Folklore: Southern Gothic Horror
The haunting of the Gray Man, The vengeful Witch of Yazoo, and the man who made a deal with the devil. Today, we're exploring the horrors of the gothic south
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SOURCES
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tKunDdxmsI
https://www.newspapers.com/search/?query=yazoo%20fire&dr_year=1899-1915
https://www.counton2.com/haunted-history/haunted-history-the-gray-man-of-pawleys-island/
https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/robert-johnson-myth-devil-crossroads-story/
https://visityazoo.org/witch-of-yazoo/
https://www.clarionledger.com/story/news/2014/10/28/witch-yazoo-still-haunts-town-burned/18093723/
Oakes, Brian. Remastered: Devil At The Crossroads. Netflix. 2019.
TRANSCRIPT
Welcome to Heart Starts Pounding. A podcast of Horrors, Hauntings and mysteries. I’m your host, Kaelyn Moore.
This is a community for the darkly curious. And if you’re unfamiliar with heart starts pounding, I like to think of this as a place where all the legends are true. The stories you’ve heard of witches that live in the woods. The ghosts that haunt the abandoned buildings in your town. And the feeling you get of being watched by something otherworldly while walking home at night. Here, in our little world all of these things exist. When the show is over and you enter your reality again, then it’s up to you to decide what’s real and what’s legend.
Today, I want to tell you about a place that is steeped in myths, legends, and ghost sightings. It’s another place where all of the legends feel true. The American south. There, ghosts seem to walk about freely. Folklore passed from person to person one hundred years ago still feels as relevant as it did then. And to this day people fear the grave sites of witches that once lived among us.
I want to share with you three legends from the south today. The first is the story of the Gray Man, next is the Witch of Yazoo, and finally, I want to tell you the story of a man who made a deal with the devil and how that deal still impacts your life today.
And as always, if you’re listening to the ad supported version, thank you so much, our sponsors make this show possible. And shout out to all of the listeners who let me know how you listen each week when you become part of our little world. Lots of people listen in the car, some while walking their dogs, but some people go really witchy with it. Ive heard of people listening to the show while wandering around in the woods, or turning all the lights off and lighting a candle to listen. Keep tagging me on social media with how you like to listen, and this week I’ll try to share some of those posts
We are going to take a quick break, and when we get back, we’re going to jump into the ghostly story of The Gray Man.
Our First story takes us to Pawleys Island in South Carolina.
Pawleys island is a picturesque seaside town, and a hot bed for travelers in the summer. You can see water from almost any point you stand on the small island. A calm quiet bay is on one side, and the atlantic ocean, warm as bath water in the summer, is on the other
But as summer fades into fall, the cooling weather ushers in dark gray clouds. Hurricane season. The tourists vacate the island, turning it into a ghost town And if you were to stand on an empty beach as the strong winds of a hurricane started rolling in, you may catch the glimpse of a ghostly man, forever searching the beaches for his lover.
200 years ago, in the summer of 1822, there was a young couple who lived on Pawley’s island. William and Emma. William had been out at sea for many months, and each day, Emma awaited his return. Sitting on her family balcony and watching the sea for signs of a ship.
One day, emma noticed angry looking clouds roll in as she was waiting for William. The ocean breeze from the morning had evolved into an angry, breath stealing wind. And it was getting stronger still. She hurriedly packed up her things and went back inside.
Unlucky for William, that was the day that he was set to return home. He gripped the side of the big wooden ship as it tossed around in the churning ocean. When he finally caught a glimpse of the shore, a powerful rain had started. The captain announced they were going to have to dock at another location, south of Pawley island and closer to where they were now. It was too risky to try and make it up the shoreline, this old ship had been through enough the last few months at sea, it may not survive the waves.
To William, this was a blessing in disguise. It was much shorter for him to hop on a horse from the shore and ride to his Emma’s home than it was going to be to steady the boat and dock it up the coast. And plus, he was very VERY eager to see Emma. He reached in his pocket and turned over the ring he had traded a man for while he was away. This ring would make Emma his wife.
Once he arrived on shore, he paid a man to borrow his horse and took off towards the island. The rain had already turned the earth into a thick mud, but the worst of the storm hadn’t even made landfall yet, and he knew if he hurried he could get to his love before dinnertime.
