Written by Craig Dominey

The picture hung in my parents’ home for years before I finally asked about it: a pencil sketch of a gentle old man looking like some unkempt, nomadic Santa Claus, cradling a baby goat in his strong, leathery hands. Behind him, a team of older goats pulled a ramshackle, trash-strewn wagon, a placard on its roof screaming “GOD IS NOT DEAD.”

As a kid, I dismissed the drawing as yet another curiosity that my parents would buy in the folk art galleries and antique stores that surrounded our North Georgia mountain home. But when I began writing columns for the local paper and became hungry for story material, I asked my mother one day about that strange old man on the wall. She flipped the picture around with a smile, revealing a manilla folder full of newspaper articles taped to the back, waiting for the day that I would ask.

That was how I first became acquainted with the fascinating life of Mr. Ches McCartney, a.k.a. the “Goat Man.”

For over five decades, the Goat Man roamed the highways and byways of the South, fueled by little more than simple wanderlust. Most of this time was spent in a goat-powered, scrap wood wagon covered with cooking utensils, dented signs, old furniture, rusty lanterns and whatever else he could find on the roadsides. “The Goat Man’s coming!” became a common refrain on radio stations and newspapers across the region. Traffic would back up for miles as curiosity seekers stopped to gawk at him. Some schools would even let out early so that the children could see this modern day pioneer.

After his “retirement” from traveling in 1987, rumors circulated in the press that the Goat Man and his team had been killed on a rain-slickened highway by an out-of-control truck. But back in 1998, I discovered he was indeed alive and well at the Eastview Nursing Home in Macon, Georgia. After arranging for a visit with the staff, I drove down to see him.

As I was led into the crowded television room, I spotted a short and frail old man sitting alone on a bench. He was indistinguishable in his clean plaid shirt and pressed khaki slacks, a new baseball cap covering what was left of his brittle white hair. He constantly rubbed the stubble on his face, as if he were feeling for the fuller beard of his youth. His hearing was nearly gone, and he mumbled almost unintelligibly when he spoke. But the minute he smiled at me, the gentle, road-tested wanderer from my parents’ picture suddenly appeared before my eyes.

He immediately spotted a Goat Man biography under my arm and motioned for it. Without my asking, he took out a pen and signed his name twice on the cover page. Although pictures and framed magazine articles on the Goat Man hung throughout the nursing home, the other residents seemed oblivious to the fact that a celebrity was in their midst. “Ain’t no lies in that book,” he said, excitedly tapping his long fingernails on the cover. “I don’t tell nothin’ but the truth. ”

The nursing staff around us smiled. No one is sure how many of the Goat Man’s stories are fact or fiction. He claimed to be around 105 years old, although nursing home records at the time estimated his age to be somewhere in the mid-to-late 90s. He said that his goats were on display at Disney World, although no one had ever seen them. He also claimed to have spent the night in the White House as President Carter’s guest, although I found no official record of such a visit.

But most accounts of Ches McCartney’s life agree that he began his traveling days in 1915 when, as a teenager, he ran off to New York City from his home in Iowa. According to one of his self-published booklets, he sold newspapers on a street corner before embarking on a whirlwind romance with a 24-year-old Spanish knife thrower. Struggling to make ends meet, the couple put on a traveling circus act in local taverns where, upon arrival, Ches would take down the dart board, get up on the wall and allow his new bride to throw twenty-five keenly sharpened knives in his direction.

The performing duo eventually split up, and Ches returned to Iowa. Thinking he had quenched his wanderlust, he remarried, had a son, Albert Gene, and settled into a life of farming. Ches was first introduced to the benefits of “goat power” when he used them to plow his fields after he lost his horses during the Depression.

The McCartneys eventually lost their entire farm in the Depression, and Ches went to work cutting timber for the Works Progress Administration (WPA). It was during this time that a tragic event occurred that would forever alter his life. While working deep in the forest, a tree fell across him, shattering his left side and pinning him to the ground for hours. According to Ches, when a search party finally arrived, they presumed he was dead and took him to the local funeral home. He later awoke on the embalming table, much to the shock of the mortician.

Ches eventually recovered, but his left arm was forever mangled. Unable to work, Ches nevertheless refused go on the public dole, wanting to be his own boss. “I decided to do what I could,” he would later write, “and so my life with the goats began.” Inspired by one of his favorite books, Robinson Crusoe, he had his wife sew goat skin outfits for him and his son, while he designed two goat skin-covered wagons. The family then set off for parts unknown.

His wife eventually grew tired of the road and left him. Albert Gene stayed in Iowa to attend school, rejoining Ches on his vacations. But Ches traveled on, gaining notoriety across the country as the “Goat Man.” His goat skin outfit eventually gave way to several layers of greasy, sooty clothes, which he would peel off depending on the weather. He never shaved or bathed, and it was said that his smell would roll into town long before he did. “[The goats] don’t care how I smell or how I look,” he later wrote. “They trust me and have faith in me, and this is more than I can say about a lot of people.”

At its height, the Goat Man’s junk-filled “goatvoy” consisted of two wagons pulled by a team of over thirty goats. The larger billies were hitched to the front of the wagon with homemade leather leads. Nannies were tied to the back with a couple of strong billies that served as the “brakes” on steep hills. The Goat Man also collected stray and neglected goats that he found during his travels, including a three-legged goat that rode in a special box on the front wagon. He referred to the goats as his “babies,” and called each of them by name as he walked beside them.

He slept with the goats in the back wagon, which he dubbed the “maternity ward” since it was where the females gave birth. At night, visitors to his campsite would frequently find him curled up with his goats in the back wagon, reading Robinson Crusoe or The Bible under the warm glow of a kerosene lantern. “On cold winter nights, my goats are the finest electric blanket I can find,” he would say.

Upon arriving at his chosen campsite, usually on the outskirts of some town, the Goat Man’s first responsibility was to feed and water his goats. He would then build a campfire out of whatever sticks and trash he could find lying around and cook his dinner. The final touch was to throw a couple of junk tires on the fire that he kept stocked in his wagon. He claimed that the thick, acrid smoke chased the mosquitos away and added a distinct flavor to his food. But the burning tires more than likely served a more ingenious purpose: to attract visitors.

Thinking there had been a car wreck, those curiosity seekers who were already held up in traffic behind his slow-moving caravan would rush over to the campsite at the sight of the smoke. There, they would find the Goat Man drinking flesh goat milk from his herd, which he claimed had kept him healthy for years. He would then offer up a plethora of novelties for sale: booklets on his travels, picture postcards, proprietary medicines, sewing materials. Whether folks bought something or not, he always thanked everyone for coming out.

All of the money he raised either went to the maintenance of his goats or to a series of churches he planned to build throughout the South. The Goat Man claimed to have been ordained by the Pentecostal Church, and refused to travel on Sundays so that he could preach in a booming voice to the crowds gathered around his wagon. One of his tiny churches, the Free Thinking Christian Mission in Jeffersonville, Georgia, stood for several years until vandals burned it down. When I asked him about this, he sadly shook his head. “Takes all kind of people to make a world,” he said. “And I think we got ‘em, all right.”

For those hardy visitors who could stand the stench and the constantly bleating goats, the Goat Man would eagerly recount stories of his travels and offer opinions on his three favorite subjects: God, politics and women. He claimed that modern day preachers were only interested in the Almighty Dollar, and warned of upcoming race wars and economic depressions. He also tried to generate interest in a run for the Presidency on a third party ticket. By the late 1960s, he claimed to have been married three times, fathered children by each of his wives, and to have received over 25 additional marriage proposals. “The Good Lord gave me three wives, which proved to be three too many,” he would often say. “The Good Book says that there’ll be seven women for every man. Somebody can sure have my other four.”

