Roy Exum: Never Disturb The Dead

  • Thursday, July 2, 2015
  • Roy Exum
Roy Exum
Roy Exum

I’ve got too many things in my life that scare me so I’ve always been real leery of “unnecessary fear.” A guy named Terry wanted to teach me how to catch a live rattlesnake one time but had a tough time telling me what exactly to do with the angry serpent when the time came to let it go. I have the same view of these paranormal societies where otherwise sane people go around looking for ghosts.

Among my earliest teaching was to leave dead people alone, especially “haints” like “Green Eyes” in the Chickamauga Battlefield, or that legendary haunted room in the Read House, or any other ghosts.

Nothing can be accomplished except for sheer terror and, like that rattlesnake, what do you do if you find one? Take it home as a pet?

It didn’t take five seconds the other day for my sense of humor to kick in when I heard about a group of “ghosts hunters” who had descended on the dark and abandoned skeleton of the Kuhn Memorial Hospital down at Vicksburg, Ms. It seems a large number of “paranormal activity” events have been detected in the forlorn building and, with black mold, open elevator shafts, leaking roofs and all kinds of garbage strewn around, it’s the ideal place to find a wispy nurse-like creature carrying a big syringe or a crazed madman clawing at boarded up windows.

Apparently a “paranormal expedition” went horribly awry Sunday night when the “ghosts hunters,” creeping around in the dark and talking in veiled whispers, suddenly happened on a real-life corpse. This woman, who had been murdered only a day or two earlier, was pretty bloody and police said traces of blood were on the dirty walls inside of Kuhn Memorial.

Are you kidding me? They would have had to send two ambulances if I had been there because I would have had a severe heart attack had the beam from my flashlight found the woman. Lord have mercy, Kuhn Memorial may have just gotten another ghost, but I’ll guarantee you I’ll never know.

The story, albeit it tragic for the family of the deceased, brought to mind my favorite trick that I played on my children and their friends on summertime nights when we’d take a crowd to our family farm. After the kids swam and played tennis and had more fun that you can imagine, we’d cook a big grill full of hamburgers and just about dusk, I’d venture, “Say, who wants to walk down to the Unknown Hobo’s grave?”

My goodness, even the kids who had made the brave march to the graveyard for three or four years still loved it so I’d walk eight or 10 kids down to our family cemetery – where my mother was just interned with my two brothers this fall – and we would walk among the centuries-old tombstone. Soon we would get to one that the years have obliterated any marking. “There he lies,” I’d say and then I would tell his story.

During in the years leading to the Great Depression, it was a horribly embarrassing thing to be poor and hungry. We have an old train line, still active today, that goes from Chattanooga to Cincinnati and back, running down the middle of our farm. During a particularly bitter winter sometime in the late 1920s, a half-frozen hobo tumbled from a railroad car and was found by our farm hands the next morning.

They scooped him up, brought him to the Big House, where my ancestors put him in a warm bed, fed him countless bowls of soup, and doctored him the best they could. Several gentle attempts to learn his name were futile and, while he was begged to give us an address where we could write his kin, his grief and despair were too great to oblige. This is a very true chapter in our farm’s history, which we’ve had since 1836.

After about four weeks of doing everything they possibly could, the hobo died in his sleep one night and was buried, with a civil funeral, in our family cemetery. Within its high walls and its ornate gate, we know every person in the McDonald clan who was ever buried there for generations except for one – the Unknown Hobo.

Well, I’d tell the kids the story, just as darkness would fall, and then casually suggest we take a shortcut back to the Big House, cutting through the corn field rather than walking all the way back to the road. Oh, what a great idea…except city kids have never been in a cornfield at night, particularly if the corn is starting to cure and the raspy leaves begin rattling just perfectly every time they are touched.

Within five minutes some kids will start crying and running every whichaway through the corn. Oh my goodness. What a splendid lesson to never disturb the dead and I am virtually certain the kids I have taken on the cornfield shortcut will never join any paranormal society – they got all the ghosts they wanted in one big gulp.

royexum@aol.com

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