A Flint Hills' Haunting

There was no reason in the world that Angie Henderson’s bed and breakfast should do so much better than that of Marge Grable.

It wasn’t the type of thing that Marge liked to admit, but she could keep score as well as anyone.

Better than anyone, those who knew her best might say.

Each house hovered on its separate horizon, faintly visible from the highway, one to the north, one to the south; both shared the same exit from the highway; both perched on the outer shallow rims of the Flint Hills; both were similar in style, sprawling ranch homes built for the country, neither one more picturesque than the other. Both were isolated on the vast prairie, like boats adrift on silent fixed waves of land.

Both had their information placed on the vacation web sites in Denver and Kansas City to catch the west- and east-bound traffic, both had flyers and mailing lists and logos and business cards and catchy images thumbtacked to bulletin boards in grocery stores, libraries, and civic auditoriums as far out of town in all directions as a tank of gas would take you.

And yet — and yet — season in, season out, Angie Henderson’s Flint Hills Bed & Breakfast pulled in twice the traffic – no, this is a time to be honest, Marge told herself, four times the traffic – of Marge’s Kansas Prairie B&B.

“I’ll tell you what it is,” said Marge to herself, gritting her teeth as she formed the words. “It’s that damned ghost!”

It certainly wasn’t Angie’s menu over there — please! — casserole concoctions that had everything to do with Campbell’s Condensed Mushroom Soup and nothing to do with authentic prairie cooking.

In fact, more than one citizen of Hanover, here in Humboldt County, Kansas, put Angie’s widowed status down to the pure awfulness of her cooking and its eventual and relentless effect upon poor Fred Henderson.

You could sample her cooking at wide intervals with little immediate danger it was generally agreed, but to inflict it upon yourself day in and day out was just asking for trouble.

“More men die of bad cooking than any other single cause,” cited Marge to herself, again through gritted teeth, though she gave no statistics to back up the claim.

No, what Angie Henderson had was a ghost, and a good bloody one at that. She had The Dripping Head, nearly the only supernatural manifestation in all of Humboldt County.

Marge didn’t like to give out the specifics when people would ask her – why would she want to help the competition? – but it was well-known that there was a mass murder, an axe, various howlings across the prairie, occasional hootings in the rafters, and, of all the luck, bloodstains that appeared on otherwise pristine walls and ceilings at Angie’s B&B in places unreachable by living human beings.

Or so the story went. Marge didn’t credit any of it.

A mishmash of local legends, tales told round the campfire, drunken misconceptions of reality by the boys stumbling out of Jimmy’s at midnight, and an artful playing up of the legend by Angie Henderson herself – grrrr! – that’s what was really at work.

Well, two could play at that game.

A trip to Humboldt County Library, 4th Street Branch, Local History Room, was initially fruitless though.

It revealed to Marge what it must have revealed to Angie years before on her own quest: the above-mentioned Dripping Head, the original violent spree which may or may not have taken place at all, suspect Native American lore that conveniently changed shape every time someone told it anew, a piling on of every feverish detail imaginable through the years and... “ta-da!,” muttered Marge bitterly, “there you have a legend.”

Most anything else in the archives was distinctly second fiddle.

Vaporous lights across the harvest fields, mysterious noises under one or another of the bridges in town, phantom steps in the dark corners of dilapidated barns….just the sort of nonsense you would expect to pile up around an isolated small town over the years, a town barely clinging to life along the banks of the interstate.

There was one thing, one thing, that was a little more interesting though.

Marge saw it just as she was about to put the archive pages away, the material of interest not bound, but tucked separately into the folds of the hard-backed research volume.

Scrawled handwriting mainly, smudged over the years, with the occasional rare mention in the newspapers of the time.

It seems there was a recurring haunting, not a single episode, but a recurring event, a witch no less – not any of your fairy tale witches, but of the violent and vengeance-extracting kind – that came and went over the years.

Now that was interesting right there, this business of coming and going, here for a while and then gone. The witch seemed to blaze up in a streak of terror like a prairie fire and then….subside.

Not too different from an epidemic or a plague that burns itself out, then goes to ground.

That’s the type of scaffolding you could build a phony legend upon.