The paths there, however, were nearly destroyed. The rain had flooded the strip of land in between the bay and the ocean, making the south part of the island a marsh. He pushed the horse to keep going, but its hooves kept getting stuck. First the mud was just a few inches deep, but it quickly got deeper and deeper, and the rain got heavier and heavier.
His destination was in sight, he could see the top of Emma’s oceanside home just in the distance, but he could also feel the horse start sinking in the mud. So he desperately pulled the reigns and kicked the stirrups, trying to muster a last bit of energy from the horse, anything to get him to keep going. By this point though, the mud was almost to William’s feet.
It crept up over his ankles, up to his knees. He was sinking quickly and there was nothing around him to pull him out. Before he knew it, he couldn’t even see the horse. The ground was swallowing him whole, making its way up to his neck. He took one last giant breath, and then his head slipped underneath the mud. (sfx Thunder/ lightning). When the earth settled, there was no sign he had ever been there.
A few days later, after the storm had passed, Emma was out walking in town when she recognized a young man as another sailor from William's voyage. Wait, if he was home, then surely that meant William was home. She approached the sailor and asked when he had returned to land.
“Oh, just earlier this week.” he replied
“And was William with you?” she asked
The soldier confirmed that yes, William was on the boat and had made it to shore with the rest of them, but had taken off quickly to get out of the storm. Had she not seen him?
This devastated Emma, there was no way for her to know what happened, but she assumed that if he had made it to shore he must be somewhere else, maybe with another girl. Maybe he didn’t want to see her after all.
In her heartbreak, Emma completely retreated into herself over the next few weeks. She only wanted to be alone. Every evening, she would take solo walks out on the beach to clear her head and watch the sun set over the bay behind her home.
One evening, she was out by herself. She could feel the ocean breeze getting stronger, as if there was a storm blowing in from somewhere. Just as she was about to turn and leave, she saw the figure of a man standing by the waves lapping on the shore. He was looking out to the sea so she couldn’t see his face.
But still, she couldn’t help but think that the man resembled William. He was the same height and his hair was the same shade of chocolatey brown. Though it was a bit longer than she remembered, possibly from months of being at sea. He was dressed in gray tattered clothing that she didn’t recognize. Something came over her, and she got the sense that she should approach the man. On the off chance that it was William she wanted to give him a piece of her mind.
Excuse me? She called out when she was just a few feet away.
The man slowly turned towards her, revealing ghostly pale skin and sunken eyes. There was sand caked in his hair and his eyebrows. He looked like death. But there was no mistaking that this was William.
He opened his mouth, and when he did, seawater spilled out. LEAVE was all he said.
What? Emma asked
LEAVE THE ISLAND.
His eyes rolled back into his head, and emma knew that this was a ghost. Emma took off running, terrified. She made it back home and told her parents what she had seen. But she knew now that William had died, he hadn’t left her. And he was warning her. She helped her parents pack their bags and get off the island. That night, the worst storm of the century hit, The Great Storm of 1822, which devastated Emma’s home and could quite possibly have killed her and her parents had they not left.
This ghost is now known as The Gray Man, and he is still sighted in the area occasionally before a major storm. He serves as a warning for the community.
In 1989, Jim and Clara Moore were walking on that same beach when they noticed they were the only ones there. The area was usually bustling with tourists, and they were enjoying having the beach to themselves. But then they saw a man dressed in all gray walking towards them. Being a good neighbor, Jim raised his hand to say hello, and watched as the man evaporated in front of his eyes. 2 days later, Hurricane Hugo made landfall and destroyed parts of the island.
So if you’re ever on Pawley’s island and you notice a man in all gray on the beach trying to get your attention. Just know that vacation is over.
Our next story takes us down to Mississippi, to Yazoo city, about an hour north of the state’s capitol, Jackson. Yazoo is technically a city, but it’s smaller than most towns, clocking in at around 10 thousand residents.
In the southeast of the city, lies a cemetery known as Glenwood. Behind a large iron gate lie Cracked and lichen-covered old tombstones under shady trees.
