Moore: This is a Friday edition of Ozarks at Large. I’m Matthew Moore. We are one day away from Halloween. Here to bring us some Ozarks history around this spooky holiday is our pal Jared Phillips. Jared, welcome back, as always.
Phillips: Hey. Glad to be here.
Moore: OK, so you’ve got some haints, some spooky stories. You’ve got some stuff you want to share with us.
Phillips: Yeah. So, you know, when we think about Halloween in the Ozarks, it’s like other places in the country. We’ve got our own little ways of doing, but a lot of the normal lived experience is kind of similar for us as it is. You know, kids dress up, we go trick-or-treating.
And what I wanted to talk about today was I wanted to reach back and I wanted to grab some stories from the storyteller, the story collector, the Ozarks’ Vance Randolph, right? And see what he had collected in the early days of the century. How did Ozarkers think about stuff like witchcraft and witches and ghosts and stuff like that? So that’s what I’ve tried to bring in today, is a few of these old stories.
Moore: OK, great. And so these are more like folklore stuff. Is this like oral history kind of stuff? Like, “A friend of a friend told me this”?
Phillips: Yeah. That’s a great question. So one of the fun things about Mr. Randolph’s work, whether you like him or not, is that he goes out and he collects all this information. So sometimes this is a friend of a friend. Sometimes these are eyewitness accounts, and so we’ve got some of that today. And sometimes it’ll be practitioners of particular things themselves that are talking to him, at least in part.
And what I love about it is it highlights a particular vision for what the Ozarks is going to be. Because some of your listeners may know this already or remember this, but Vance Randolph is really productive in the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s. And he and his wife, Mary Celestia Parler, who were here at the university, they’re doing all this great work, collecting a lot of stuff. But one of the things that they do, on purpose or unintentionally, is they freeze us in time, right? And we can look at how we’re frozen in time according to kind of different topics. And so when I work with these records with my students, like, “OK, what do ghost stories tell us about the Ozarks in this moment?”
And so what I would say is that all the stories that he’s collected, that I’ll share a few things from, from that collection today, are, there are enough people in the Ozarks that thought the story had merit, that it was worth recounting, even to an outsider. And that some of these stories, there are people like Miss May Kennedy McCord of Springfield, who’s the Queen of the Hillbillies. She was a journalist. She was a musician. She was well regarded across the community, firmly believes in some of these things.
And I think it’s a marker, I guess, of how old things like this that seem quaint when you pick up a Vance Randolph book off the shelf down at the Dickson Street bookstore, but you can still go out into a hill or a holler or take a ghost tour of Fayetteville, like, you know, like Jerry Hogan just did, and people still find that the ghosts are here, right?
Moore: I love it. OK, so where do you want to start?
Phillips: Well, OK. So first thing, you know, one of the standard fares of a Halloween weekend is witches, right? There’s always witches everywhere. The black cat is with us everywhere. So, Ozark, we don’t have black-hatted witches. We have kind of a variety of people that practice some kind of magic, right? And so some of it might be something as simple as, a lot of listeners probably know, witchers. So like a water witcher, or even, some people may not know about this, there’s also grave witchers, which is extra spooky for Halloween weekend, right?
But a water witcher is really simple, right? Somebody that can go around and they can divine where water might be underneath, right? Using any number of methods, the most common is a forked stick that wants to bend itself down. Or maybe you hold copper rods that’ll twist into an X over a spot. And this is a supernatural skill, but it’s of immense value in a rocky, hard place to work in. Like, if you moved into a place and you need to set up a well and you’re trying to dig through however many feet of bedrock that we have, you really would like some insight from the spirit world. “And where’s the water at?” You know?
Moore: Yeah.
Phillips: So this is helpful. And then with grave witchers, they can help you find where people are buried. That’s what they do. And so, you know, you can have people come out and they’ll hunt for old Native American burial grounds or maybe old, you know, enslaved community burial grounds, or, you know, “We’ve got this farm that’s been handed down. And, you know, Great-Grandpa always said there was somebody that was buried out over here,” and you bring somebody in and they help you find the grave.
And, you know, witchers, depending on who you ask, are either 80% right or 80% wrong. It really just depends, you know, on the veracity, you know, sort of on how honest the witcher maybe is. But I think in my neighborhood, at least in western Washington County, you know, we’ve not used the witcher on our farm, but several of my neighbors have. And there’s been pretty good success with it. So there’s some kind of linkage here, I think.
