The Shadows of Memory and Tragedy

One beautiful summer evening, a large group of my family members and I had gathered at our Cave City, Arkansas, lake house. My oldest sister Sue, Sue's husband Jay Johnson, my uncle J. D., his son (and my cousin) Doug, my other two sisters Amy and Ann, my parents, my late brother Tim and I were all staying in the lake house.

That evening was very exciting to me. I've always remembered it as one of extraordinarily unusual family togetherness and closeness. Coolers of soft drinks, hot dogs, chips, grilled barbecue sandwiches and cole slaw fueled us as we played games around the table. Card games, including poker and blackjack, entertained the adults. We youngsters ran around in the lawn and grounds area until sunset. Then we came into the lake house, where I broke away from the rest of the kids to join the adult card games. I was thirteen, awkward, in-between adult and child and I wanted to learn poker.

Tim, Doug and my younger sisters played hide and seek for awhile, running through halls and rooms. After awhile, I broke away from the adults at the table to join my mother as she again inspected the front windows to insure they were lined properly for storm protection. Those windows offered a crystalline, beautiful view of the sparkling blue lake and its evergreen-lined far shore as well as an excellent view of the spillway that held the Spring River, the lake's source, within its boundaries.

I'd helped mom with this inspection task a few weeks before and had become fascinated with the left-center front window. In windy weather, a strong wind would produce a "murmur" in this particular window. "Whooo--whooo--weeeooo--weeooo--weeeooo!" it seemed to moan. The phenomenon, perhaps mundane enough in its causation, was nevertheless almost unnerving in its effect. Even adults who visited the lakehouse, standing next to that window on a windy, dark, stormy day would be quite stunned by the sound and comment on it.

For awhile, the memory of that wailing window was the eeriest one I held about the lake and the lake house. However, that recollection was to be replaced by an even weirder one. It involved one of the oddest and most thought-provoking experiences of my life. It was to occur later on that same evening, in that same Cave City lake house.

After my mother finished her front window inspection, I returned to the adults at the card table. The group was beginning to break up, although in the first round of cards I had learned some of the basic of poker. My uncle J. D. and Sue's husband Jay left the table and went out to the lake roadside to attempt some frog-gigging, because they wanted to have fried frog legs the next day. The other adults closed down the card games and began to retire. My mother and Sue watched TV for a few minutes as Dad joined them on the couch. He stretched out there and fell asleep within five minutes, at which point the three retired to back rooms to bed. The younger kids--Amy, Ann, Tim and Doug--played a little longer, soon began to fall asleep in the den floor and followed the three adults back to bed.

Sometime later that night, just as I was leaving the lake view windows to go to the side bedroom to bed, J.D. and Jay came back in. They were too tired to even talk at that point, walking immediately to the back bedroom to sleep. They told us the next morning that about all they'd run across was a bunch of snakes, so they'd given up on frog legs after a few minutes along the lake road. They weren't in the mood to do any "snake-gigging," J.D. and Jay said. Doug, Tim and I retired to the side bedroom, which was barely large enough to sleep three boys. Doug and Tim were in sleeping bags on the floor and I was on a small cot just below the bedroom window. I had a small transistor radio with an earphone. I had briefly talked to Tim and Doug as we listened to the night sounds of the lake and engaged in imaginative speculations and jokes. Gradually, they fell asleep and, after listening to my transistor with the earphones for about an hour, I did as well.

I awakened abruptly, sometime after midnight, to see a stick scraping across the window screen in front of me. It seemed real and I can recall it vividly. The lights and shadow at that hour loomed eerily in a house that was still strange to me. The "limb" seemed three dimensional, casting a shadow on the window screen. The effect of being awakened by such a phenomenon was quite startling.

My first reaction was to believe that someone in our party was playing a practical joke. But then I had more apprehensive thoughts. Maybe someone was trying to peep in the window, or even break in. With so many other people there, I felt there was relatively little danger. Surely anyone watching the house even in the past few hours would have seen all of us in and out. And our several vehicles were all parked just outside. So a potential intruder would be put off by our numbers.

Even so, it took a few seconds--or perhaps it was minutes--for me to build up courage. I'd also been awakened from a sound sleep, so it took a minute for me to even be able to move. But I finally drew myself up to a kneeling position closer to the window.

The moon shown down, though I confess I don't recall the phase. Blue moonlight shown across a gray-green, cricket-serenaded lawn. Moving upward from a lying position slightly down from the edge of the window, I moved my forearm up to the window's warm and silent outside edge. Finally, I forced myself to raise my eyes. I looked out through the glass and the window screen.

I saw no one there. I looked down at the lighted dial of my watch and checked the time. It was about two a.m. I once again looked out, to try to detect further movement. There was none, only the gentle rustle of leaves and the distant sway of trees. There in the darkness, I had only the moon, those crickets, the distant rippling of the Spring River feeding into the lake and, at a greater distance, the roar of a late-night truck on the highway four miles away for company. I felt a slight chill on my spine.

I felt a certain reassurance in knowing that others were there with me. As I looked around in the silence, I saw that Tim was sound asleep, lying on his back, head turned to one side, mouth wide open. Over in the farther corner, Doug lay on his stomach, face turned into the darker shadows, invisible, also conked out from another hectic day of helter skelter running and playing our imaginary games all over the lake property.

My parents, uncle J.D., Sue and her husband Jay, Amy and Ann all were asleep in other rooms of the house. Focusing more on the silence, I could hear Dad's and uncle J.D.'s snoring, off in those other rooms. They were exhausted and I wasn't going to awaken them unless it was absolutely necessary. Perhaps it had just been a dream.