One subject that continued to haunt the Goat Man in later years was Vietnam. He claimed to have another son missing in action, and my mere mention of the subject brought about an unexpectedly angry response. “The money people just kept sendin’ the boys over there, killin’ ‘em all,” he said. “People know how to kill, but they don’t know nothin’ about savin’.” At one time, he even considered camping out with his goats on the White House lawn until he received an answer on his boy’s whereabouts.

Over the years, the Goat Man became a problem for law enforcement. Due to heavy traffic jams behind his wagon, he was frequently rerouted at various state lines. Humane societies charged him with cruelty to animals, although he was never convicted. In the 1940s, he was even suspected by some Twiggs County, Georgia residents of being a Nazi spy. After a short investigation, the local police decided that his mountain man appearance was not a disguise. “[The whiskers and long hair] have something to do with professed religion,” they concluded.

Unfortunately, the Goat Man’s herd proved irresistible to vandals. One of the worst violations occurred on a snowy Christmas morning in 1964 when the Goat Man awoke to find Old Billy, his oldest goat and so-called “companion of companions,” wounded by a hunting arrow. Kind passers-by helped bring the goat to a veterinarian, but he died of complications four months later. The Goat Man later eulogized him in one of his autobiographies with the heartbreaking poem, “In Memory of Old Billy.” The vandals were never found.

Despite this setback, the Goat Man traveled on, eventually covering, by his count, some 100,000 miles and 49 of the 50 states. The only state he missed was Hawaii, due to logistical problems and his concern that, as he told an Alabama newspaper, the “goats might eat the grass skirts sight off the hula girls!”.

As superhighways were constructed across the country in the late 1960s, it became more dangerous for the Goat Man to continue his odyssey. But it would take two more tragic events to knock his caravan off the road for good. While traveling through Chattanooga, Tennessee late one night in 1968, the Goat Man was violently mugged. He later awoke in a hospital with a gash in his head that required twenty-seven stitches to close. His goats were not so lucky; eight were found dead, their throats slashed.

Horrified by his ordeal, the Goat Man and his herd were driven to Conyers, Georgia to recover. While there, two of the remaining goats were stolen. One was believed to have been tied to a railroad track, while the other was never found. This proved to be too much for the Goat Man, who finally called it quits in 1969.

His livelihood gone, the man who prided himself on being his own boss finally moved into a one room wooden shack in Jeffersonville and lived off Social Security. One evening, he forgot to extinguish his makeshift stove after dinner, and fire swept through his shack while he slept. Luckily, he escaped with only his hair and beard singed, but his shack burned to the ground. Sympathetic Jeffersonville residents bought him and his eldest son Gene an abandoned school bus to live in.

Domestic life eventually became too dull for the Goat Man, and he soon became a common sight limping along Highway 80 between Jeffersonville and Macon, decorating himself with various objects he scavenged from the roadsides. He would also hitch a ride into Macon every week to socialize at the senior citizen’s center. Frustrated with his shrinking Social Security checks, he vowed to renew his cross-country odyssey, this time with the help of airplanes and buses.

In October 1985, the Goat Man followed through on his threat. He was reported missing to the Twiggs County Sheriff’s Department, and did not resurface until three months later, when a doctor from Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles called to report that the Goat Man was hospitalized there after being mugged. The Goat Man claimed to have traveled to Hollywood with the intention of romancing actress Morgan Fairchild. Instead, he was robbed at gunpoint of his watch and two government bonds. After his release, friends purchased a plane ticket back to Georgia for the dazed Goat Man.

The California trip effectively ended the Goat Man’s wandering days – that is, to everybody but the Goat Man himself. He considered his stay in the Eastview Nursing Home to be only a temporary thing. “I’m on the go all the time, bud,” he repeatedly told me. He then scratched his stubble with a smile, saying how anxious he was to grow his flowing beard back.

As my visit ended, I asked the Goat Man if he would allow me to take a picture of him to put in the frame of my parents’ drawing. He smiled and guided me out onto the sunny deck, allowing me to take all I wanted. Our task completed, he stayed back in the dining room as I told him goodbye.

“God be with you,” said the Goat Man. He then turned and stared silently out the window at the open blue sky.

ADDENDUM: Not long after my visit, tragedy struck Ches again as his son Gene was shot to death on their Twiggs County property near the old school bus, a murder which remains unsolved. Gene is buried in a donated plot in Jeffersonville, Georgia. A few months later, Ches passed away at his nursing home at age 103.

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Photo/Artwork Credits:

Home Page:

“Face Of A Legend.”  Pencil drawing by Larry K. Martin.  Copyright by Larry K. Martin. Printed with permission of the artist. This subject and others are available as prints from larrykmartin.com.

Story Page:

1. “America’s Goatman – Mr. Ches McCartney.” Pencil drawing by Larry K. Martin.  Copyright by Larry K. Martin. Printed with permission of the artist. This subject and others are available as prints from larrykmartin.com.
2. Postcard of the Goat Man handed out at his stops, photographer unknown.
3. Home movie of the Goat Man provided by Robert Bonner.
4. Picture of Goat Man in 1998 by Craig Dominey.

Other Goat Man Links:

Facebook group for The Goat Man
Great slide show of Goat Man photos
Wikipeda entry on The Goat Man
The Goat Man, America’s Legend
America’s Goat Man
New Georgia Encyclopedia entry on The Goat Man

Additional Resources:

Darryl Patton,  America’s “Goat Man” (Mr. Ches McCartney) (Gadsden, Ala.: Little River Press, 1994).

Adapted from folklore by Craig Dominey and Curtis Richardson

On the Georgia coast, there is an island called St.Simons Island – a beautiful place where the sea laps against the sandy shores, the Spanish moss sways gently in the salty breeze, and there is a real sense of peace.

But St. Simons is also a place of mysterious and tragic stories – some true, and some folktales that have become legends. One of these stories concerns a lone grave marker sitting a few yards off the main highway. What is strange about this grave is that no vegetation grows around it – no trees, no grass, and no moss.

The most popular version of this story takes place over 100 years ago, when large rice plantations were in operation up and down the coast. One day, the plantation owners on St. Simons decided they were going to hire a schoolmarm to teach their children. So they found a young woman from Ohio named Margaret to come down and live on the island as the local teacher. She was a wise woman, for she had traveled in Europe and had attended a number of well-known schools. Margaret would teach the white plantation children during the day – but at night, she would teach the black slave children whose parents toiled day and night on the plantations. The plantation owners did not like this, for they did not want the slaves to be educated in any way. They thought that, if the slaves became educated, they might rise up and attack their captors.

But Margaret was headstrong, for she had seen how other people lived around the world, and firmly believed that blacks were as deserving of an education as whites. Since Margaret was such a good teacher, the white plantation owners reluctantly looked the other way. But they became very suspicious of Margaret, and kept a close eye on her.

There was one little slave boy named Joshua who Margaret liked to teach the most. Joshua soaked up knowledge like a sponge, for he felt that a good education was his ticket to freedom. Joshua especially loved English literature and poetry. Long after the other slave children had left school, he would stick around and beg Margaret to read to him some more.

Margaret was truly touched by Joshua’s eagerness, and found herself growing close to him. But Joshua never got a chance to use his newfound knowledge. One day, a slave uprising erupted on one of the plantations. During the furor, a white slave owner was killed. Later that evening, an angry white mob rode through the island and started beating the horrified slaves, whether they were part of the uprising or not. They kicked down the door of Joshua’s home and savagely attacked his parents. When Joshua leapt to his mother’s defense, a young white man viciously clubbed him in the head, killing him instantly.

