Vinegar Tom

This is the true story of when I witnessed a real ghost with my very own eyes for the very first time. This narrative is an account of a ghost my dearly departed grannie called Vinegar Tom. The ghost I'm going to tell you about is of the type known as a Witch's Familiar. Some say these ghosts are spirits of the dead. Others say they are demons. There are even people who say these fearsome ghosts are beings from alternate dimensions - realities wholly apart from the cosmos in which we live. Whatever they are, have no misconceptions about it - these ghosts are real.... and they are deadly.

As close as I could figure it, grannie's familiar she called Vinegar Tom was the ragged scarecrow perched at the far end of her cornfield where the dark compost soil lowered down into the shadows of a brooding swamp. That scarecrow was a ghoulish specter dressed as he was in faded tattered denim overalls with patches on the knees. Under his bibs he wore a red checkered flannel shirt. His sackcloth head was topped with a weathered straw hat, the brim of which was wildly frayed at the edges. He was grotesquely stuffed with rust-colored pine straw that stuck out in all directions from the cuffs of his threadbare shirt and the hem of his dirty overalls.

I did not like to play down at that far end of the cornfield because the creepy scarecrow seemed to be watching me when I was near it. The face of the grim thing bore a sinister expression. Once, I stared at that scarecrow's face for a long moment, then I looked away for an instant and when I looked back I swear the scarecrow's face had altered in some mysterious unnamable manner. The change was difficult to pinpoint - some subtle shift in the charcoal eye, a slight upturn at the corners of the cracked paint of the red mouth. It seemed to be grinning at me. The hideous thing was like a reanimated cadaver and I felt it coldly, ominously reading my thoughts.

During the winter months when the corn wasn't growing, I played on the side of the house opposite the cornfield, because without the tall cornstalks out there, it felt like that haunting scarecrow was watching me from a distance - watching.....and waiting.

Grannie's old house was surrounded on two sides by the dark swampy woods. Across the little sandy dirt road was one neighboring house; on the other side of grannie's vegetable garden was another and that neighbor's house was literally a falling-down shack. The place was infested with burnt brown cockroaches of prodigious size and disgustingness which were kept company by big hairy swamp rats that were as inky iron-gray as any shadow in the mucky murky woods that crowded in on all sides.

Those poor people didn't have air conditioning for relief against the sweltering summer heat. For warmth in winter all they had was a bent old potbellied wood-burning stove.

It was a middle-aged couple who lived in that rotting house with the sagging floorboards. They couldn't have been a day over sixty, but they were both alcoholics and smoked cigarettes lighting one off the end of the other so that they appeared to be aged far beyond their actual years. Their skin was dusky red from exposure to liquor and smoke.

The old feller was a man by the name of Taylor. He didn't call his wife by her name, he just called her "the old lady". He used to beat her. He got along with her all right as long as he wasn't too far gone in his cups, but as soon as he got really drunk he would beat his wife sure as the sun rises in the morning. Have you ever seen it rain while at the same time sunlight is still shining down through the raindrops? There's an old saying that when that happens it means the Devil is beating his wife with a frying pan around the hickory stump. When we saw it raining with the sun shining we said old Taylor was beating his wife around the shack with his firewater bottle.

Now, it came to pass that one time when I was approaching my ninth year of life on this Earth old man Taylor beat his wife so severely that she had to be hospitalized. Back in those days there was no such thing as 911. If somebody wanted to call the police they had to dial zero, wait for the rotary dialer to go all the way back around the numbers because zero was the last number, then wait for the operator to answer, then ask her to connect the call to the police department, then wait for someone at the police department to finally answer the phone. It didn't matter about any of that because back then nobody called the police when a husband beat his wife.

Somebody did call an ambulance, though. It was grannie. She had heard old man Taylor's wife screaming while he was pounding her, then all grannie heard was silence. That's how she knew something worse than usual had gone wrong. Whenever old man Taylor got drunk and beat his wife, the missus would shriek while she was being beaten, then sob mournfully for well over an hour after he tired of knocking her around in the cluttered disarray of their vermin-infested tumbledown hovel. That evening came when grannie didn't hear the crying after the screaming and the beating, so she knew something life-threatening had finally happened.

Without hesitation grannie called for an ambulance. When paramedics arrived, they found old Taylor sucking hard liquor straight from a nearly drained fifth of bourbon while his unconscious wife lay battered, bruised, and bloodied face down on the kitchen floor at his bare fungoid feet. They took her to the hospital but no body called the police and no charges were filed against the old drunkard who had beaten his wife senseless. Back then there was a tradition that a husband could beat his wife as long as he didn't use a stick any bigger around than his thumb.

Now it happened that evening that some cousins of mine from out of town were supposed to be coming in to spend Halloween with us. I had gotten all excited about it of course because grannie always dressed up like a witch and made chili that she put green food color in to make it look just like witch's brew as it bubbled, all creepy and gooey, on the stove. Well, I don't know for sure that it was chili and I don't know for sure that she put green food color in it. Grannie said that's what she did, but the odd thing about her Halloween chili recipe is that she would never let me watch her make it.

I say odd because grannie always encouraged my interest in cooking and would let me help her make all our family meals - all except her witch's brew for Halloween. That was the only cooking she wouldn't let me participate in.