The down times were frequent enough and deep enough that a haunted tale proper never really took hold, there were no stories to pass down from generation to generation, only sparse phrases, smatterings of memories, stray drips of paint so to speak off to one side of the portrait proper, a portrait no longer on display.

“So one generation couldn’t warn the other,” Marge suddenly thought, for no good reason. "Each generation forgets."

The Hallow Witch she was called, and that was part of it too, hallow being the word for the crevices and deep creases of the countryside.

She would lay, or some say, float, horizontal and invisible in the folds of the hills, with a long knife – sometimes it was described as a scythe – until night gave her complete cover, then she would rise slowly up and creep from house to house, asking for entry and then, well…then she would use the scythe.

This was good! This was better than Marge had hoped for!

She quickly scribbled down the vague details – and they would be vague, wouldn’t they? With the witch coming and going like that across the decades, I mean, any original details were smeared by memory – and the usual folderol on how to summon The Witch from her sleep.

There were details too on how to repel her, but who needed that?

Marge determined to post the incantation, the ingredients of The Summoning, the historical details, what there were of them, in the hallway under a picture of The Hallow Witch – Jimmy Thornton could work something up for her in oil on canvas – and sigh whenever she walked by and look fearfully over her shoulder, and hint darkly to the world that the Witch had taken up residence, or so it is said, at Marge Grable’s Prairie B&B.

And do you know what? She was determined to follow through on the whole Summoning thing too, lock, stock, and barrel, ritual and all, just to say she had, and to enrich the legend she was creating.

In matters of public chicanery Marge took the position that thoroughgoingness was a virtue; it helped you keep your story straight.

There were ingredients and a spell of sorts and a bit of reciting involved in this Summoning, there always is, there always is, but the ingredients weren’t as hard to come by as she had feared: fingernail clippings from a foe of kindness, a chip of ice from the cold of heart, a pinch of dry, dry dust found at the foot of an ingrate, a soiled coin from a miser, spit on the ground from the mouth of a despiser and mocker, a ripped page from the favorite book of a hypocrite, a false tear from a moralizer, two shanks of braided fine hair, one from the one deceived, one from the one deceiving, rat this, spider that, the usual. Letters to abandoned lovers, that sort of thing too.

Marge had a taste for guilty things and dark secrets though and she knew well enough where to find and gather the storm debris of human error.

It took the better part of the day to gather it all, and then to set the small fire and then to burn the letters and the hair and the clippings and the pages and the dust of one sort or another and all else upon the flames like an ancient offering. \

And then of course to let drip onto the flames a few claret drops of blood from her own finger.

She made sure throughout that she was visible to anyone in town who cared to notice. She wanted to be seen, you see. She was building a legend. Anyone want to know where this witch came from, this witch that was going to up her business by a good 50%? Why, it came from this Summoning ritual that Marge undertook without quite understanding what she was getting into.

The story in all its parts held together nicely.

Bright flames sprung up, brighter than you might expect from such base ingredients, and then it was time for her to undertake the reciting – well, you could almost call it chanting.

Next was to extinguish the flames with water from a sinner’s well.

Well, my goodness, this was the modern age. You couldn’t throw a rock with your eyes closed these days in Hanover without hitting a sinner, Marge thought to herself with grim satisfaction, so that was no problem. A dime a dozen. Her position on the matter was that water dripped from a selection of outside hoses would do as nicely as any well had ever done in times past.

Back inside she washed up and posted the charm on the wall, along with some other touches – clusters of weeds, the ashes of the burnt pages, the photocopied news clippings from the library archives. Like a dark little shrine.

Now, outside, completely dark.

Just the time of day – ordinarily – that she disliked the most, looking across the highway to the distance at the headlights of the cars rolling into Angie’s place, one after the other. Visitor after visitor… and none for her.

Well, that was about to change. Take that, Angie Henderson!

Feeling well-satisfied with a good day’s work, Marge was just about to go upstairs when she heard a noise at the front door.

Not a knock, not a rap, not as sharp or as certain as either of those, this was more of a rasping scrape, like something hardened and bony, harsh to the touch and to the ear, being dragged across the wood.

It sounded like something wanting in.

As Marge excitedly pulled her robe about her and headed to the door, she smiled to herself.

It was working already. See?

See?

There’s a visitor now!