Margaret took the news of Joshua’s death hard. She was so grief stricken that she isolated herself from the community. The only time she would speak to anyone was when she was teaching the children. The rest of the time, she wandered the backroads of the island, alone and sad.

It was while she was walking down an island road one day that she had a strange feeling she was being watched. She looked above her and saw a large black raven flying overhead, seemingly following her. As the days passed, the same raven would always seem to be around her. Whenever she arrived at school in the morning, the raven would perch upon the windowsill and watch her teach the children. And when she would go home, the raven would follow her and perch in a tree near her front door.

At the end of one of the school days, after all of the children had left, Margaret was cleaning the classroom while the raven watched her from the window. She looked at the bird and thought about how much she missed Joshua, for this was the time of day she used to teach him one-on-one. She picked up a poetry book and began to read to the raven. The raven bobbed its head up and down, as if understanding what Margaret was reading. Margaret smiled and read more poetry to the bird, and before she knew it, she was reading lessons to the bird every day after school. Margaret would sometimes laugh at herself for reading aloud to a bird, but strange as it was, she found it to be a good way to deal with her grief.

Late one afternoon, some white children returned to school to pick up some belongings they had left behind. When they got to the school, they saw Margaret speaking to the large black raven on the windowsill, reading the day’s lesson. They ran back to their parents screaming, “The teacher’s a witch! She’s a witch! She’s brought that little black boy Joshua back from the dead as a bird!”

The parents didn’t believe them at first, but they agreed to accompany the children back to the schoolhouse. When they got there, they also saw Margaret reading poetry aloud to the bird. When they saw Margaret smile at the bird, and the bird nod its head back, the parents ran back to town and, like their children before them, screamed “The teacher’s a witch!”

The islanders were a close-knit, fiercely religious community, and were frightened of anyone who practiced black magic or witchcraft. The rumors of Margaret being a witch also fueled many islanders’ long-held suspicions about her. So it wasn’t long before an angry white mob marched to the school, dragged Margaret outside and killed her, leaving her body for the vultures.

When the time came to bury her body, one of the plantation owners had pity for Margaret. He tried to have her buried at Christ’s Church, a famous church on the island where John Wesley had preached. But the other plantation owners wouldn’t hear of a witch being buried in a church cemetery, or in any other cemetery on the island. So the kind owner buried her body on a small piece of land he owned off the main road. He had a grave marker made for her that was inscribed with three simple words – “A Beloved Teacher.”

Within a month, the locals who happened to visit the grave noticed that all the vegetation had died within a few feet of where Margaret was buried. And for the next hundred years, nothing grew around the grave – no trees, no grass, no moss.

If you’re ever in the area, ask one of the locals where the grave marker is and see for yourself. You’ll see that nothing grows around where they buried the beloved teacher.

-THE END-

Story Credits | Story Background

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Written by Craig Dominey

To some folks, Christmas might not seem like the right time of year to tell ghost stories. But I’ve got a spooky tale to share with you. And to understand my story, you first have to understand the relationship between my father and his dog.

You see, my father loved his dog more than anything else in the world, including his own family. Or at least that’s the way it appeared to me. There were no pictures of my mother and I in his wallet, only that big, sloppy, clumsy dog. He took his dog everywhere he went – on family vacations, out in the fields, even to bed at night! He showered every ounce of love he had on that dog, and it made my blood boil.

Back then, I was an only child growing up in a farmhouse deep in the South Georgia countryside. The wooden house sat at the edge of a thick forest that stretched on for miles. It was a drafty old place with high ceilings, cavernous hallways and dark hardwood floors that creaked loudly with each footstep.

My father was an ex-army colonel, and a strict disciplinarian. He had a cold and stiff demeanor, as if some army trainer along the line had squeezed every ounce of emotion out of him. As the years passed, I grew more and more distant from my father. In fact, sometimes I was downright scared of him. And I paid little attention to any awkward attempts he made to show his affections. But every human being needs an outlet for their emotions, so my father got something that wouldn’t talk back or challenge him – a dog.

As if by divine intervention, a stray black lab came bounding onto our property one day, wet and starving. After some half-hearted attempts to locate the original owners, my father named him “Mac” and welcomed him with open arms into our home. Mac constantly tried to play with me – jumping up on my lap, nudging me with a dirty tennis ball in its mouth, licking my face. But I shoved him away each time, sending him running back to my father. Over the years, Mac never seemed to get the message that I wanted no part of his affection. I even shut the door to my room to keep him out.

When I was about 13 years old, Mac grew sick with cancer. My father watched in horror as his dog deteriorated before his eyes. Mac spent his days lying in the middle of the family room, panting and unable to eat, his sharply defined ribs heaving with each pained breath. When my father would reach down to pet him, a joyous recognition would flash in his eye, only to be extinguished by his agony. We had no choice – my father made the hardest decision of his life and had Mac put to sleep.

After it was done, he wept and spent many hours alone. Each part of his daily routine – driving to the store, walking around the property, reading the paper in the morning – seemed empty without Mac around. But to be honest, I felt no sadness. Deep inside, I felt like we could now be a normal family with Mac out of the picture.

One day, I walked into my parents’ bedroom and noticed a strange wooden box sitting on my father’s nightstand. It was nailed shut, and had the name “Mac” engraved on a brass plate. When I confronted my mother about it, she rolled her eyes and told me the ghastly story. Shortly after Mac’s death, my father had had him cremated, and now kept his ashes beside the bed. Well, that was the last straw. My father couldn’t stay away from that dog when he was alive, and now he was clinging to him in death. I simply could not live another moment with that dog in the house. So one night when my parents were away, I grabbed a shovel, stole the box from their bedroom and ran through the dark into the forest. I buried that box under a tree and covered it with pine straw. It was so far out in the woods that there was no way my father would ever find it.

I knew I’d get the beating of my life when my father came home, and I didn’t care. The look of agony on his face made it worth it to me. Now he would pay for not being the father I wanted. Hysterical with rage, he dragged me out into the forest the next morning and made me dig under every tree for that box. But I honestly couldn’t remember where I had buried it. After days of trying, we finally gave up.

Needless to say, our relationship soured even more after that. We rarely spoke to one another, and when I grew older and left for college, I rarely returned home. Christmas seemed like a painful obligation, with a cold chill hanging over us as we sat silently around the festive table. My poor mother tried everything she could to bring us together as a family, but the damage had been done.

I eventually married and moved far away from my parents. They barely knew my wife, and we spent most holidays with her parents up north. But the bitterness of my childhood wormed its way into my marriage, and before I knew it, we were divorced. In the following years, my parents passed on, leaving the old family house cold and empty.

I dreaded the Christmas season of 1985, for I knew that for the first time, I would truly be alone. The sounds of Christmas cheer were like nails under my skin, and I drank heavily to block them out. So when I was asked one day to look after the old family house while it was being put on the real estate market, I quickly agreed. Perhaps deep in the country I could get away from all the bright lights and wretched merriment.

What I discovered was that the old house was a dark crypt of painful memories. Although the outside was run-down, everything inside was left as it was, as if my parents had suddenly been plucked from the earth by some unseen force. Fortunately, this also meant that my father’s bar was still fully stocked. Without hesitation, I grabbed a bottle of scotch, made myself a fire in the old stone fireplace in the den, and drank myself to sleep.

