It was almost pitch-dark now, and I couldn’t recognize any landmarks. It was also cold, and I wished I’d taken my mother’s advice about wearing a hat.
To cut to the chase, I was becoming frightened. I mean,
Because it was such an open space, there was a wind that I hadn’t noticed back on the road, and the wind was making things move-tree limbs, dead leaves, litter, and the white shrouds that cover Jewish tombstones until the day of unveiling. And along with these movements came sounds and shadows that startled me every few seconds.
To make matters worse, if that were possible, I now heard something I’d never heard before in the cemetery-dogs.
The guards had one or two dogs, but these dogs that I heard were not those well-trained guard animals; these were wild dogs, and a lot of them, baying and barking into the black night. Or were they werewolves?
I mean, if you still believe in Santa Claus at age eleven, and you believe in good fairies, then it stands to reason that you will also believe in ghosts, witches, warlocks, werewolves, vampires, zombies, and flesh-eating ghouls, and if you’re particularly gullible, killer mummies.
I could stretch things here and say I had visions of the killer gorilla and the creepy Dr. Marais, but I really didn’t; those guys were wimps compared to the undead. I was, however, pre-spooked by the 3-D shock effects, and my spine had tingled about ten times already in the movie theater. So whatever it is in our psyches that causes us to become frightened by a horror flick, this feeling stays with us for a while, and when we go to bed, we pull the sheets over our heads and listen for vampires trying to get in the window or zombies banging on the door.
This, in retrospect, may have been why my imagination was running wild in the cemetery and why I froze with fear as I crouched in the dark, listening to the wind blowing between the tombstones and the dogs, or werewolves, barking in the distance.
So, quick segue to Edgar Allan Poe, master of the macabre, manipulator of our minds, and a very elegant writer. Long before the study of the mind became a quasi-scientific discipline, Poe was able to grasp what frightened us, and he transformed that understanding into spooky and entertaining tales that were far ahead of their time and which have endured through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and into the twenty-first-which is more than I can say about that 3-D schlocker shocker I saw fifty years ago.
You could analyze this guy to death, and people have-and maybe Poe had that coming-but in the final non- analysis, just read this extraordinary writer, enjoy his prose with a glass of sherry, and read aloud the poetry- especially “The Raven”-to some kid in a dimly lit room. Don’t forget the sound effects.
Cut to Beth David Cemetery, 1954, exterior, evening.
A calm, fatalistic sensation passed over me. I knew I was going to die, and I’d accepted that. I just wasn’t sure if I was going to get eaten by dogs or werewolves. I wasn’t thinking much about the killer gorilla, though somewhere in the back of my mind I could still see him jumping at me out of the movie screen.
I stood and began walking toward my Fate, wondering what I had missed for dinner.
Eventually, I came across a familiar road, and I allowed myself a small glimmer of hope. I pointed myself in the right direction and ran like hell. I could see house lights now, and I knew I was less than a minute from the chain-link fence that separated the living from the dead.
I honestly don’t even remember climbing the fence; I think I ran up it. Then I remember being in someone’s backyard and dashing down their driveway, then running on the sidewalk, then home.
My mother said, “Jack’s mother called and said you were cutting through the cemetery. We were worried.”
I replied, “It’s a
My father said, “Don’t cut through the cemetery again.” He explained, “The ghosts come out at night.”
Thanks, Pop. I’ll remember that.
The Gold-Bug
What ho! what ho! this fellow is dancing mad! He hath been bitten by the Tarantula.
– ALL IN THE WRONG
MANY YEARS AGO, I contracted an intimacy with a Mr. William Legrand. He was of an ancient Huguenot family, and had once been wealthy; but a series of misfortunes had reduced him to want. To avoid the mortification consequent upon his disasters, he left New Orleans, the city of his forefathers, and took up his residence at Sullivan’s Island, near Charleston, South Carolina.
This island is a very singular one. It consists of little else than the sea sand, and is about three miles long. Its breadth at no point exceeds a quarter of a mile. It is separated from the mainland by a scarcely perceptible creek, oozing its way through a wilderness of reeds and slime, a favorite resort of the marsh-hen. The vegetation, as might be supposed, is scant, or at least dwarfish. No trees of any magnitude are to be seen. Near the western extremity, where Fort Moultrie stands, and where are some miserable frame buildings, tenanted, during summer, by the fugitives from Charleston dust and fever, may be found, indeed, the bristly palmetto; but the whole island, with the exception of this western point, and a line of hard, white beach on the sea-coast, is covered with a dense undergrowth of the sweet myrtle so much prized by the horticulturists of England. The shrub here often attains the height of fifteen or twenty feet, and forms an almost impenetrable coppice, burthening the air with its fragrance.
In the inmost recesses of this coppice, not far from the eastern or more remote end of the island, Legrand had built himself a small hut, which he occupied when I first, by mere accident, made his acquaintance. This soon ripened into friendship-for there was much in the recluse to excite interest and esteem. I found him well educated, with unusual powers of mind, but infected with misanthropy, and subject to perverse moods of alternate enthusiasm and melancholy. He had with him many books, but rarely employed them. His chief amusements were gunning and fishing, or sauntering along the beach and through the myrtles, in quest of shells or entomological specimens-his collection of the latter might have been envied by a Swammerdamm. In these excursions he was usually accompanied by an old negro, called Jupiter, who had been manumitted before the reverses of the family, but who could be induced, neither by threats nor by promises, to abandon what he considered his right of attendance upon the footsteps of his young “Massa Will.” It is not improbable that the relatives of Legrand, conceiving him to be somewhat unsettled in intellect, had contrived to instill this obstinacy into Jupiter, with a view to the supervision and guardianship of the wanderer.
The winters in the latitude of Sullivan’s Island are seldom very severe, and in the fall of the year it is a rare event indeed when a fire is considered necessary. About the middle of October, 18-, there occurred, however, a day of remarkable chilliness. Just before sunset I scrambled my way through the evergreens to the hut of my friend, whom I had not visited for several weeks-my residence being, at that time, in Charleston, a distance of nine
