August 9, 2010

People are always a bit astounded when I tell them I grew up in a town of less than 7,000 people in northern Alabama known as Arab (pronounced “A-rab.”) For one thing, you can detect only the slightest tinge of a southern accent when I talk, although, as a stunt, I can really lay on the drawl-n-slang. For instance, “that guy over there” becomes “that ol’ boy over yonder,” and “I went to the mall with my mother and father” becomes “Ah wint tuh duh-mall with muh mumma an’ muh diddy.”

I’ve also taught myself to have, shall we say, a wider grasp of the spectacle of modern life than many people who surrounded me down south ever bothered to display in my presence, and I gave them more than enough opportunity to branch out while I stood there gape-jawed.

So does that mean everybody in my hometown was a simpleton? Absolutely not. No. But I’ve developed a theory over the years that 60% of the people on earth, regardless of where they’ve parked their asses while they consume copious fats and “think” in a fine, proudly unwavering line, are tunnel vision-embracing numskulls, and the rest of the population tries the best it can to move forward in spite of them. Now, imagine how easy it is to stumble across the same gaggle of numskulls saying the exact same numskull things that all the other numskulls are saying, day-in and day-out, in a town that has only 7,000 residents.

Exactly.

I had to leave when I had to leave, then. Some people train themselves to deal with it and stick around. I couldn’t. But I was pondering my adolescence the other day, and realized that there was some pretty entertaining, supposedly spooky southern gothic stuff available in the greater Arab area back when I was growing up, provided you knew what you’re looking for and you were gullible enough to believe it. I had a close friend who was a hardcore local and knew the out-of-the-way roads like the back of his hand. So all I had to do was sit in his Plymouth and drink an IBC root beer while he quite recklessly drove us to the Creepiness.

It’s all old news to me, of course. But to the uninitiated, this stuff can read like something out of the director’s cut of “Twin Peaks.” Here, then, is the merest taste of the supernatural exoticism that was part of my 18-year, weeping willow tenure in the Heart of Dixie, Huntsville-Decatur Division.

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The Three Witches

“Out around Grassy” (a nearby hamlet that was viewed by Arabians as even more concealed from the rest of the world than Arab was) there was a decrepit wooden house where “the Three Witches” lived. According to the lore - which is to say, the horse shit that kids said to each other when they didn’t have anything better to do, and, outside of playing baseball, basketball, and football, there was rarely anything better to do - you could sneak up and peek in the window of the Three Witches’ house, and see them doing things like levitating and making fire come out of their fingertips.

I remember one kid in my 9th grade class who swore up and down that he saw the Witches float from their front door to the old steps that stood about 10 feet away from their house. The porch had caved in years before, but this didn’t bother the Three Witches, who apparently had little need for a series of wooden planks nailed together by mere mortal construction workers.

This all sounded a little…um…suspect to me. First of all, if you were a witch, don’t you think you could think of something better to do with your unearthly powers than to float around the living room in front of other witches? I mean, to what end would they be doing this? Trying to get the most out of that carpeting?

Admittedly, the fire on the fingertips thing is pretty cool. But again, wouldn’t the other witches get sick of it after a while? You know— “Stop with the fingers already and clean the bathroom!” And if the Witches could float across the empty expanse of what used to be their front porch, why would they even bother with the steps? Wouldn’t they just float down to the ground and go get the mail?

During my senior year, I inadvertently learned for certain that the witch stuff was a load of crap, because my friend, Delene Leak (the same guy who used to drive us in his Plymouth, actually), explained that the “Witches” were in fact his great aunts, three sisters who had finally gotten too old to take care of themselves, and now lived in a trailer that Delene’s parents parked next to their house. That way, help would be available if the sisters needed anything.

Not surprisingly, the women had also grown sick of idiots running up and trying to look in their window to see if they were floating, or lighting stogies with their freakishly flaming phalanges.

What they should have done was introduce a random intruder to the magic of a sawed off shotgun. That would have immediately transformed them from “witches” to pillars of second amendment righteousness in the eyes of their neighbors, provided of course it wasn’t some rich guy’s kid who got cut in half by their Freedom.