Sometime in the middle of the night, I was awakened by an odd thumping noise coming from upstairs. The house was dark and cold, and my fire was long extinguished. In my drunken stupor, I had forgotten to leave any lights on, and now I was enveloped in the blackness. After an eerie silence, I heard the thumping again, this time sounding like something moving about in the upstairs hallway, the floorboards creaking under its weight. I remembered that squirrels and other small creatures sometimes found their way into the house when I was young. But this sounded larger than a squirrel.

The thumping sound descended the stairs and moved closer and closer toward the den. Through my drunken haze, I recognized it as the rasp of claws on wood. I heard it enter the room, then stop. I fumbled around me in the dark for a candle, found one on the mantle, and lit it.

I could scarcely believe my eyes. Sitting in the doorway, slobber dripping from the sides of his mouth, was Mac, looking strong and youthful. He made no move toward me, but just stared at me with twinkling, excited eyes. After a long pause, he whirled around and ran out the door, barking loudly.

I guess it crossed my mind that this was very strange, being visited by a dead dog in the middle of the night. But I found myself following him as he bounded through – and I do mean “through” – the front door. Before I knew it, we were running through the frosty night deep into the woods, the brittle pine needles crackling under my feet. My flickering candle cast strange shadows on the dark trees towering ominously overhead, as if they were encircling me for the kill. After what seemed like miles, Mac suddenly stopped under one of the trees and began pawing at the ground.

Now, have you ever have one of those moments when you finally realize you’re dreaming, and you have the power to wake yourself up? Well, this was one of those moments, and I wasn’t about to be fooled. “Okay Mac, I know what this is about,” I heard myself say. “I ain’t digging up your ashes, you hear me? I know this is a dream, and I’m gonna wake myself up now. You ain’t ever gonna leave these woods.”

With that, I pinched myself on the arm. Mac stopped digging, looked at me with that goofy grin of his, then slowly vanished. I could feel chill bumps on my skin, and I knew that, any minute now, I would be awake.

To my surprise, I found myself still standing in the forest. Mac was gone, and the ground showed no signs of his paw prints. But now the trees had taken on a strange, burnt orange glow, and the air was thick with smoke. Was I awake, or had I just moved into another dream?

I turned around, and my jaw dropped. The old family homestead was on fire – a giant tower of flame licking the night sky. I ran back to the house, but it was too late. The fire had been burning for almost an hour, and everything was gone.

Shortly thereafter, fire investigators reasoned that a stray cinder falling out of the fireplace as I slept caused the fire. The house was so old and wooden that it burned in no time at all. What was miraculous to them was that I had somehow walked out the door in my sleep when the fire started burning. Otherwise, in my drunken stupor, I certainly would have died.

But I knew there was another part of the story: that Mac had come back and guided me to safety. And I also knew that there was only one thing I could do to thank him. I grabbed a shovel and went back to that spot in the woods where I had stood the night before. I dug right where Mac had been digging, and sure enough, I found the box I had buried many years before. I then bought a plot near the foot of my father’s grave and laid Mac to rest – much like he had slept at the foot of his bed when I was young.

My life changed after that Christmas. I married again, had a son of my own, and have tried every day to be the best father I can be. I told no one about what really happened that night, but I think of Mac every day. Most importantly, I learned that you must give of yourself if you expect anything in return. And that everyone is capable of unconditional love – not just four-legged creatures.

Happy holidays, everyone.

- THE END -

Story Credits | Story Background

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Written by Veronica Byrd

I got wings, you got wings —All God’s chillun got wings. When I get to heaven, gon’ put on my wings, gon’ fly all over God’s heaven, heaven. Everybody talkin’ ’bout heaven, ain’t goin’ there, heaven.

I bet you always thought those songs were about dying and goin to heaven didn’t you. Well, I’m here to tell you different. Those songs and many other Negro Spirituals were actually secret songs. They sounded like one thing but they actually meant something else. For instance, during slavery time “flying away” actually meant running away or stealing away late in the midnight hour when Ole Massa wasn’t paying his slaves no attention. Whenever one of the slaves would start to sing that song, that was a message to the others that somebody was gonna run away that night. But long before slavery time, before the slaves were brought over from Africa, that song was really telling the truth.

You see, long ago, when Africans were still living on the continent of Africa, they had a special God given ability to actually fly. Oh yeah, what I’m telling you is true. It wasn’t until just recently here that black folk lost their ability to fly.

I remember this story my great great granddaddy used to tell me. There once was this old slave master down in south Georgia, down by the coast, by the name of Jessup. Now Ole’ Massa Jessup was the meanest man you’d ever want to meet. He worked his slaves so hard he near bout’; killed them all off, and those that were left were so worn out from the cruel treatment that they weren’t able to do the hard work that needed to be done in the fields. He decided he was gonna get him “the real thing”, not these “domesticated” Negroes from America, he called them. He went right down to the dock and brought him a whole company of native Africans, just off the boat from Africa. He figured they were much stronger than the “watered down Americans.”

He wasted no time. He took them on back to his plantation and put all of them straight to work in the cotton fields. He worked those poor folks so hard, it was inhuman. He’d have them working from sun up to sundown. Now he wasn’t just working the strong ones, no siree, he worked the men, women and children equally as hard. That man was meaner than a stirpped snake.

Whenever they would get to the end of a row of cotton they would try to take a rest, but Ole Massa Jessup had an overseer who was equally as mean as he was. He would ride to the end of the row and if he saw one of the slaves slow down he’d pull out that big old black whip and snap it in front of them to insure that they didn’t even think about stopping to take even a moments rest. Nobody wanted to catch the wrath of that ol’ whip, so they just kept on going. Now the human body can only take so much, and there were more occasions than not where the poor slaves would drop from sheer exhaustion.

There was this one young girl who had just given birth to her first child. I can’t rightly remember her African name, but folks just called her Mimi. You would think that Ole’ Massa Jessup would give the girl time to recover from childbirth; but no, he had that girl right back out in the field the next day. So there she was trying to tend to her baby as well as do her chores in the field. Well, that baby started to cry, as all babies do, and that overseer hollered “shut that thing up a’fore I come over there and beat the both of you.”

Well, Mimi tried, best she could, to stop the crying. But she was a new mother, she didn’t know what to do. That baby kept crying and sure enough, the next thing she knew, that old black whip was slicing through her back. She fell to the ground, baby still strapped to her hip. But she got up as quick as she could so as not to get hit again. She managed to stagger to an old man who was working a few feet in front of her. She whispered something to him and he immediately shook his head as if to say “no.”

She went on back to her place in the row and started back to picking. The hot sun beaming down on that poor child, and the fact that she still hadn’t regained all of her strength back from giving birth, that child’s knees buckled and she fell once again. And that old overseer laid that whip on her quicker than you could imagine. This time she didn’t even take the time to whisper to the old man, she just called out, “Is it time yet father, is it time yet?”

That old man’s voice sounded as if it were coming from the sky, the ground, and even from the thicket of trees that stood just beyond the cotton field. “Yes, daughter, yes indeed, now is the time!!”

With that, that girl slowly rose to her feet and just kept on risin’ and risin’ and risin’. And before you know it, she was flying high over the cotton fields. And that baby that had been crying all along, was just as quiet and calm as could be.

The other slaves looked at one another, and even though they were tired beyond measure, there was a sudden glimmer of hope in their eyes. The old man called out in some unknown tongue, “Kuliba — Kuliba!” As if obeying his command, the workers dropped their bags full of cotton and raised their arms to the heavens, and faster than you’d believe, they too start started to slowly rise off the ground until they were all hovering right above the cotton field.

Now Ole Massa Jessup and his over seer didn’t know what to make of all this. “I don’t’ know what kind of African hoodoo you’re trying to pull here, but all of ya’ll better bring yourselves back down here, a’froe I take this whip to ya.” With that the slaves rose higher and higher until they were nearly out of sight.