If you take a closer look at some of the tombs however, you’ll get a better understanding of the cemetery. One stone reads “in this plot are buried between 700 and 800 unknown confederate soldiers…” And soon the picturesque cemetery starts feeling quite a bit darker.
If you were to keep walking, eventually, you’d come to a chain on the ground, surrounding a lone tombstone. The stone lies flat on grass, cracked into three pieces. And on it reads
“According to local legend…on may 25th, 1904, the witch of yazoo city broke out of these curious chain links surrounding her grave and burned down yazoo city.”
In this plot, protected from the other graves by a heavy, iron chain, lies the body of a woman who Some have described as half ghost, half scarecrow but all witch. no one today knows her true name. Her legend has made it to her grave marking, but her name never did.
The legend goes that on on may 25th, 1884, 20 years before the legendary fire, a man named Joe Bob Duggan was drifting down the yazoo river on his raft when he heard what sounded like screams echoing through the forest. It wasn’t common to hear people out here, let alone screams, so Joe Bob beached his raft and went running in their direction, afraid that someone was hurt
The source was a run down little house deep in the woods. Standing outside on the creaky wooden porch, he could hear the screams echoing from within. They were the only indication that the home wasn’t abandoned. The mailbox was rusty and being overtaken by weeds. The shutters were falling off the windows. He crept up to a front window and peered inside, and what he saw, he could have never expected.
In a decrepit living room, empty except for an old worn couch, was a woman in a black dress, dancing and shrieking. Now that he was closer, he could tell that it wasn’t just screams, she was shouting words, almost like a chant. The woman had her head down and was dancing around something on the floor, but her window was so dusty and shattered, it was hard for Joe Bob to see. He could hardly make out what looked like shoes on the ground, attached to legs, attached to the torsoes of two dead men. Right as he realized what he was seeing, he glanced up and saw the woman staring directly at him.
He ran off the balcony, back through the woods, where he got in his raft and paddled downstream until he reached a more populated part of Yazoo city. He ran straight to the sheriff and told him everything he saw.
The sheriff had Joe bob take him exactly where the woman’s house was, but when they got there, she was nowhere in sight. The front door, however, was wide open, so the men walked in. There, on the floor, were the two bodies of the men Joe Bob had seen earlier. The bodies were in near perfect condition as if they had died only recently.
Just then, the two heard a sound sfx. Footsteps coming from the attic. Slowly, they crept up the stairs, the sheriff with his hand on his pistol. There, on the ceiling of the second floor was a door leading to the attic. That’s where the footsteps seemed to be coming from. The Sheriff pulled it open, SFX CREAK , poked his head up through the floor, and saw… nothing. The attic was an A frame, with a window that let in juuust enough light to see. The sheriff scanned around. There were sheets covering a few old pieces of furniture, lots of dust bunnies and cobwebs. He kept scanning until he came to a floor length, cracked mirror. There, in the reflection, he could see his own reflection and the space behind him, a mostly dark, liminal space. But there, in the darkness, he could make out a vague shape. It looked like…A shoulder, curving into a neck, gently swaying (sfx) . SMASH sfx
Before he could see exactly what it was the mirror fell forward and smashed on the ground, and the Sheriff hurried back down the ladder connecting the 2nd floor to the attic.
What? What was it? Joe Bob wanted to know.
The sheriff was pale, and had to catch his breath. There’s more people up there. He heaved. Dead.
The Sheriff and Joe bob gathered themselves and went back up to see that multiple sets of human remains hung from the rafters in the attic, all in various states of decay. What they all seemed to have in common, was they all seemed to be fishermen, lured to the woman's home in some way. Was that why Joe bob heard the screams? Had he just narrowly escaped death?
The sheriff gathered townspeople together and started a hunt for the woman, who was eventually found hiding out in a nearby swamp. They chased her for a moment but soon the earth was too soft and marshy to keep going, every step sunk them further into the earth.
That didn’t stop the woman though, who trekked on through the swamp, sinking deeper and deeper. Finally, when just her head was above the ground she screamed out that this was not the last time any of them would see her. She’d be back in 20 years to burn down the city. And with that, she slipped below the surface.
