Are you interested in angels, demons, spirits, ghosts, and monsters? Are you curious about their origins, tales, and influence upon history and on the present day? If so, sit back, relax, and welcome to Southern Demonology, the podcast that explores all of this and more. This is episode six. And as it's Mother's Day, I thought that we would do a tribute episode that is entirely in line with the theme for this particular podcast. In fact, I thought that it's finally time to introduce the Southern into Southern demonology.
As today is Mother's Day, uh this is actually going to be a small tribute episode because I'm going to be discussing and going over some ghost stories that comes out of the lives of my grandmother and my mother. Let me start off by saying a happy Mother's Day to all of the moms listening in the audience and soon to be moms. I hope you had a really fantastic day. And to my own mom, I cannot tell you how much I appreciate all of the sacrifices, all of the sweat, blood, and tears that you have poured out because of me.
If it wasn't for you, I would not have been able to attain anything within this life. And the older I get, the more I recognize exactly how much you have done, and there's just no amount of words that I could ever say to thank you. I love you very much. So for some Mother's Day may be a chore or may not be anything special, but to me I feel doubly blessed because first it's a way for me to show my own wife and my mother how much they mean to me, but it's also a way to honor my grandmother.
See, after my mom and dad divorced when I was three months old, uh my mom took me away from Washington State where his family was and moved me back to her ancestral home of Tennessee. And my grandmother began living with us, and so it was just the three of us. Uh they raised me. Um early on. My grandmother uh developed well, she had worked all of her life like a maniac. Uh, she raised five kids by herself, uh, which was an almost unheard of feat.
But when I was young, she developed a rare form of scleroderma in her fingertips, which made it excruciatingly painful just to have them barely brushed against. Um so she couldn't really work. So my mom was the sole breadwinner of our family, and my grandmother uh watched me at home after school and on the weekends. My mom worked her butt off for years upon years, and a very thankless job. But she did it. They both did what they had to do, and for that I could never express enough thanks. They're both the most amazing women that I've ever known.
Uh now my grandmother, she only had a week's worth of education. When I knew her, she could write her name and that only painstakingly. But she was one of the smartest women I've ever known, and both my mom and my grandmother have a work ethic that just can't even begin to be compared to. It's uh it's absolutely amazing. But for the point of this episode, we're going to go through some very unusual experiences that both of them have experienced um in their lives. Now, my grandmother is no longer with us, she passed away back in 1997.
But we uh we've carried these stories with us um all along and uh uh would like to do nothing more than recount a few uh to show some of her strength, fortitude, and wisdom. So my grandmother, she was born in 1927, and she was the second oldest girl out of seven kids. Now back in those days, uh at least within the region that I'm from, the roles of women and men were much more starkly delimitated.
Um the men went out and worked in the fields because most of my family were farmers and s most of them still happened to be in some way, shape, or form, and the women stayed inside and they cooked and cleaned. However, my grandmother broke the mold when it came to all that. Um my uncle, great uncle LD was a sickly kid and couldn't take the rigors of working outside, and so essentially he and my grandmother switched places. So she would go out and she would work right alongside the men, and uh Uncle El Grand Uncle LD would stay inside and uh and work with uh his sisters and grandmother.
This first story comes when my grandmother was just barely into her teen years. This story is one that I call the announcement. So it was a hot day, and the younger kids, which was my great aunt Marlou, uh great uncle Tutu, and great uncle LD, were all acting kind of strangely that day. They were crying, they couldn't be consoled, and my grandmother did what she could for them, but she had a lot of chores to do that day of her own. But at that night, she uh had them all sitting either on her lap or around her, and she was singing to them, trying to get them to calm down.
And that's when she noticed a light way off in the distance. See, my grandmother at that time, she uh the whole family lived in this old shack uh way back down the haller. And my uh grandmother, great actually great-grandmother, at the time was inside. Uh, she was not exactly what most people would call a pleasant person, although she could sling a shoe and hit someone in the head at 500 yards without a problem in the world. Um but my great-grandfather uh was kind of the light of everyone's eyes.
