Free Ghosts of Graveyards Past by Laura Briggs Page A

of furniture in the cabin.”
    “He’s not so big,” the dog’s owner protested. “Not compared with the dog Billy Cray saw t’other night. The size of a mare and all shaggy with black fur—”
    Laughter greeted the wild statement, everyone but the doctor joining in the mirth.
    Her expression was one of confusion and mild concern.
    Charley’s mother demanded, “What nonsense are you talking now, child?”
    “The plat-eye,” he insisted. “Billy and his pa saw it twice down by the Crooked Wood spring. It had eyes like fire.”
    Plat-eyes were the spirits conjured by the dead in the form of menacing, oversized animals, according to old folk tales. Nell had heard plenty of tales of it, and shivered through them, as a girl.
    “Oh, hush now,” his mother said, embarrassed by the smiles of amusement the story was drawing. “Billy Cray is not to be trusted anyhow. Were it not his fingers left such an ugly mark on our door the other night?” She spoke of a recent prank the children had played in the Mischief Night tradition, the scrawling of a mysterious symbol on various doors in the community.
    Nell’s family had been spared this indignity, but the Hinkles, among several others, had woken the next day to find their homes marked with a blood-red dye, streaks of it trailing down the wood from the painted symbol above.
    A death symbol some claimed, though Nell wasn’t sure why. When she went to borrow a volume from her former instructor’s shelves, Nell had seen the one left on the schoolhouse door. A half-moon with an arrow bent through it. The teacher, Miss Mitchell, had studied it with pursed lips and a cold eye, muttering something about “heathen youngins” under her breath.
    “Mr. Roan’s door has the same mark,” Charley insisted, revealing his reason for braving the hermit’s fence. “That makes eight I’ve heard of, besides ours. Reckon I will have to see them all to be sure.”
    “Not until your wound is healed,” the doctor cautioned. “You must take care not to loosen these stitches. I will be extremely disappointed if I hear otherwise.” She had begun to repack her bag, a battered leather one said to belong to her father in his early days of practice. She rarely mentioned her family, or anything of a personal nature, but Nell had seen text books on her shelves that bore the former physician’s name.
    “Billy says the plat-eye’s the spirit of a convict,” a shy voice offered, the only Hinkle girl, her hair twisted in a long braid that she toyed with nervously. “Hung back in granddaddy’s day. That is why no one’s seen it outside the woods—’cause its spirit is trapped there.”
    Nell squirmed to hear such talk. The story of the convict had inspired more than one nightmare for her as a child. Suspected of thieving from his neighbors, he was said to have hanged for his crimes on the big, twisted oak from which Crooked Wood took its name. No burial for the body, only a rope to slowly fray, and birds to pick the bones.
    The doctor snapped her case shut, her expression unreadable. What must she think of their superstitious talk? A woman of science and education, her love for reason excluded even the possibility of a higher power, something Nell’s family had learned the first Sunday she refused their invitation to church.
    “Could be that’s what marked up the doors,” Charley said, an idea coming to him. “Vengeance in blood for the hanging—”
    “Enough of such talk,” his mother said, waving away the boy’s excitement.“You will be scaring the young ones,” she added, with a glance at the other Hinkle children. None of them looked remotely frightened as they sat forward, eager gazes trained on their brother for more of this wondrous knowledge.
    Relief flooded through Nell as the subject changed to the crops and eventually to Henry’s last letter. She read part of it aloud, as their neighbor made tsking sounds at the regiment’s shortage on food and supplies.
    “We