Eventually, when the water line went down a bit, her body was able to be recovered, and the woman was placed in the Glenwood Cemetery with a headstone that read TW. Some guessed it stood for The Witch, others thought it may have stood for Tandy Warren, which maybe was her name. All of these guesses have gone unconfirmed though, because the original headstone went missing. And though she was dead and was no longer a threat, the townspeople still secured a large, metal chain around the grave so she couldn’t make good on her promise. They thought it would ensure that her spirit couldn’t leave her burial site.
But then on May, 25th, 1904, exactly 20 years after the witch was buried, a fire broke out in Yazoo that burned the city to the ground.
The new york times reported that not a single business was left standing when the fire wiped out over 200 buildings in the city.
Reports vary on where the fire started. Some say a woman, Pauline Wise, started the fire while preparing for her wedding. Another say it was a young boy playing with matches.
But as the legend goes, one day after the fire, a local townsman was visiting the cemetery. His wife had perished in the fire and was now buried close to where The Witch Lie. He was placing flowers at his wifes grace when he noticed something out of the corner of his eye. The thick, heavy chain that lay around the Witche’s grave, had been broken. He ran back into town and told everyone- the witch had escaped.
Is her spirit roaming free in Yazoo? Did she claw her way up through the earth to escape? If you came upon her grave, would you be brave enough to approach? To read the words left on her cracked tomb stone?
More, after the break
Our last story takes us about 2 and a half hours north of Yazoo to Banks, Mississippi, up where Mississippi, Tennessee and Arkansas meet.
It’s said that in the mississippi delta, that crossroads hold a special, magical power. This legend comes from hoodoo, a form of magical spirituality brought to america by african slaves. They believed that crossroads represented a place in between life and death, and spirits could be communicated with at their center. It’s also believed that this is where the devil resides. Waiting for someone to come by and make a deal with him.
Almost exactly 7 years after Yazoo burned down, a child named Robert Johnson is born. For a man who only has 2 pictures of him in existence and only 29 recordings in his entire musical career, it’s surprising he became a legend. But he’s not a legend because he was the best blues guitar player in the Mississippi delta, and not because his life was tragically cut short
No. folks would go on to say that those two things were just results of a deal he made. A deal that would cement him in southern folklore for all of eternity. It was a deal with the devil.
music
Back in the 20’s and 30’s in Mississippi, a new kind of music was being born in the fields where sharecroppers, many of them black, worked all day. Blues music. Blues music was how laborers could get out their frustrations about their working conditions, sing about how hard their boss was on them, about their troubles at home. It was played on guitars and harmonicas because they were easy to transport to and from the fields. And so, under the hot Mississippi sun, some of the country's best musicians and songwriters were developing their craft.
The first time Robert Johnson heard Blues music, he knew that’s what he wanted to do with his life. even when he’d go to church on Sundays and was told that the music was coming straight from the devil. He didn’t care. He wanted to play.
Robert had a rough childhood, he was raised by a single mother who went on to marry an abusive man who was slowly losing use of his body after working in the fields for decades. It was a harsh upbringing, but it gave him plenty to sing about.
When Robert was 18, his wife was pregnant and had traveled to see her grandmother, hoping to give birth with her family around. While she was gone, Robert practiced the guitar every day. He slowly made his way north to his wife for her due date, stopping at music venues in the delta to play shows when he could. He was getting better, he could feel it each time he played for a new crowd. They clapped for him a little bit longer, they shouted just a little bit more.
But all of that came to a crashing halt when he made it to his wife’s grandmothers home.
Her grandmother answered the door wearing a somber look. Where were you? She asked. His wife and child had died during childbirth, Robert had not made it in time to say goodbye.
His wife’s family shunned him from their home, they blamed him for not coming sooner, for not being there for his wife.
And this was a kind of tipping point in Robert. He decided after that moment he was going to give his entire life to blues music. If he could pour his heart and soul into the music designed for singing your sorrows, maybe he’d be able to make sense of his loss.
After that, Robert disappeared. No one saw or heard from him for an entire year. People figured he had moved away, died, or even worse, given up playing.