I checked around the property the next day to try to determine what it was. There was no plant, bush or tree near enough to scrape the window. I tried to convince myself that it had only been Uncle J.D. or Sue's husband Jay, scraping on the window with their frog gigs after having gone back out for a late-night last ditch attempt to find frogs to gig. But J.D.and Jay denied they'd done so, saying they didn't think they'd been out that late on their solo trip on the lake road, and, they asked, did I not recall meeting them coming in the door as I was walking away from the lakefront windows.

I wasn't sure about J.D., who was a bit of a kidder. Perhaps it had only been my dad's snoring I'd heard. Perhaps uncle J.D. had been up and around alone out there in the darkness. Still, it didn't fit uncle J.D.'s character. As I've noted before, he was a heavy sleeper who usually went to bed early, being an Air Force sergeant.

Perhaps, I again thought, it was a vivid dream. But I knew I woke up because I'd looked at my watch. I then tried to convince myself that it was a vivid hypnopompic hallucination like Sue sometimes experienced at the end of dreams, when she'd awaken to still see the characters from her dreams as we rushed into her bedroom responding to her cries. Those dream characters, she'd said, only faded as we began to speak to her. So I wondered if the stick on the window had been one of those. Perhaps they ran in the family.

Or perhaps it was something else. I never did really find out what caused that vivid nighttime image of a stick scraping across the window screen. But, years later, I read in several different sources about the "Ozark Spook Light." This phenomenon may have been connected with Sue's "Jacob's Lantern," as well.

According to some sources I've read, including Haunted Heartland by Beth Scott and Michael Norman (308-9), scientists have speculated that this light is connected with either gas pockets trapped in the ground and released by thunderstorms or electrical phenomena caused by subterranean earth movements. The latter, known as "earthquake lights," is often reported in Japan before a major tremor. These would be comforting natural explanations of an otherwise somewhat unnerving occurrence. However, I fear a bit of caution is needed here, in attempting a scientific explanation of such a long-lived phenomenon. Guy Zona tells us (in The Soul Would Have No Rainbow If the Eyes Had No Tears in quoting from a Pima Indian saying), that: "The smarter a man is the more he needs God to protect him from thinking he knows everything."

On the other hand, the folklore I've read, also referred to in Haunted Heartland, linked the Ozark Spook Light to the supernatural. It included stories of light sightings seen over a much larger area of Arkansas than the "official" Spook Light's limited path, which is an area near the Arkansas-Oklahoma line, also not far from the Missouri community of Hornet. According to the folklore, the ghost light is seen infrequently by campers in sparsely-populated areas all over northern Arkansas.

Those traditions told of the death of an Indian chief due to treachery by whites. He supposedly committed suicide by leaping from a cliff after a long trek, sometimes interpreted as the Long Walk of the Trail of Tears of the Cherokee nation, during which he had hobbled along with a walking stick. A variation included a female in the scenario, possibly a white woman who was either jilted by or jilted the chief. In any case, a manifestation of the chief was said to be seen around Salem, Jasper and other remote areas of northern Arkansas. Some storytellers even reported actually seeing his lantern--"Jacob's Lantern"--bobbing along paths in that area. It turns out that's the same area, just outside Melbourne, where Sue had seen her "orange flashlight," and its being called "Jacob's Lantern" apparently stemmed from some of those same traditions.

Some stories also recount seeing a shadowy form behind the lantern light, apparently leaning on a cane or walking stick. Cave City, where I saw the stick scraping on the window screen those years ago, is only a few miles from Salem. Perhaps this is only coincidence.

With the help of Dr. James W. Parrins at the American Native Press Archives,⁽¹⁾ I more recently learned of Native American traditions, including brochures with essays about the Ghost Light. Many of those traditions, including some found in American Indians Kitchen Table Stories by Keith Cunningham and The Trail of Tears: The Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation, had legends and stories that pertained to the symbolic spirit of the Cherokee nation. According to those symbolic myths, the communal soul of the entire Cherokee nation walks those Ozarks paths, displaying utter despair on the long "Trail of Tears." That whole spirit of the Cherokee now forever expresses that nation's sad exhaustion as, driven from its homeland by white treachery, it walked, step after painful step, to the cliff of oblivion.

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Works cited:

Cunningham, Keith. American Indians' Kitchen Table Stories. New York: 1992

Ehle, John. The Trail of Tears: The Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation. New York: 1989

Gaddis, Vincent. Mysterious Fires and Lights. New York: Dell, 1967. 76-88.

Littlefield, Daniel F. and James W. Parrins. Bibliography of Native American Writers, 1772-1924. New Jersey: Scarecrow Press, 1981.

Scott, Beth and Michael Norman. Haunted Heartland. New York: Warner, 1987.

Zona, Guy A. The Soul Would Have No Rainbow If the Eyes Had No Tears and other Native America Proverbs. New York: Touchstone, 1994. 80.

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1. ^*Dr. Parrins is the co-author, with Dr. Daniel J. Littlefield, of A Bibliography of Native American Writers, 1772-1924, published by Scarecrow Press, which is associated with American Native Press, 502 Stabler Hall, University of Arkansas at Little Rock, 2801 S. University, Little Rock, AR 72204-1099. American Native Press is the newsletter of the American Native Press Archives in Little Rock. The American Native Press Archives houses the largest collection of Native American writers' works in the world.

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