Superstitions, Part II
Sometimes our ancestors don't seem to have known many names. In my mother's family, if a name wasn't traditional or wasn't in the Bible, they didn't consider it. I expect the dialogues went,
Prospective mother: "What should we call the baby?"
Relative Uncle: "I don't know, what did we call the last one?"
Prospective mother, to her room of relatives: "Lewis."
Uncle: "Perfect."
The men in the room clutch their pipes in their mouths and nod.
Husband: "We’ll go with that."
When I was eleven, I charted my family tree on paper. We didn't know my father's grandparents. That part was over quick. But on my mother's side, we found what seemed to be an endless number of records. The Stocketts had a long tradition of naming their men John, Jack, Clinton, or Lewis. (John and Jack are the same name, I know.) The tree of names went back, back, and farther back, all the way to 1530.
There were probably a dozen men named Lewis in the tree, either directly in my mother's line or brothers to an ancestor in the line. My uncles had referred to a great-grand-uncle Lewis, I remembered. He had always been 'frightened of ghosts.' I wondered which one he was. They had refused to tell me his story, actually. My grandmother had stopped them.
The next time I visited, I asked about the Lewis names in the family. My uncles glanced at each other, noticed my grandmother wasn't around, and conspired to tell me about my great-grand-uncle.
“Lewis hated seances, skeletons …” Johnny began.
“And vampires,” one of my younger uncles, Mike, interrupted. Naturally, he brought it up because he liked vampires. His older brothers scowled at him.
“Not sure they had vampires back then. Anyway, Lewis hated anything about the undead or any people coming back to life," Johnny continued. He gave a wry smile. "Ghost stories made him cry."
They told the story in a disjointed way because they argued while they were describing it. This is how men tell stories, I realized at the time. It's the only way I'd heard men talk in a group setting.
Arguments subtracted, Lewis lived in the 1860s. And he hated graveyards. He couldn't avoid them because he lived near a church. Every church had a graveyard. Most family farms did, too. Lewis refused to walk near the headstones after sunset. As a young man, he put his hands over his ears and fled when people tried to tell him ghost stories.
Of course, his reactions attracted the attention of his brothers, sisters, uncles, and cousins. They loved to tease him. Everybody loved practical jokes, too. They were living in practical times.
My ancestors brought ghosts into their stories whenever Lewis walked up. They made demonic sounds when they could get away with it. They jumped out at him from behind tombstones. In short, they made his life miserable. But if Lewis ran off and changed his name to Ebenezer or Elijah or some other, popular name, we wouldn't have gotten our family story.
The incident began with a death in the family. Lewis's grandfather got ill and died.
For decades, American society groups had felt a fear, almost a mania, about being buried alive. So Lewis wasn't alone in his worries. Getting buried alive had happened a few times. Newspapers had run breathless, horrified accounts. The New York Times reported on a man from Buncombe County, North Carolina named "Jenkins." His body was found turned over inside his coffin with his hair pulled out and scratch marks visible on all sides of the coffin's interior. Another case involved a girl named "Collins" whose body was found with knees tucked under her and the burial shroud torn into shreds. These cases and others caught the public imagination. People across the world, quite literally, adjusted their burial customs. Mortuary associations and churches inserted medical checks into their rituals.
This all brought about a resurgence of the custom of spending a night with the body. It had been something churches did long ago, usually as a service offered by professional clergy. But now, given the public mood, it had to make a comeback. That's why Lewis's small church required the dead man's relatives to stay with the body overnight. They were supposed to pray, of course, but it was partly to make sure the corpse didn't move.
Four men volunteered to stay overnight. Since they were Lewis's cousins, they pressured him to join. One of his uncles ordered him to do his family duty.
His uncle, however, saw another chance to tease Lewis. He talked to his sons and his other nephews about it. They agreed; it was too good an opportunity to pass up. All five of them committed to the prank.
The chapel of rest, where the body lay, was actually a wooden shed next to the church. Of course, that meant it also sat next to the graveyard. Lewis arrived early. He didn't want to cross the grounds next to the graves in anything like darkness.
Inside, the casket lay on a pedestal in the center. A pastor lit oil lamps for the vigil and hung them on hooks. Around the walls, even hung on some of the walls, rested the pastor's tools for the gravedigging. Shovels, sledge hammers, picks, wooden pry bars, and anything else that might be needed to bury a casket had been pushed to the corners. Someone had tied up the pry bars in a bundle along one wall. He had leaned shovels and sledges against the wallboards, too.
The rest of the family arrived, one by one, through the big, barn-like doors on the east end of the chapel. The pastor led them in a prayer. They knelt on the dirt floor. They rose and knelt on the wooden platform, next to the casket. Finally, the women who had come for the prayer all left. The pastor exited through the only other door, a small one on the southwest corner closest to the church.
The five cousins sat on stools near the lamps. Occasionally, they walked around or prayed next to the coffin. After a while, though, the cousins started to tell ghost stories.