But at this point, he was actually in a hospital in Memphis, which now is about three and a half hours away and then was considerably longer. Uh, but the army had transported him down there uh because of some issues that he was having with his teeth. So he was staying in a hospital and my grandmother's with all the younger kids, and this light that she happened to notice kept getting closer and closer until finally she could see that it was a lantern, but she could not see anyone that was holding it.
The kids began to whimper more and more, and this thing, this light source, this lantern, sat down on the first porch step and a voice which belonged to nobody echoed out of your father has passed away. Somebody will be around in the morning to tell you. And then this light source disappeared. And I don't mean it picked itself back up and walked back down the haller, I mean it just faded from sight instantly. And sure enough, one of the neighbors uh had gotten word from the uh from the sheriff that their father had died. So that was the first story.
The second I call the wind of salvation, and it's something that happened to my grandmother when she was in her late teens. It was an excruciatingly hot day in summer, and my grandmother hitched up a team of mules and walked to a local uh tobacco patch and began trying to uh sow the field. And as the longer she got out there, the hotter it seemed to get. At this point in time, my grandmother was a force to be reckoned with. No man would ever hope to stand against her because she would put them in their place. But at this time she also cursed like a Russian sailor.
Please forgive the euphemism. So she was out there with her two donkeys, and she was cursing and screaming at them, trying to get them to move faster so that she could complete her chore. And as she was doing this, she began to hear chains. But she couldn't see anything. So she just chalked it up as maybe someone else was logging or something back in the woods and kept on uh mo uh kept on plowing the field. But the day seemed to be getting hotter and hotter and the chains kept getting closer and closer until eventually she felt something cold snap around her neck. It was the chains.
She couldn't see anything. She would reach her arm hands up and try to grasp whatever was around her neck, but her hands encountered nothing. But yet she could not breathe now. She collapsed to the ground, and all she could do was pray. She prayed to the good Lord, please let me breathe. Please get me out of this. I'll do whatever you want. I will serve you, I will stop cussing, I will do whatever it is. And the more she prayed, the tighter these things got. And that is until eventually she felt the sweetest, coldest wind begin to blow in her face.
And right then the chains unwrapped around her neck, and she heard them proceed back down the hall. She always told us this story as a reason for why she did not like to cuss and did not want people to cuss around her. This last story is actually uh when my grandmother um had she had five kids of her own, and the youngest of which, Ernest, was in high school at the time. And it was her and my mom and my aunt Brenda, who's married to my uh other uncle, Uncle Booty. They were all sitting around in the old house, and suddenly my uncle Ernest appeared in the doorway.
And my grandmother said, Ernest, what are you doing there? Come on in. And my mom and my aunt Brenda each saw him there, and then all of a sudden the silence was shattered by the telephone ringing. Grandmother picked it up, and it was the highway patrol informing her that Ernest had been in a very serious accident. And she looked back at the doorway and there was nobody there. What kind of apparition this was I have no idea.
But yet they all three swear to the fact that they saw my uncle Ernest standing in the doorway when it was physically impossible because he was being rushed to the emergency room as he had been in a very bad car accident. In fact, later on, my uncle Booty was also in a very bad car accident. In fact, every bone in his face had been crushed and had to be surgically um redone, uh repupped back together, which is why his later pictures appear very different than his early years. But the moment my mo my grandmother got a phone call, the first thing she asked was, Is he dead?
Because somehow she knew, and she's always been like that. This next set of tales involves my mother. The first one I like to call the Fifty Figments. So in my mom's late teens, she started dating my dad, who was in the army in the neighboring town over. It had been raining earlier that day, but skies had finally cleared up and she went over to Clarksville to meet him near the base, and they went to a little park. And when they got there they had seen other cars parked in the area, but they didn't see anybody. They were the only ones there.
