Carolyn Ridder Aspenson - 02 Ghosts Are People Too by Carolyn Ridder Aspenson

Author:Carolyn Ridder Aspenson [Aspenson, Carolyn Ridder]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781087042992
Amazon: 1087042992
Publisher: Independently published
Published: 2019-08-01T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5

I did my due diligence on the Kentworth history, and I discovered more than I’d expected. I truly loved my job. I loved discovering information about days long gone, the people that lived before me and their stories. People hadn’t changed a whole lot. The surroundings and the things available to them might have, but people were the same. They wanted love, respect, things that made them feel complete, and many searched for those things in their community.

Sometimes doing historical research required a lot of time and a shovel big enough to dig through the rocks of history that buried the truth, and other times the information shouted out, Over here! The information is over here!

The Kentworth family’s history screamed bloody murder.

At least Anna Kentworth’s history.

The wife and mother of two was twenty-nine-years-old when she died a brutal, horrific death. Though tragic and violent, her death helped me understand her desire to be left alone.

Town records and old newspapers were abundant in Castleberry. For such a small town in the 2000s, in the beginning of 1860, it was up and coming , filled with opportunity and wealth. The local newspaper, originally a small two pager, did a fine job of staying up and running during the war, even growing to a six-page spread because of the massive death and destruction rampant in town.

Anna’s death came about two years before the war ended, on a beautiful, sunny fall day. It was seventy-four degrees, and from what I knew of my hometown, I suspected the leaves in various shades of decay—greens, reds, and even browns—very likely floated in the breeze to rest on the ground. But it wasn’t a happy day. Castleberry had lost six townspeople. Anna’s home was taken over by Union soldiers who pilfered through the Kentworth belongings, ate what little food they may have had, destroyed their crops and livestock, and worst of all, raped and beat the young wife and mother.

Anna’s husband hadn’t been heard from in months, but records indicated he wasn’t likely dead at that time. Her children, however, were already deceased. Dysentery took her small boy, a three-year-old named William, along with her five-year-old daughter Annabelle.

As if the gun fire and canons exploding weren’t enough, the children lived in fear of the men marching through Castleberry, destroying their homes, their livestock, and their innocence. I silently prayed their deaths were quick and less painful than reports of dysentery claimed.

The last day of Anna’s life, she’d been beaten and raped by three soldiers, then thrown out of her own home like trash. Beaten and scared, she somehow gathered the strength to walk two miles to town, collapsing, battered and bloody, in front of the general store. Doctor Henry McGruder did his best to save her, but it simply wasn’t enough. She died in his office, crying for her husband William.

I sniffled as tears dropped onto my desk. The world I lived in was by no means perfect, but it was miles better than the war zone of the Civil War.

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