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Cry Baby Hollow (aka Cry Baby Holler)

Cry Baby Holler - I opt for the less formal variation, as it sounds, rather amusingly, like someone ridiculing a bawling infant - is probably the best-known supernatural location around Arab. You actually have to drive a little bit out of town, all the way to the outskirts of Hartselle, to see it. But, believe me, once you’ve made the trek and have gone through the motions of trying to be frightened by an old bridge, you’re not particularly inclined to do it again.

The above picture was grabbed off the Internet, so enough people know about this place that it gets a little bit of coverage. The idea, and I never really heard the back story that supposedly caused this theoretically hellish situation to generate, was that you put a Baby Ruth candy bar on the bridge in the middle of the night, then pulled just far enough away that you couldn’t see the bridge anymore. Then you listened closely, and eventually heard…a baby crying!! Once the crying stopped, you drove back to the bridge to discover the candy bar missing, and no baby in sight.

Holy shit!! Except that, as far as I know, no one ever heard a baby crying at Cry Baby Holler, and, once you got irritated and returned to the bridge, what you actually found was a Baby Ruth Candy bar with your fingerprints on it, unless some squirrel or raccoon that was wise to the situation was hanging around waiting for another rube to pony up some treats. It should also be noted that even living babies don't eat candy bars.

Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole Cry Baby Holler myth was introduced as a hillbilly meme by a bunch of wily forest critters. Regardless, as Friday night activities go, it was about as productive as jumping on the hose and listening to the bell ring over at the San-Ann station.

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The Devil Grave

Not to be confused with The Baby Graves, which were literally so far out in the woods, I couldn’t have found them by myself if I had to, the Devil Grave was right out in the open. During the day, it was just a partially shattered tombstone situated on the corner of a small graveyard. At night, however - or so the story went - when your car’s headlights swept across the tombstone, there was a split second where you could see the very face of Beelzebub staring back at you, with his eyes glowing red!! Once again— holy shit!!

Yeah, well. I drove past the Devil Grave at least 15 times in the middle of the night and basically saw a partially shattered tombstone. I had people with me once or twice who shrieked wildly at the sight, but I also knew people who shrieked wildly over Styx albums when they could have been listening to Springsteen. Even in 1981, a shriek wasn’t quite what it used to be. My friends and I, however, did manage to wrangle a first-class practical joke out of the Devil Grave, and it nearly gave a girl we knew a heart attack. Ha-ha!

Our friend, Pam Brown, scared easily - I remember her literally crawling over strangers to get out of the theater when Nicholson busted out the ax in “The Shining” - and one night my buddy Llane conspired with a guy we knew named Jeff Johnson to freak Pam’s shit out.

Here’s what happened. Understand that many a Friday or Saturday night was spent simply tooling around the area in a packed car, blasting cassettes. So a bunch of us were cruising, with Pam sitting on the passenger side in the front seat, when it was decided we’d drive past the Devil Grave to see what we could see. Pam, of course, wanted no part of this, but she was eventually mocked into submission (this task undoubtedly fell to me) and complied. Unbeknownst to Pam, however, Johnson was hanging out in the graveyard waiting for us to pull by.

This was long before cell phones, so I’m not exactly sure how it was all timed, but it worked perfectly. Johnson came running out beside the grave at the exact point our headlights hit it— while wearing a sheet, and, in what I thought was a brilliantly surreal touch, waving a wooden crutch in the air!

Cue Pam’s shit being freaked out. There was, of course, an absolutely blood-curdling scream, coupled with Pam turning quickly to her right, which may or may not have been an attempt to…well…I don’t know what she was trying to do. But she swung her head so violently to get away from the encroaching ghoul, she smacked her face on the passenger side window and left a big streak of grease on it. If I were directing this scene in a movie, I would linger on the streak in the final shot while everybody howls with laughter in the background.

Okay. So it’s not Yoknapatawpha County. What have you got?

Paul Tatara