So there I was with sundown rapidly approaching all by myself outside gathering sticks to make a fire for a good old fashioned marshmallow roasting when the kinfolk arrived, but a call came in from them saying they had suffered car trouble and as a consequence wouldn't be arriving until afternoon of the next day. I sat outside alone in the dark night huddling in the autumn chill at my little campfire. I admit I was sulking a bit. My ego had been injured by the lack of an audience for the campfire I had worked so hard to prepare - and besides that, I was lonely.

It was at that very moment I saw it. It was uncanny.... and it was terrifying. An eerie thing moved silently through the dry brown decaying cornstalks that had been picked clean of their harvest. The blood froze in my veins as I watched the skulking thing radiating a spooky green luminescence. It didn't seem to be in any hurry. It moved completely without sound and you probably know exactly where it was headed - right straight toward the old falling-down Taylor shack.

I didn't dare scream. My voice was caught in my throat. I couldn't have screamed if I'd wanted to. I also didn't dare run hard on the ground to make any noise to attract that grim thing's attention, but as quickly and as stealthily as I could, I made my way inside grannie's house and cautiously quietly locked the deadbolt.

I was shocked when I realized that all the lights were off in the house. The only way I was able to see through the shadows is that the little night-light on the back of the stove was on, its faint bluish-white glow barely reaching down the hall to the living room where I stood in unexpected confusion.

I went straight to the kitchen to tell grannie, but mysteriously she was nowhere to be seen. I flipped on the kitchen light, then flicked on the light in the other hallway that led to the far end of the house. Turning on lights as I went, I looked in the laundry room, in the back bathroom, in the down bedroom, but I couldn't find grannie anywhere. Then it struck me that maybe she had gone to bed, but that would have been strange because grannie usually didn't go to bed until after she had stayed up late enough to watch the ten o'clock local news. Glancing at the clock on the back of the stove I saw it was only 8:24.

In a growing dread of the fearful thing I had seen moving silently through the dead cornstalks and a bewilderment of where grannie might be, I made my way back to the front door because that's where grannie's bedroom was, just inside the front door to the right.

To my indescribable horror, I saw that the front door was standing open. This terrified me more than I can say because I knew for a fact that I had firmly turned the deadbolt to the locked position.

For a moment, I could not move at all. I was frozen like a solid block of winter ice. The sound of rapid breathing came to my ears. It seemed to be emanating from grannie's bedroom.

I flipped the switch for the light in the living room but it didn't come on. I was facing a mocking gauntlet of laughing demonic shadows.

With far greater courage than I can imagine any little youngan having, I made my way on tiptoe through the menacing shadows to the front door. I didn't look out into the stygian darkness that cloaked the porch in gloom. I placed my small trembling hands on the front door, softly pushed it all the way closed, and squinting my eyes, I slowly turned the deadbolt until I heard it click into the locked position.

By now the rapid shallow breathing was very audible to my highly alert ears and it was definitely coming from grannie's bedroom, the opening of which was immediately beside me.

I was more afraid than I had ever been in my life. Moonlight was oozing in from the window in grannie's bedroom and it fell in a diaphanous silvery wash over her gentle old face. I muttered, "Grannie?" but she did not answer.

The sickening sound of that raspy breathing was thundering in my skull. I was mortified with terror. I carefully entered the melancholy murkiness of her bedroom. I approached grannie with my heart lumped in my dry throat. I stood at the bedside and watched in that haunting moonlight her chest rise and fall with rapid shallow breathing. I was so scared and worried that something was wrong with my dearly beloved grannie. I began to sob a little because I feared she was dying. The fear that gripped my sad spirit that awful night was a terrible misery of loathsome isolation. All I could think about was how much I loved my beautiful grannie and how I didn't want her to die. I could endure anything life threw at me as long as I had grannie by my side, but without her, I was lost.

It was many years before I could look at myself in a mirror and admit that I had actually truly seen a real ghost. There was no denying the evidence of my own eyes. The image of that green glowing thing that walked without sound at night through the dead cornstalks toward the old falling-down Taylor shack haunts me to this very day.

Old man Taylor's wife spent over a week in the hospital. Grannie had gone to see her a couple of times, then cooked a big wholesome supper for Mrs. Taylor when the doctors let her go back home.

After that old man Taylor never beat his wife again. He couldn't because he was dead. An eerie thing happened while the old drunkard's wife was in the hospital. Someone, the police never did figure out who, entered old man Taylor's shack on the very night after he had beaten his poor wife so severely. Homicide investigators reckon the victim must have been passed out drunk and had no chance to defend himself. His cranium had been crushed with a ballpeen hammer. His entire head had been completely obliterated.

I remember the next day about the time the cousins finally arrived seeing police cars, an ambulance, and the hearse from the funeral home parked under the tall heavy cedar trees that perpetually shrouded the front yard of the falling-down Taylor shack. I also remember, when I went to dump the seeds from the jack-o-lantern at the far end of grannie's cornfield, seeing the rusty pine straw, flannel shirt, and bib overalls of that ragged scarecrow soaked in blood. Vinegar Tom looked sleepy. He had been up late the night before.