This was part of the prank. Of course, Lewis knew they were teasing him. He asked them to stop. But they didn't and Lewis's imagination ran away with the stories. The morbid tales of demons and murders had the same effect on him they always did. After an hour, he had to go to the bathroom. For another hour, he held it because he didn't want to go out in the dark. Eventually, he asked his nicest relative, Jack, to walk to the edge of the woods with him.
"No, you go alone." The young man shook his head.
Lewis asked the others. No one wanted to go. His cousins knew it would interfere with their prank. He was so panicked and so insistent, though, one of them - the youngest, Jack - finally agreed.
As soon as he left, his uncle Jonathan came out from hiding behind the shed. He stepped through the southwest door with an empty casket in his arms. The rest of the cousins jumped up to help. They carried their grandfather's body in its casket to a spot behind the nearest tree. Then they rushed back to the shed to help their father. He had managed to set his empty coffin box onto the pedestal. They helped him into it, put on the lid, and arranged it to look as much like their grandfather's casket as possible. They spent a lot of time trying not to giggle.
They knew this was going to be the best prank ever.
Outside, at the northeast edge of the woods near the graveyard, Lewis refused to do his business between the trees. He didn't like the look of them.
"You won't go with me?" he asked Jack.
"No, I don't need to go."
"Well, then turn around." Lewis unbuttoned. He 'made a river' for about a minute. When he was done and presentable, he told his cousin it was time to head back.
While young Jack had been staring at the headstones of the graves, though, the he had gotten an idea. He could get a head start on his father's prank. As they wandered by the graveyard, he pretended to hear a noise.
"I'm going to look," Jack muttered.
"Don't!" Lewis realized what was happening too late. He couldn't prevent his cousin from entering the graveyard. And he wasn't willing to follow.
What happened next was, according to the tale, a wonderful acting job. Jack howled. He claimed that something had grabbed him. Then he groaned and struggled a bit more as he sank behind a gravestone. Finally, he called,
"Run, Lewis!"
Lewis ran back to the barn that was the chapel of rest. There, in a panic, he told his other relatives about their brother's disappearance. They chuckled.
"Not to worry," said the eldest, Clinton. "He'll be back."
They sat for a long time. Of course, the missing cousin Jack did not return. The rest of them prayed once or twice. They got up close to the coffin. There, Lewis heard scratching sounds. No one else heard them. He heard them again. But everyone acted like he was crazy.
A few minutes later, Lewis heard groans coming from the coffin. No one else paid attention to it.
"Well, he's been gone a while," said Clinton. "I've got to go take care of business, too. Maybe I'll fetch him back."
He grabbed a lantern and marched out. After a while, the lid of the casket seemed to move. Only Lewis noticed. He tried to point it out to the others. Every time he pointed, though, the motion stopped.
"All right," said one of the two remaining cousins. He rose from his stool. "I'm going to find out what's going on."
"Don't go to the graveyard!" Lewis demanded. He grabbed his cousin by the arm but the larger man shoved him away. He took another lantern with him, leaving the room in dim light even by the low lighting standards of the countryside.
For a long while, Lewis sat with his remaining cousin. Naturally, his cousin wanted to leave. He rose once, saying he had to go. Lewis stopped him. He got up again. Lewis grabbed him again.
"There are noises in the casket," he hissed to his cousin.
"Oh, you're always imagining things." The young man gave the chapel pedestal a dismissive glance. "We peeked in at the body earlier. Why don't you take a look now?"
Lewis stepped closer. He almost touched the lid. But he heard a scratching noise. He froze. The sound seemed to come from under the casket lid. He thought he saw the pine board tremble.
"No!" He backed up. He turned toward his cousin.
His cousin wasn't there. A breeze blew in through the big barn door front. Behind him, Lewis heard a groan. He spun around.
In the casket, his uncle Jonathan let out another, louder spooky groan. Then another.
Lewis panicked. The voice didn't sound to him like his dead grandfather. It sounded deeper, more haunted. He didn't want to run out into the graveyard, where the skeletons might be lurching out of the ground and grabbing people. He ran from wall to wall in the little building.
Finally, as uncle John heard Lewis getting more and more frantic, he decided to finish the prank. Slowly, groaning, he lifted the casket lid from the inside. In the dim light, he rose. He let out a theatrical, loud hiss of the undead.
That's when Lewis steeled up his courage. He grabbed a sledgehammer from next to the wall and beat the body back into the coffin.
So that was the end of the prank.
A few days later, a policeman came around to question everyone. He didn't arrest Lewis. He didn't arrest any of his cousins, either, who after all had just lost their grandfather and their father. The policeman gave them all a long talking-to and left - while, I have imagine, shaking his head so much he needed to shut his eyes.
Lewis didn't change his name or join the army or even leave the area. He married a bit late in life. He had one child. And he left behind this story.
