Jeffrey's Favorite 13 Ghost Stories by Kathryn Tucker Windham

Author:Kathryn Tucker Windham [Windham, Kathryn Tucker]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Ghost stories, Southern ghosts, South, Southern folklore, folklore, folktales, storytelling, Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Tennessee, Kathryn Tucker Windham, Jeffrey's Favorite 13 Ghost Stories, supernatural occurrences, phantoms
ISBN: 9781603061117
Publisher: NewSouth Books
Published: 2004-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

7

Nellie

Columbus, Mississippi

Sitting on the front porch of the old Weaver home and rocking and listening to Miss Nellie talk was as fine a history lesson about Columbus as anybody could have.

Miss Nellie knew everything there was to know about that old river town. She knew about the buildings, and she knew about the people whose lives were a part of those buildings.

She also knew nearly everybody who passed along the sidewalk in front of her house, and she interrupted her rocking and her talking to speak to them and to inquire about members of their families. Each passerby stirred another of Miss Nellie’s cubbyholes of memories and prompted the telling of another chapter in the chronicles of Columbus.

As she grew older—she lived to be eighty—Miss Nellie spent more and more time in her rocking chair on the front porch. Looking out across the boxwood hedge and the iron fence (both there before she was born) with her back to the cracked windows and the broken shutters and the dingy walls, she could forget for a little while that her house was worn and shabby.

The house seemed to have gone down—that was a term her father would have used—so quickly that she was overwhelmed by the magnitude of the repairs it needed. Yet she knew that was not true: the changes had come gradually. Time and neglect, not willful neglect but neglect nevertheless, had taken their relentless toll.

She remembered walking through the back parlor one afternoon (was it last year? five years ago? ten?) and glanced into the tall mirror. A stranger, wrinkled and disheveled, stared back at her.

For the first time, Miss Nellie knew that she was old.

Having seen the changes in herself, she looked closely at her house. It, too, had changed: the graceful elegance of the familiar rooms, rooms where she had spent her entire life, had been swallowed up by deterioration and drabness. Going from room to room, Miss Nellie, felt like an intruder, as though she had mistakenly come to the wrong address.

“Well,” she said aloud, “we’ve gotten old, this house and I. Not long ago, this was the loveliest house, and I was the prettiest girl in Columbus. But we’re quality—we’ll survive.”

It was true, her observation about the loveliness of the house and her beauty.

The house had been built by her father, William B. Weaver, a Columbus merchant, in 1848. That was in the prosperous pre-War days when there was money and labor to indulge the tastes of cultured men such as William Weaver for residences of classic elegance.

Select lumber was shipped up the Tombigbee River from Mobile. Marble mantles were imported from Italy. The front of the house had an Italianate influence with its delicate arches of wooden tracery connecting the six octagonal columns. The columns were decorated with plaster medallions of acanthus leave, and flawless pier mirrors reflected the lights from chandeliers into infinity.

It was a lovely house, a perfect setting for a girl as vivacious and as pretty as Nellie Weaver.

Many of

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