The overseer and Ole Massa Jessup started towards the old man, with that whip ready to give him the lashing of his life. But all at once the old man let out a sound that sounded like it came all the way across the water from Africa. Then he too rose into the sky as fast as could be. He began to mumble something in an unknown tongue right at Ole Massa Jessup, and then he laughed and laughed. He caught up to the others and they began to sing and clap their hands, and flew off into somewheres where I can’t even imagine. Not one of those slaves was ever seen again.

I hear tell there’s a few of us that still have the ability to fly, we just can’t remember how it’s done. But if ya’ll ever run across one of those flying’ folks, let me know. I’ll be the one hovering right above your imagination.

- THE END -

Story Credits | Story Background

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Written by Craig Dominey and Lanny Gilbert

Bill Morgan and Tom Edwards sat nursing their umpteenth beers in Fat Daddy’s Saloon, a loud, smoke-filled, neon-lit honky tonk in the foothills of the North Georgia mountains. Fat Daddy’s had always been their bar of choice on the weekends, but ever since Bill and Tom lost their jobs at the bottling plant, they were there almost every night, drinking away the last dollars they had.

If you hung out in Fat Daddy’s long enough, the same things would happen every night like clockwork. The phone behind the bar would ring precisely at seven, as Mrs. Floyd would call making sure her husband hadn’t snuck over there after work. At eight-thirty, Little Jake would lose yet another pool game to Mike “The Mouth” Kilbey, and he’d hear about it the rest of the night. At nine-thirty, someone would play “Whisky River” on the beat-up old jukebox. And at ten o’clock, sitting alone at the end of the bar, Chief “B.S.” would tell his tired old tale of the gold in Sawnee Mountain to anyone who would listen.

Now, some of you young folks may not know what “B.S.” stands for, but you older folks surely do. Bill gave the Chief that name because he got tired of hearing the same old stories coming out of his mouth. The Chief was an old Cherokee with long grey hair, wrinkled, leathery skin, piercing eyes, and a beaten up hat with some sort of turkey feather sticking out of the brim. His ancestors had lived and hunted in the North Georgia mountains long before the white man arrived. And he knew those mountains so well that he could hike through them blindfolded if he had to.

That didn’t matter much to the good ol’ boys at Fat Daddy’s, who considered the Chief a weird outsider. But maybe it was their dire employment situation that led Bill and Tom to suddenly pay attention to the Chief as he told his story to another unsuspecting drunk. He always started his tale by talking about the Trail of Tears, and how Chief Sawnee, one of the most respected Cherokee leaders in Georgia, refused to go. Instead, Chief Sawnee hid in the North Georgia mountains with his loyal braves, and when he died he was buried in the mountain which now bears his name. According to the story, he was also buried with a large stash of gold coins, which his remaining braves buried with him.

This was the part of the story where everyone in the bar would laugh at the old man and tell him he was nuts. “It’s true,” the Chief insisted, “The gold is buried with Chief Sawneee deep in Sawnee Mountain. But it’s protected by his spirit. I can tell you how to get there, but I’d never go in myself. I don’t need gold bad enough to have a ghost hounding me for the rest of my life.”

Well, maybe the Chief didn’t want the gold that badly, but Bill Morgan certainly did. He moved two barstools down toward the old man and said, “Tell you what, Chief. You draw me a map, and I’ll go up and get that gold. I’ll even give you a cut of it.”

Tom looked at his friend in disbelief. “I ain’t goin’ bushwackin’ up there on some wild goose chase!” he said.

Bill put his arm mockingly around the Chief and grinned a phony grin. “It ain’t no wild goose chase, is it, Chief? That gold’s up there, and we’re gonna get it!”

The Chief took a long, contemplative swig of beer, then stared at Bill with his black, piercing eyes. “You two church going men?” he asked.

“What difference does that make?” asked Bill with a chuckle.

“Like I said, the gold is protected by Chief Sawnee’s spirit,” the old Cherokee answered. “If you go in there, you gotta go in with a pure heart. So a church going man will stand a better chance with the spirit than a sinful one.”

Bill rolled his eyes, grabbed one of the bar napkins and said, “Yeah, whatever. Draw us a map on this napkin and we’ll go see if your story’s true or not.” Then winking at his friend Tom he whispered, “If Chief B.S. is right, we’re gonna be rich this time tomorrow. Besides, what do we got to lose?”

After the Chief had drawn the map, Tom followed Bill as he staggered out of the bar. Bill tossed his keys to Tom and said, “You drive. I’ll show you where to go.”

“You can’t be serious,” answered Tom. “C’mon, you’re drunk. There ain’t no gold up there. Besides, it’s dark out.”

But Bill wouldn’t be swayed. “C’mon, I need your help. We’ll just take a quick look, I promise.”

Now Tom knew he had done plenty of stupid things himself after one too many beers. And his friend Bill had always been there to bail him out off trouble. So with a heavy sigh, Tom grabbed a couple of flashlights from the back of his truck and said, “Alright, which way do we go?”

For hours it seemed, Tom drove Bill’s truck up the curvy, two-lane road that led up into the highest elevations in North Georgia. The lights from town disappeared, and soon they were enveloped in darkness, alone on the road, with only the intensely bright stars above keeping them company. In fact, Tom had never seen stars so beautiful and bright. Or perhaps he was always too busy to notice them. Maybe those Cherokees back then didn’t have it so bad after all, he thought to himself.

“There it is!” Bill suddenly screamed.

Tom slammed on the brakes and looked where Bill was pointing. On the side of the road stood a wooden, unoccupied lean-to with a big black pot inside. A crudely painted sign nailed to a tree above it read BOILED P-NUTS $1.00. Tom rolled his eyes – these tourist traps were a dime a dozen up in the hills, especially in the fall when the leaf watchers drove up in their shiny SUVs from Atlanta. Tom looked at the map scrawled on Bill’s napkin. Indeed, the Chief had drawn the peanut stand with a long dotted line behind it, indicating a dirt road. Tom turned onto the dirt road behind the peanut stand and plunged deep into the dark forest.

For several miles, the dirt road was in surprisingly good shape. But then it suddenly worsened, with Tom’s truck rocking violently in the deep ruts. Thick clouds of dust blanketed Toms’ headlights, obscuring what little of the road he could see. It was obvious that no one had been down this old hunting road in years. Tom was just about to turn around when the road suddenly dead-ended into a thick, impenetrable wall of old-growth trees.

Bill looked at the map clutched in his sweaty hands, grinned and said, “We’re here!”

Where’s “here,” Tom thought to himself as they exited the truck. The woods surrounding them were pitch black and silent, save the loud crickets that seemed to be everywhere. Tom followed Bill as he plunged into the old growth forest, the trees wider and taller than anything he had seen before. The ground rose up steeply before them, and all the beer Tom had consumed that night quickly perspired from his body. He was now totally sober, wondering what in the world they were doing out there.

Panting and exhausted, Tom rested against a tree. After a few minutes passed, he noticed that Bill’s flashlight beam had disappeared. He called out Bill’s name, but only the crickets answered him. “Bill?” he called out again, but there was still no answer. Now worried, Tom cried out as loud as he could, “Bill!!” Bill’s faint voice drifted back from somewhere in the darkness. “Hey, man! I’m over here! Look over…” “YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!! ”

Tom ran frantically in the direction of Bill’s screams, his flashlight beam bouncing off the ominous trees. He screamed his friend’s name over and over, but only the mocking crickets called back. Then his flashlight beam cut across a small cloud of dust floating in the distance. He ran in that direction, only to suddenly freeze in his tracks, his eyes widening. A few inches from his feet was a yawning black hole, leading straight down into black, uncharted darkness.

