of either. The Mountain State can boast of a long list of such violent deaths throughout the years. Probably trouble with Indians, the Civil War, and mine accidents have contributed more generously toward ghost origins than any other factors, but cruel slave owners, the killers of wandering peddlers, and other murderers have helped too. It is altogether possible that one of my distant relatives, "Devil" Anse Hatfield, added to the number of West Virginia's ghosts. And yet, in spite of the evident hard circumstances under which most of these unfortunate creatures died, West Virginia's ghosts, as a whole, do not come back for revenge. xi It may be that many of them come back in a kind of nostalgia-to get another look at the hills. Even the victim of a scythe murder, over a hundred years ago, did not come back in malice. The poor thing evidently preferred West Virginia to wherever he was-and particularly wanted to locate his head, which had been separated from his body in death. Ghosts do not like such separations, but most of them are polite about it and, headless or otherwise, are far less hostile than people realize. In speaking of New York ghosts, Louis C. Jones says "far, far more come back with kindly purposes in mind-than come back in anger," and West Virginians are much the same. Perhaps the tales represented here may not bear this out very well, but my entire collection of ghosts will. Since the early 1950s, a great deal of research has been completed on the folktale, including ghost stories. Ernest Baughman's Ph.D. dissertation, "A Comparative Study of the Folktales of England and North America," devotes 128 pages to Motif E with the addition of numerous motifs concerning the dead. Stith Thompson's Motif-Index of Folk Literature has been revised and enlarged to include much of the scholarship of the last thirty years. In the revision there are thirteen additional pages on Motif E. Also a number of ghost stories, or collections containing ghost tales, with comments and references, have come out within the last ten years. Prior to 1950, various scholarly articles on ghosts had been published, including a study of "The Vanishing Hitchhiker," but the great surge of scholarly work on motif indexes (barring Stith Thompson's earlier six-volume edition ), especially motifs concerning ghosts and the dead, has been made available only since 1950. Consequently, although comparatively few ghost tales could be identified some fifteen years ago, now almost all of them can be classified under one or more motifs. However, even though they are a form of the folktale, and a very early form, comparatively few ghost stories can xii be identified as Tale Types. In the hundred tales represented here, only one, "Seven Bones," can be so identified. It is Tale Type 365, "The Dead Bridegroom Carries Off His Bride." A selection of one hundred ghost stories could hardly give a complete picture of West Virginia's people. However, I think these tales do suggest something of their lives, oral culture, and beliefs. One may also read into this collection, as into any collection of folklore, something of the history of the state-even before 1863. When I started to collect West Virginia folk material in the fall of 1946, it never occurred to me that any possible ghost story collection might be grouped to form a historical pattern. Now when I look over some of the classifications -"Negro Slaves," "Railroad Ghosts," "Animals and Birds," "Headless Ghosts," "Omens of Death," "Mine Ghosts," "Immigrant Ghosts,"-and think of the stories and beliefs involved, it seems to...