Then, one night, in a dark, smokey blues club in the mississippi delta, Robert emerged holding a guitar. He marched up to the stage as everyone watched him in silence, and then, he played the best blues music anyone had ever heard.
People were shocked. Even the most talented guitarists couldn’t believe that Robert had become this good at playing in just a year. He was miles beyond them, and they had been playing for a decade, some longer. It was as if Robert had invented a new way of playing, where he could slide his hand to make it sound like the top and bottom of the neck of the guitar were being played at once. It was as if something supernatural were playing along side him, like another hand was helping him.
It begged the question, how did Robert get so good, better than the most seasoned players, in only a year. Well, quickly the rumor spread that Robert must have made a deal at the crossroads.
The story went, that after he disappeared, Robert went to a crossroads in the delta where it was rumored the devil liked to hang around. He waited and waited, unsure if he’d ever find him, until one night, he went down and saw another man standing on the corner.
A well dressed man in a pinstripe suit. He had no business standing on a corner at 3am, yet there he was, looking at Robert like he knew something.
Robert tensed up. Was this really him? Should he turn back? What was he about to get himself into? A chill went through his body. But he remembered what he came here for. Being the best was the only thing he cared about. The only thing he felt he had left to live for.
So He approached the man in the suit, got down on his knees, and held his guitar up. He was met by a wicked grin. This man was definitely the devil. He took the guitar from Robert, tuned it for him, and added a seventh string. It was the most perfectly tuned guitar in all of creation. Before he handed it back he said to Robert, “If you take this guitar, your soul is mine, do you want it?” And Robert did.
The rumor wasn’t just started because of Robert’s talent. They said there were also signs in Robert’s music and behavior. He came back to town singing songs like Cross Road Blues, Up Jumped The Devil, and Me and The Devil Blues. Demonic imagery like hell hounds chasing Robert was infused into the music.
And then there was his practicing ritual. To practice the guitar, Robert would go out into a graveyard in the middle of the night, sit on the quietest stone, and play. When asked why he did this he said, “I heard the best place to practice was the graveyard.”
It was around this time that Robert started indulging in his darker impulses. He once was a family man, but these days he was a heavy drinker and a womanizer. Still, Everywhere Robert went he was the best musician in the building. He was doing things with a guitar no one else could do. But they say that when you make a deal with the devil, he eventually comes to collect.
One night in 1938, Robert was sitting at the Three Forks Juke, a bar in the Mississippi delta where he often played. It was no secret that Robert had been seeing the wife of a man who worked there, and that night, Robert had enough whisky to rub it in the guys face. The man was working the bar when Robert asked for another whisky, but when the bottle came, the seal had been broken.
One of Robert's friends took one look at the bottle and snatched it out of his hand. Robert, never drink from a bottle that’s been open, he said. But Robert wasn’t listening. “Never snatch a $7 bottle of whisky out of my hands” and with that, he took a long gulp. Within a few minutes, Robert had trouble holding up his head, and within 2 days he was dead. Poisoned. The man behind the bar was never charged, there was a strong contingent of people in the south that thought Robert played Devil music, and the world would be better without him. He was just 27 years old when he died.
Robert Johnson died on August 16th, 1938, but his story lives on and his influence is still everywhere. His music inspired other blues musicians at the time who carried on his sounds, one of them being the famous BB King. A young man passing a record store in the late 50’s came across a Robert Johnson recording and claimed it inspired his songwriting for his entire career. That man was Bob Dylan. The Blues riffs that Robert played became the building blocks of the next wave of music, Rock N Roll, another genre said to be devil music. And if you believe the legend, it might be true.
One mans interaction with the devil could have inspired countless musicians, fueled the creation of various genres of music, and is maybe responsible for most of the music we hear today.
But, I must add. Johnson’s family refutes these rumors. They say that Johnson learned to be amazing at Blues because for a year he studied under Ike Zimmerman, who taught Johnson that the best place to practice in front of a crowd that won’t judge you was in a graveyard.
But what’s fact and what’s fiction becomes blurrier as time goes on and all we have left are the stories being passed along. One thing remains certain, though. All of us will come to crossroads at some point in our own life. And all of us must decide. What are we willing to sacrifice for what we want, and how much of ourselves are we willing to give up?