So they went and sat on a picnic bench, sitting there chatting and talking and generally just enjoying each other's company, when over the hill they saw a person begin to walk toward them. And then there was another and another until there was an entire group of individuals walking toward them, probably about forty or fifty indiv people. And what was odd is that they didn't make a sound. They were staring straight ahead, right at my mom and dad, and walking toward them. Not fast, but at a very steady measure. And it was so bizarre that chills ran up their spines.
And my mom said, Okay, it's time for us to get the heck out of here. So they ran to her car, and the thing is about her car, she had a Mustang at the time, and because it didn't have any undercoating, it would flood out when there's a lot of rain, because water would get into the vehicle. But luckily this time around, after saying copious amounts of prayers, the vehicle turned over on the first catch, and she spun gravel everywhere, high telling it out of the area. And she looked over at my dad and she's like, Okay, what are they doing? What are they doing? Where are they?
And he was white as a sheet. And he said in a whispered voice, They're not there. And she said, What do you mean they're not there? They were right behind us. And she looked up in the rear view mirror, and sure enough, the knoll that entire area was once again devoid of people. This next tale is the missing items. So after my mom and dad got married, they moved up to Washington State where his family was.
And they had just came back from the ceremony, and my mom had put their wedding cer she was going to hang up their wedding certificate right then and there, but she couldn't find any little nails. And so she laid them on the table next to this book. See, my dad uh was hugely into science fiction and fantasy, just like I am. I got that from him. Uh, but he was also into the occult, and so he had this strange little grimoire of spells, um, and my mom did not like that at all.
Um even though my family isn't particularly religious, they were still instilled with a lot of basic Protestant Christian values, and so my mom had no truck with that kind of stuff, and she said, I want that out of my house, I want your um anything to do with that gone, because I don't like it. But anyway, she put the wedding uh certificate on the table next to this book and they went to bed. The next morning she got up and she could not find the wedding certificate. Strangely enough, this book was also gone, and she never found it.
They had to actually reorder copies because it had just disappeared. In fact, my dad accused her of throwing away his book, and she said no, I didn't. She accused him of throwing away the wet the marriage certificate, um, which he didn't do, so who knows what happened to them. But still, it's kind of an interesting tale. But the most interesting one is one that I call the pink trailer and the brown garb. Um, she was very far along with uh being pregnant with me uh and was living in a pink trailer at the time, who was being rented out by the owner who everyone just called pop.
Well, in her own words, uh at that point in time uh she was having to uh pee a great deal uh because of me, and uh she woke up in the middle of the night and just before she began to swing her legs off the bed, she saw a man standing in front of the bed who happened to be looking out of a window. She was petrified and before she was able to reach over and shake my dad awake, this figure turned around. It was dressed in a brown hunting outfit, the likes of which she had not seen before. But instead of a scary expression on this strange figure's face, it was a really sad smile.
She describes it as the saddest smile that she's ever seen. And she sat there frozen, unable to do anything. But then all of a sudden the apparition faded from view, but it did so by the top part of his body vanishing first and later his legs. Needless to say, um she did not have to go to the restroom because uh uh that apparition had scared her so badly at that point.
A few weeks later, she was going to uh with my dad uh to pay the rent to Pop, and she'd actually have never has never uh been to his office before, so they walked back there, and she turns white as a sheet the moment she walks into the room because there is a large picture behind Pop's desk which depicts him and the same man that she saw standing in front of her bed in the same. Brown hunting garb. And he looks at her and he goes, Are you okay? And she goes, Pop who is that man in the picture behind you? And he turns around and he goes, Oh, that was my best friend.
And she goes and he looks really sad when he says that and she goes, Well, what happened to him? And he says, Well, it was the last day of hunting season and his wife asked him not to leave. She says that she's not feeling well and uh she just wished that he would stay behind and stay with her all day. And the husband said, No, it's okay. I'm just gonna be gone for a few hours, and then I'll come back and we will spend the rest of the day together. So she relents and he leaves. He comes back home and he finds his wife dead. She had passed away due to a massive stroke.
