It was a strange little Christmas Eve. I was to be at my mother’s house at two o’clock, and I needed some time to myself beforehand (for the greater good). I took a walk in one of my favorite eerie places, the Holly Springs woods. It’s a place I’ve visited since I was a child.
You can find the woods directly past G.B. Alford’s old house. When I was a child, my mom sold vegetables at the farmer’s market up the road and I would sneak off to the old house to explore. There had been a fire inside long ago, and the wall by the stairwell was charred. The dust on the floor was about an inch thick and kicked up with every step, so it was hard to breathe. There was an old clawfoot tub in the raggedy garden, all overgrown with weeds.
That house was perhaps the first thing that truly sparked my love for ghostly things. The draw for me has always been mostly about the idea of time-slips, and existing where so many different lives have come and gone before. If that house has a ghost, it’s G.B. Alford.
He surely had his share of ventures, among them the chartering of the Cape Fear and Northern Railroad. I wonder if he’d be considered a foamer if he were alive today. He and his wife and child are buried among the trees in the woods behind their old house. There’s a very grand headstone for the couple and a rather shabby one for the child, but all three plots are sunken in quite a bit, likely from the deterioration of their wooden coffins. There’s an incomplete black-iron fence around the gravesite that gives it quite a gothic look. I especially enjoy being around when the church bells across the street ring on the hour.
While walking around the woods, I chose a nice stone. It looked like quartz and it was smooth enough. I took that around the corner to the town cemetery and used it as a paperweight for the note I’d written to leave on my grandmother’s grave. The note said all sorts of things. It recalled Christmas Eves spent at her house, filled with memories of dark-wood furniture and apple-soap scents, designating an elvish helper to disperse the presents, the curling of a bow, the horrors I’d faced after leaving her house those nights. I told her I wish she’d taken me out for ice cream like she always promised (petty, some may say), and that I never got that ever-alluded-to ring, either. I also mentioned that I had one of her Karastan Williamsburg rugs and I’d pulled so much ancient detritus out of it by hand. It smelled like cigarettes. Go figure, I wrote. I was there less than a minute to drop the note off.
A few days ago, I heard through the grapevine that my uncle died. I didn’t even know he was sick. I looked up his obituary and found his funeral will be soon. I had to imagine the tragicomic scene of my dad stumbling around the graveyard during my uncle’s gravesite service and happening upon the piece of paper on his mother’s grave and being interested enough to pick it up to read it. But I know he’s not that kind of man. And I’m pretty sure my uncle is going to get cremated, anyway.
Afterwards, I got a coffee and some orange cheese-crackers and headed to my mom’s. My experience there was a typical garden-variety of things that I’ve worked for years to separate myself from. My dad was dressed like a frontier cowboy. I asked him if he remembered when mom vacuumed up a snake and he’d ran to the vacuum-bag outside and taken the snake out and chopped it up with a garden ho. No response. He didn’t move his glazed eyes from the Universal Western channel. We all have somewhere we’d rather be, I suppose. At least I had the grim satisfaction of knowing I’d left that note on his mother’s grave, and for once, comfort in the fact that he would never be the type of man to notice.
Mary Honeycutt 
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