“Tom, you up there?” screamed Bill hoarsely from somewhere in the dark depths.

Tom pointed his flashlight into the hole, revealing a rocky pit nearly fifty feet deep. Bill looked up at him from the bottom, a bleeding gash on his face, but he was standing. He then gave Tom and boyish grin and said, “Look here what I found.”

Bill turned on his light, and Tom could see that he was standing in some sort of cavern entrance, with numerous holes in the walls leading God-knows-where. In the dancing beam, he could also see eerie paintings on the walls – pictures of the universe, of animals, of warrior figures and strange tribal masks. On the ground beside Bill’s feet, Tom swore he saw a human skull buried below the nose in red clay.

But it was what he saw next that made his jaw drop. Sparkling in Bill’s flashlight beam was a dirty burlap sac, filled with gold coins! Bill looked up at Tom and grinned. “What do ya’ know,” he said, “the Injun was right!”

They wasted no time hauling the bag of gold out of the pit and running back through the woods. Bill had sprained his ankle slightly in the fall, but that didn’t stop him from making a beeline toward the truck. And as they roared back to town, they whooped and hollered out the open windows, listing all the things that gold was going to buy them – sports cars, motorcycles, beach houses, beautiful ladies. But they agreed that the first thing they would do is march right back to that bottling plant and tell their old boss to…well, you can imagine the rest.

Several days passed after their discovery, and Tom became concerned that he hadn’t heard anything from Bill since then. Tom’s phone calls to Bill’s home went unanswered, and nobody at Fat Daddy’s had seen him, which was very unusual. Had Bill left town with his share of the gold?

So one day, Tom drove over to Bill’s place to check up on him. Bill lived in an old trailer home on some barren and overgrown family farmland several miles out of town. He saw Bill’s truck in the driveway, went up to the door and knocked, but there was no answer. He then tried the doorknob, and was surprised when the door suddenly creaked open. Tom’s stomach turned as he was greeted by an awful smell, worse than any barn or latrine he’d ever run across. Covering his nose and mouth, he walked cautiously into the trailer. He noticed a light burning in Bill’s bedroom. He walked over to the door and peaked inside.

What he saw next froze his blood. There was Bill lying on his soiled bed, horrifyingly thin, his eyes bulging out of his pale, skeletal face. Tom could see Bill’s exposed rib cage underneath his filthy shirt, heaving up and down with each pained breath.

“What happened to you?” Tom blurted out. But Bill didn’t answer. “Can you hear me?” Tom asked. Again, Bill didn’t answer, but instead rolled his eyes, as if directing Tom toward his bedside. Tom moved toward him and leaned close to Bill’s face. And in a painful, hoarse whisper that took every ounce of his strength, Bill said:

“He…won’t…let…me…get…up.”

Tom grabbed Bill’s arm, but it wouldn’t move, as if it were super-glued to the bed. He tried his other arm and his legs, but still he wouldn’t budge. Tom knew that Bill was too frail to resist him. Something else was holding Bill on the bed – something powerful and invisible.

Tom lunged for the phone to call for help, but it was dead. Frantic, he ran into the kitchen, heated up a bowl of canned soup, then brought it to Bill’s bedside with a glass of water. But Bill spit up everything Tom tried to put in his mouth, his eyes deliriously rolling back in his head. As Tom watched his friend suffer, his mind suddenly crossed that line between the real and the surreal. That moment when you finally realize you don’t really know everything about how this world operates, and anything is possible. So without thinking, Tom grabbed Bill’s share of Chief Sawnee’s gold, still sitting in the burlap sack in the closet. He then rushed home, grabbed his share, and sped back up into the hills. Past the “Boiled P-Nut” stand, down the old hunting road, through the creepy, old growth forest, and up to the edge of the deep pit. And with tears in his eyes, he called out to the skeletal remains below: “I’m givin’ you your gold back, Chief Sawnee! I don’t need it, and I’m sorry I took it! I’ll never bother you again. Just please let my friend go – please! He’s my only friend in the world! And that’s the only thing that matters to me! I swear!”

And with those words, he tossed the bags of gold coins back into the pit. Then using his bare hands, he shoveled dirt, rocks, branches, anything he could find over the hole, so no one else would ever find it. He then bolted back to his truck and sped back towards town.

Tom knew he had to find a phone fast, and the closest one was at Fat Daddy’s a few miles away. The sun was quickly setting over the hills, and he knew that Bill didn’t have much more time. Tom knew he’d get strange looks wandering into the bar with his filthy clothes and cut, bleeding hands, but he would find a way to explain it later.

When Tom finally roared into the Fat Daddy’s parking lot around ten o’ clock, he was surprised to find it empty. The lot was usually full on a Saturday night – maybe they closed early, Tom thought fearfully. Tom was relieved to find the door unlocked. He ran inside and found it dark and empty. He ran behind the bar, grabbed the phone, and dialed Bill’s sister in a neighboring town. She picked up her cell phone after one ring. “Bill’s been rushed to the hospital,” she said in a panicked voice. “He called me a few hours ago and said he couldn’t get out of bed. The doctor says he’s lucky to be alive. Now I’m trying to get Mom on the phone. He looked awful, Tom. What happened to him? Do you know?”

Tom couldn’t answer, but the news of Bill’s condition sent waves of relief through him. He assured her that he would head straight to the hospital, then hung up the phone.

“You’ve been up to Chief Sawnee’s cave, haven’t you?” said a sudden voice from the darkness.

Tom nearly leapt out of his skin. Sitting at the bar was old “Chief B.S.,” nursing a beer.

“What do you know about it?” was all Tom could say.

The Chief took a long, contemplative swig of beer, stared at Tom with his piercing eyes, then said in a voice that seemed deeper and older than the one Tom had heard so often: “That gold isn’t going to do me no good. You’re welcome to it. But I told you to accept it with a good heart. That’s all I ask. Now use it that way. Or I’ll come back to see you again.”

With that, the Chief polished off his beer and strolled leisurely out the door. Tom looked at the Chief’s bar stool. Sitting there was the dirty burlap sack of gold coins that Tom had thrown into the pit hours earlier. Tom could hardly believe his eyes. He then charged out the door to find the Chief. But only the stiff evening breeze rolling off the North Georgia mountains greeted him. The Chief had vanished into the night.

And in the years that followed, as Tom and Bill both married and finally settled down, Chief B.S. – or Chief Sawnee, as they called him to anyone who would listen to their crazy stories – was never seen in those parts again.

- THE END -

Story Credits | Story Background

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Written by David Hirt

Now I know what my Pap used to say: “You take care what’s you wish Fer, ’cause you just may git it.” And that happened to the old blacksmith here-a-bouts in Stone Mountain, Georgia – a man named Lon.

My story also got in it the old witch woman of Stone Mountain. Not too many people know about her, but she lived here. Down the end of Poplar Springs Road where the old city swimming pool used to be (but it was way back before then), she made salves and poultices to help the sick and weary to get better. Why she could birth a baby or lay out the dead, didn’t matter to her.

Well, one day she come into ol’ Lon’s blacksmith’s shop looking to have her big old boilin’ put fixed. Seems a leg had broke off.

Now lemme tell you – Lon was no pillar of society. He drank, gambled, and there are some who say they heard him swear on the Sabbath. But he did have a mighty respect of the old witch woman. He knowed she could kilt him dead ift she wanted to. He fixed that pot in jack time and wouldn’t take no pay for it. So the old lady said she would grant him three wishes whenever he wanted, and he knew she was telling the truth. Right then she started her chant: “This old woman taken nothing for free. I’ll grant you wishes, I’ll grant you three.”