And after that he was never the same again. And he finally passed away a few w uh months later. And the thing is, is that this man lived in this pink trailer that my mom and dad were liv were renting. In fact, that's why Pop bought the property, is because his best friend lived in it. Needless to say, even though the man did not s this apparition did not seem to be harmful in any way, uh it stare still scared my mom to death. And so very shortly afterwards they moved because she simply could not stand to be in the same uh place as she saw this thing. But luckily she had never seen it since.
So those are the tales of the strange and the supernatural from both my mom and my grandmother. They had quite a few things happen to them, and I've related a lot of it. There's still some more, obviously, but um for this last few minutes I thought that I would share something from my own past. I haven't had a phenomenal amount of paranormal experiences, but I've had a few. So in the area that I grew up, um we do have a great deal of Indian burial mounds, and we also have a large amount of wooded lands everywhere. Across the way um was my neighbor.
Uh they had a kid named Ricky who was a year um younger than I was, and we would always stand across the road from each other and shout back and forth uh because we weren't really supposed to ever cross the road ourselves, and we would then try to plan out if we were going to play together that day uh or what we were going to do. And at this particular occasion, it was right around Halloween, and we decided to play Fright Night. So we made plans to get together uh that night, and I uh decided to dress as a ghost.
So I uh pretty much took um uh notebook sheets and rubber band them around my arms and my legs, and I put a white towel over my head, uh, and I I thought I looked mighty scary, but in actuality I didn't look scary whatsoever. But uh got permission from my mom, and so I walked across the street and uh we all began to play together. So um that family had a uh had a boy and a girl, and the girl was name uh was um Lori K, and she was two or three years older than I was.
But then they had also adopted a uh few younger kids, and so it was all of us playing around in these uh scattered woods around their property, uh just trying to scare each other uh senseless. The first night nothing strange happened, everything went up went fine, and then the next night we decided to play again because it was so much fun. So I went back over there and we were playing amongst the woods, and then there came a point where I couldn't find anyone.
And I went looking all over the place in the front yard, side yard, finally went around to the back, and I saw what I thought was Lori K. There is this stretch of property back behind their house that we've always called the Colons. The Colons is a very dangerous area because it is filled with sinkholes. Um there's been quite a few hunters that's gone back there and have broken their legs because they suddenly fell into a sinkhole and couldn't get back up. I looked back into the colons, there's this little road that led back there, and I thought I saw Lloyd K.
At least that's what my mind interpreted for me, because there was a glowing figure there, something I could see clearly with no lights, it was a light source in and of itself. But it was tall, vaguely humanoid, and the only person I knew that fit that description out of our entire group was the older girl. But I was still pretty creeped out. And so I went into the basement entrance of their house, and there everyone was laughing at me. Lori K, Ricky, and all the younger kids. And it was at that point that I realized what I had seen was not Lori K. It was something.
I don't know what it was to this day have no idea but I do remember it very clearly. I do know that it was emanating a light through its entire body. And I am positive that I had seen a spirit at that point. What it was doing there, I have no idea. But I will tell you this, I am very thankful that I have not seen it since. Thank you all for joining me for this uh special Mother's Day episode of Southern Demonology. I hope you've liked it. Um in the future we will try to do more of these types of uh pure ghost story episodes just because they're really fun uh to tell, to listen to.
At least I hope it was fun to listen to. But um next week we are going to finish up with uh the final episode in our three-part miniseries on the pertinatural and the demonic. We will be focusing upon what a demon is, the corruption, the signs to tell what it is, the process of um exorcism, and finally some more uh pertinent issues about the troubles of source material when it comes to identifying the demonic and anything about them. I hope you'll join us. Thank you for joining once again, and I hope you have a great day. This has been Southern Demonology.
Please feel free to contact us at Southern Demonology at gmail.com. We hope that you join us again for our next episode.