Yeah. So that’s one. Another thing would be, we use supernatural powers to heal people, right? So a lot of Ozark magic practice is less in the nefarious, right? And more in the, how do we address the ailments that people that are in a hard-to-get-around place find themselves, you know, dealing with. So yarb doctors, Y-A-R-B, for those of your listeners who want to take notes for a crossword puzzle sometime. But yarb doctors, these are sort of all-purpose medical healers, right? And so they take advantage of sometimes maybe a little bit of, like, folk or traditional superstitious magic, and then also really good herb knowledge, right? So they know which herbs and which plants and roots are going to be helpful to help deal with pain or a burn or a common cold or whatever the case may be.
My favorite, though, are what we call Bible magic practitioners. And we don’t actually know just a lot about Bible magic practitioners. So a lot, according to at least what Randolph remembers for us, is that a Bible magic practitioner is somebody, usually an older woman, but not always, who is really good at healing a particular ailment. This person’s got a headache, or this person’s good with earaches, or this person’s good with left knees or whatever the case might be. But they use a particular verse or verses from the Bible almost as a spell or as an incantation. And they’ll have another ritual that they only know themselves.
And they never would share their verses with Mr. Randolph when he was asking questions. So he doesn’t leave us a terribly complete record of how Bible magic functions. And there are still practitioners of this today. And they also are equally like, either they don’t necessarily understand, they just believe and it works, or they are not interested in sharing how it works.
Moore: The divinity of all of this is really fascinating, whether it’s secular or Christian or otherwise. The idea that there’s a higher power, a higher calling that allows these people to essentially be vessels.
Phillips: Yeah, yeah. Ozarkers are like a lot of kind of frontier populations, and populations that live in these sort of in-between spaces. And so in this case, you know, the majority of our imagery of who we are as a place is kind of settling in during the American Industrial Revolution, right before, as the 20th century is dawning. And so we’re a place that lives in between.
And so it’s not surprising at all to find that we take seriously that there is not much of a divide between us, the physical world and the spiritual world. And that, of course, there’s going to be some kind of interaction. And of course, you can lean in and reach out for help, right? And of course, we will be visited by spirits, right? And so that’s where a lot of our stories, our ghost stories, are going to come from.
Moore: OK. So we’ve heard from people, we’ve heard from classifications of people who are interlocutors in this way. Tell us some of these stories about people being visited by spirits.
Phillips: Yeah. So there’s so many stories out there, and you can pick up any number of Vance Randolph books and read a bunch of them. And you can go listen to a whole bunch of people talk. So I just grabbed a few that I like.
One of my favorites is actually from the Civil War, and it takes place over in the southeastern Missouri side of the Ozarks. So not here in Washington County. The other side of the Ozarks. And the reports were that soldiers before a battle would see a giant black hog, like a huge, you know, kind of like a huge Razorback. Not red, but black. And the story is that if you saw that before a battle, then you were assured that you were going to be killed in battle or you would die shortly thereafter.
And the proof of the story was, is that several soldiers in this one particular troop, as a Confederate troop, noted that one of their compatriots, right before battle, sees the apparition, sees this, you know, kind of this ghostly spirit of this black hog emerge. And he comes through the battle, the engagement that they go into, unscathed. And he laughs afterwards and he’s like, “This is amazing. You guys have been scaring me about this. People are scaring me about this. And I saw it, and here I am, still alive.” A few days later, he actually will die from a Yankee revolver that one of his comrades had taken from the battlefield. And it mysteriously discharges and it kills him.
Moore: Wow.
Phillips: Right. And so the story then is if you see a black hog right before you’re getting ready to go do something dangerous, you’re going to die, or you’re going to die within seven days after the thing, because he dies just underneath seven days.
Moore: So it’s not, you’re not actually seeing a physical...
Phillips: You’re seeing the apparition. You’re seeing the apparition of a big black hog. And this is a part of that broader kind of, and there’s a lot of people that talk about this, the broader cryptozoology or spirit zoology of the place, right? So that’s one of these stories.
Another one takes place over near Reeds Spring, Missouri, at a place called Dead Man’s Pond. It also has a Civil War, you know, kind of background to it. A lot of these places do. But the legends really begin right after the war is over, when two bank robbers are said to have been killed near the pond, right? And you would think that it would be their ghost that would be haunting the place. But actually, that’s not the story that we have.