Lon knowed he better make up his mind a-’cause she wouldn’t leave ’til he did make his wishes. So he started to think real hard about his first wish. Well, seems Lon didn’t like to lend out his tools. And some folks had come to his shop and in their messin’ around had lost some of his tools – and a working man’s tools of his trade are his life. So for his first wish he asked the old woman to make it so’s any time anybody touched one of his tools, it’d stick to ‘em like glue. ‘Til he could come ’round and take it out’n their hand. That way he’d know who was messin’ with his tools and he could fix-’em good.

The old woman said. “It is done. Now what be ye second wish?”

Now you gotta know that Lon just loved to take him a jug and sit on the front porch of his house and drink ’til the sun went down. But somebody’s always a-moving his chair, and he’s always havin’ to pull it back up on the porch. So he wanted it fixed that if’n somebody sat in his chair they would be trapped there ’til he could see who it was. With a nod the old woman said it was done.

Now for his third wish, Lon did some real thinking. He was like the rest of us – make a penny, spend a dime. So’s he was always out of money and always a-needin’ more. He asked the old woman to fix up his change purse so that’d when he put in money it wouldn’t come out ’til he said so. In other words, make him think a’fore he spent it. And that wish was granted same as the rest.

With that, the old lady seen her debt paid to the blacksmith and she up and left. Lon was glad to see she was gone and he was stIll standin’ upright like a man, and hadn’t been turned into a pig or something. But he soon forgot about his wishes, what with all his drinking, and cussin’ and what little work he’d been doin’.

Then one day right in the middle of the hottest day on record, this man walked into Lon’s shop a’wearing all black clothes and a big old heavy wool coat. Lon thought that feller was a fool for bein’ so fully dressed on such a hot day – ’til he looked right in that man’s eyes. They was yeller like a dog’s eye, and they sortly shined like a cat’s eye. And it was right then and there he knowed he was lookin’ Into the eyes of Beelzebub, the prince of darkness, the Devil his self, and he was a standin’ right there in Lon’s blacksmith shed.

The Devil talked to Lon in a voice that sounded like rumbling Thunder: “Lon,” he said, “you know why I am here. It is time to go, and your soul is mine.” Now ol’ Lon knowed where he was headed, and he didn’t like it non-to-well. Why, going with the Devil would put him – well, you know. Lon looked at the Devil and asked if he could finish up on the job he was a-doin’ – plow head needed sharpenin’. The Devil agreed and Lon asked the Devil to hand him that 8-pound sledgehammer to finish up the work.

When the Devil grabbed a holt of that hammer, his hand locked tight around the handle and he couldn’t set it down. And the Devil went to cussin’ and spittin’ and shakin’and jumpin’, for he couldn’t take nothing from this world back to his world ‘ceptin’ a mortal soul. To put it plain like, the Devil was stuck, and both him and Lon knowed it.

With a grin on his face Lon told the Devil he was ready to make a deal. Now you got to know dealin’ with the Devil is mighty scary, but ol’ Lon knowed he would win this ‘un. It were a simple deal: “Mr. Devil, I’ll git that hammer out’n your hand if y’all leave me be here on Earth and gimme 10 more years of livin’.”

The Devil knowed when he had been skinned, and by a mortal as dumb as Lon no less, so he agreed. Lon took back his hammer, and with puff a smoke and smell that was none too kind, the Devil was gone.

Well, now I want yu’ns to know that 10 years to the day, the Devil strood back into Lon’s shop like he owned the place, and slapped his hand down on a barrel head and told Lon, “Son, it time to be goin’ and none of your foolishness. Stop what you are doing and come with me.”

Lon knowed he had no choices, so he quietly laid down his tools and followed the Devil out of his shop. But he stopped at the door and said, “Mr. Devil, I am going make a mighty long journey and I know I goin’ to run into people I know down there. I was wonderin’ if’n I could stop by my house and wash up a’fore we go?”

Well, the Devil put his mind to it and thought and then said, surely it would be all right for Lon to stop by his place, for it was on the way anyhow. It was a short walk to Lon’s house, and when they got there Lon started in to wash up and told the Devil to have a seat right there in his old rockin’ chair. Rest a bit for that long journey. Well, no sooner had the Devil sit down that he knowed he was in trouble. He was jammed, stuck tight to that chair. Couldn’ move. And the Devil went to cussin’ and spittin’ and shakin’ and jumpin’, fer he knowed that one more time, he had been took by a mortal. In time, another deal was made. And the Devil were allowed out’n the Chair, and he give Lon another 10 year. And with a puff a smoke and a smell that was none too nice, the Devil was gone.

The next 10 years of Lon’s life went by real fast. Like it was but a minute and the next thing ol’ Lon knowed was that the Devil was in his shop and in his face a’foamin’ at the mouth telling Lon it were time to go. “No more tricks Lon, no more jobs to finish or stops to freshen up – nothing. Now pack up and let’s go right now.” And with that the Devil took Lon by the arm and out the door they went.

They had been on their journey when Lon noted he were thirsty and the Devil agreed he was too. Lon said he knowed a place where he could get a “cold drank,” but he turned his pockets out to show the Devil he were broke flatter than Hassle’s bustle. But Lon had a plan. He look at the Devil and said, “Sir, I know how powerful ya’ are and I know you can be anything you need to be to steal a man’s mortal soul. And I got an idee.” Lon explained to the Devil that if’n he were to change into two thin dimes, Lon could go in and by’em each a “cold drank.” And soon as he left the place with them dranks the Devil could change into a butterfly or moth and fly outta that change drawer in the store and come outside to where Lon would be a’watin’. Then they’d have their “cold dranks” and be on their way.

Now the Devil liked this Idee. He could show off his powers, skin a mortal outa some of his due and still take a soul to the underworld. So with a blink he changed into two thin dimes and into Lon’s change purse he went. And as soon has he were in there he knowed, one more time, Lon had tricked him, and for a third time. Now if that ain’t sump’in. Well, the ol’ Devil went to cussin’ and spittin’ and shakin’ and jumpin’, but they was no way he were gonna git out of Lon’s change purse, lesson Lon wanted him out. And Lon weren’t about to take that chance. Lon figured if’n the Devil ever was to get loose he would bring down the wrath on ol’ Lon. So the Devil was forever to stay in that there change purse.

Well, don’cha know that Lon was sooner or later bound to die of natural Causes. Many folks’round here said it was drinkin’. So Lon presents himself to the gates of Heaven and Saint Peter won’t even talk to him. For he had the Devil in his pocket. So then he presents hisself to the gates of Hell, and the harpies can’t lot him in. Fer this is the man what snookered the Devil three times in a row, and they’d need special permission from the boss and he weren’t no wheres to be found. So ol’ Lon is to this day stuck sommers ‘tween Heaven and – you know – down there.

But they’s folks says that you kin see Lon to this day. You know how on a summers night you see lightening but don’t hear no thunder? They call it “heat lightening.” Well, some says that’s just of’ Lon twix Heaven and wherever, with the Devil in his pocket just a’ cussin’ and spittin’ and shakin’ and jumpin’ fer to get out of that change purse.

Now I don’t rightly know, but I tell ya one thang: That’s my story and I stickin’ to it.

- THE END -

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Written by Wendy Webb

Shhh…do you hear that? The sound of footsteps. Not human footsteps, but something that only walks at night, and visits you in places where you ought not to be – like graveyards. You can hear them sometimes snuffling when you get too close to the graves of their loved ones, or whining. You especially don’t want to stay when you hear the growling. And if they decide to let you see them, you never want to look into their glowing red eyes. ‘Cause that’s when they get you – the dogs. Graveyard dogs.