So Miss May Kennedy McCord, who I mentioned a minute ago, the newspaper woman of the Ozarks, she is well received across her area. She is known to be a trustworthy reporter. She sort of stands in high regard, right? People don’t discount what she’s up to. So what she talks about was the story of a man named, last name was Webber, Willie Webber, who was famously not afraid of ghosts. Not bothered by ghosts. This was not a concern of his.
But one day in the late afternoon, so, like, say, 3 or 4 o’clock, sun is still up and shining. You can see clearly everywhere around. He’s walking along the path near Dead Man’s Pond, and all of a sudden he sees this woman who kind of appears out of nowhere. She’s dressed in black. She’s got a red and white apron on. She’s, like, wringing her hands in the apron like she’s distraught. And as he’s watching, all of a sudden she vanishes, and he spends several minutes trying to figure out what’s going on and swears up and down to everybody that he meets that this is true, that he saw it.
Miss McCord, who grew up near the pond, utterly believes him. And she said that she still, even as a grown adult, would be afraid to go alone by herself at night to the Dead Man’s Pond, right?
And so these stories, these are just kind of almost a dime a dozen. And they seem to transcend even the people you would think would be opposed to listen to the ghost story, right? So, for example, and here I’ll just read a letter that a pastor will write into Miss McCord after she had recounted a ghost story that she had heard. And so what he said is, “Dear Madam, I read your ghost stories with interest. And I will add a modern daylight story. Two days before Christmas in 1925, four of us were sitting in plain view of Little Creek Cemetery, and there appeared a pillar of fire about 10 feet high with a flaming star at the top of it. It occurred at 4:15 p.m. and was there at the same time three days later. It appeared four times. I have lived here 14 years and have never lived in sight of other... Excuse me. And have lived in sight of other cemeteries, but that is the first ghost I ever saw, and I am 75 years old. I have been a preacher for 55 years.”
And he later says that a man even went to the cemetery to watch for it and to be there when it came, and he said that he would throw his coat over it and capture it when it came. “Well, it came, but he ran like a turkey. Yours in Jesus’ name, Mr. A.J. Graves in Hartville, Missouri.”
Moore: I think I’d probably run like a turkey, too.
Phillips: I would run like a turkey. It’s such an evocative description, right? Like, a turkey doesn’t just run. It runs full speed, right?
All of this, like, I mean, these are, whether you believe in the ghost stories or not, whether you believe in the, you know, in the spirit lights, you know, that we had, there’s one in Joplin, they’re all over the place, right? And whatever the modern explanations that we have for them, one of the things I love about all of these stories is that they help us understand how our ancestors in the place, whether they’re genetically an ancestor, just community ancestors, is trying to make sense of what’s going on, right?
They’re trying to fix problems, like a yarb doctor is, like the Bible magic practitioners. They’re trying to explain weird things that just happen in nature that sometimes there is no explanation for, right? And they’re providing a language of mythology and a language of community membership that is, I think, getting scarcer and scarcer today. And so that’s one of the reasons why I like to kind of look back at these stories and see what’s going on.
Moore: My final question here for you. You’re a reasonable, you’re an educated man.
Phillips: Yeah.
Moore: Have you ever seen a ghost?
Phillips: I have not seen a ghost, but I do work in Old Main, which, you know, we all famously think that it’s haunted. It makes all kinds of inexplicable noises. And I do not discount ghost stories. You know, like many people, I’ve been Eureka Springs and stayed at the Crescent, and, you know, where I’ve been in many an old farmhouse where we ask questions of, you know, like, “Wait, that wasn’t, was that there, this, you know, last night when we went to bed?” or like, “Now it’s moved,” and none of us remember it. And there was nothing that would let us lose our memory, you know, in the passing. So things are at work sometimes, I would say, before it, but, you know, I think there’s plenty of people who would disagree with me there.
You know, Vance Randolph even will record one of those stories. He remembers talking to a guy from Eureka who was happy to believe any number of folk tales and folk traditions and stories, but he didn’t believe in ghosts. And he said, “You know, I’m pretty sure there’s ghosts in Oklahoma and in Texas, but there’s no ghosts here.” And Vance asked him, “Well, why are there no ghosts in the Ozarks?” He said, “The country is just too rough to have any ghosts here.”
Moore: That’s fascinating, isn’t it?
Phillips: I love it, yeah.
Moore: Well, happy Halloween to you.
Phillips: Same to you.
Moore: And we’ll look forward to talking next month, OK?
Phillips: Sounds good.
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