Joseph Blakely had been scared by that story all his life, and wondered if it had, in fact, come from Widow Morris. He never forgot it, or her. She lived way on the top of a hill in an old house. Some said it was a haunted house. But as Joseph Blakely grew from a boy into a man of 14, he figured no self-respecting ghost would spend ten seconds in a house with that woman. It didn’t matter if it was a mean ghost, or a vindictive one – Widow Morris was meaner. It didn’t even matter if the ghost made an awful noise by moving furniture in the middle of the night – the widow was louder, stronger, and she rarely slept.

But as bad tempered as she was, she couldn’t compare to her live-in companion, the old goat. For that’s what he was – an old goat. He went by the name of Emerson. They were the kind ones who called him that. Others used names that Joseph Blakely couldn’t repeat, even though the seat of his britches carried many mendings, thanks to Emerson’s difficult disposition.

You see, Joseph Blakely had made it his life’s work to bother the widow and her old goat. He couldn’t explain why he had to do it, and even if he wanted to, he couldn’t stop himself. So whenever an idea popped into his head, he acted on it.

Like the time he smelled the blackberry pie and followed his nose to the windowsill, figuring if the widow had no intentions of sharing that pie, why, she wouldn’t have put it there in the first place. He had barely stuck his finger through the warm crust when Emerson appeared, beard twitching and yellow teeth bared. And then came the widow with a broom she used to swat Joseph all the way back to town.

And he’d never forget the time he dashed up the steps in the dark of night to throw a rock through the widow’s window. But since he forgot the incantation for protection, it was no wonder he didn’t get her goat – but rather, her goat got him. Until her broom sent him running for cover behind a stand of old oaks.

And maybe it was a trick of the moonlight, but with red eyes as big as those of an owl, the widow stared into the night and spoke words that still send a shiver down his spine:

“I’ll get you for this, Joseph Blakely. You know I will.”

And still the bothering kept coming, with plans for even more. But as plans have a way of doing, they went astray two months later, when word came that the widow and the old goat had passed away. So Joseph decided he would just have to see her grave for himself. Only then could he let the plans in his mind rest.

One very dark night, he set out for the graveyard. He paid little mind to the idea of Graveyard Dogs, since it was a story that scared little boys – not a man of 14 like himself. But to be on the safe side, he had practiced the incantation all day. Nothing could get him now.

With lit torch, he peered from one grave to another until he found the one of the widow. Next to her was a stone that said simply: “Emerson.”

“Well I’ll be,” he said, “she’s even buried next to the old goat.”

Suddenly, a snuffling sound came out from behind the headstone. Was that a Graveyard Dog? So following the incantation, he whirled once and whispered, “Be gone.” Then came the whine. “Be gone,” he said, whirling a second time.

And then he heard the growl.

Don’t look into the eyes, because that’s when they get you! So Joseph Blakely did what any young man with a lick of sense would do. He dropped his lit torch and ran screaming from the graveyard.

A hand reached out to pick up the torch. And the voice that made the snuffling and the whine let loose with a girlish giggle. For Widow Morris knew that, one day, she would get Joseph Blakely just as she promised. And just as she planned from the day when she, in fact, first told the story.

“That growl was perfect, Emerson,” she said. “Emerson?”

But the old goat was gone. It seemed he had done what any goat with a lick of sense would do when something was strange, and hightailed it out of the graveyard.

It was then she heard a different kind of growl. And when the Graveyard Dog chose to let her see it, she made the mistake of looking into its glowing red eyes.

In every story, there’s a grain of truth – and the opportunity for a lick of sense. So no matter what you hear in a graveyard on a very dark night…

…Watch out for those eyes.

- THE END -

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Written by Craig Dominey

Have you ever heard someone use the expression, “My life flashed before my eyes”? People use it so much it’s become a cliche’. But such a thing really happened to me. Although it wasn’t my life that I saw.

When I was a young man growing up in Chattanooga, Tennessee, I was dating a girl named Melissa. She lived just over the state line in the small town of Lafayette, Georgia. When this incident happened, I’d only been seeing her for a couple of months, so I was still trying to impress her as best I could. So you can imagine my anxiety one Friday night – the night of a big date I’d been planning for days – when my car broke down right after I’d gotten off work. I kicked the tires so hard I almost broke my foot!

Well, I frantically located my big brother and coaxed him into letting me borrow his old beat up truck. Sure, it wasn’t the fancy chariot Melissa was expecting me to show up in. But all I cared about was finding four wheels that could take me straight to Lafayette – via Chickamauga Battlefield.

Now if you’ve never heard of Chickamauga – think of it as the Gettysburg of Georgia, but bigger. Chickamauga is actually an Indian word meaning “River of Death.” And it lived up to its name during the Civil War when a bloody battle was fought there. The Yankees were trying to capture Chattanooga, which was a major rail center at the time. The Rebels drove them back, but not before nearly 40,000 soldiers died.

Of course, the history behind the battlefield wasn’t important to me that night. What was important was getting to Melissa’s house, and I was already over an hour late. So I knew the quickest way to get there was the two-lane road that cut straight through the heart of the battlefield.

As I gunned my brother’s truck over the state line, a hard rain that had been falling all day was tapering off. But it left behind a thick and eerie mist that crept through the open battlefield like ghostly fingers. The park had closed for the night, and there were no cars in sight. The road was almost impossible to see. But I had used this park as a short cut a million times before, and knew it like the back of my hand.

As I was driving down the main road, I noticed the faint headlights of a car approaching in the distance. For a split second, I wondered if this was someone just like me, late for an important date with a Georgia beauty. I could only hope he saw me in the swirling mist between us.

But as the car drew closer, I noticed it was unlike any vehicle I had seen before. The headlights appeared to be a strange greenish color. I knew a thing or two about cars, but I’d never seen headlights like that. Maybe they helped the driver see in bad weather conditions, I thought.

The car drew closer and closer, and those green lights were burning at a wattage I’d never seen from any headlight. And they seemed to bounce up and down, and weave from side to side, as if the car was riding on springs. I politely tapped my horn, hoping the driver could see me in front of him.

But as the mystery car got closer and closer, the driver appeared to swerve further into my lane. This time I laid on the horn – what’s wrong with this guy, I thought, is he drunk? Then I saw something that really shook me. There were no beams shooting out of those green lights – they looked like two floating orbs, powered by some other source. They even looked like…eyes.

I frantically blared my horn again as the green lights drew near. And just before we passed each other, the driver suddenly swerved into my lane! I reacted quickly, spinning the wheel the opposite way. My truck flew off the road and onto the battlefield grounds, swallowed by darkness. I slammed into a tree, and the world turned black.

When I came to a few moments later, the battlefield was silent, save the hissing sound coming from the crushed hood of the truck. My headlights were smashed, and the only light was from the bright stars above. I felt the large bump on my head and groaned.

It was then I saw the green lights again, sitting silently in the darkness, observing me. I watched as the lights floated closer and closer toward my vehicle. In the silence, I could hear no car engine sputtering toward me. It couldn’t be a car that I had seen. But what was it?

Suddenly the lights disappeared. I began to tremble with fear for the first time. “Who’s out there?” I called out, but no one answered. I then heard a rustling sound against my car. I peered out the window, and in the darkness I could just make out a large shadowy figure circling me. I thought it was a large man, for it shuffled about on two legs. But as my eyes adjusted, I could see that it’s hair was long, right down to the waist. And it made a horrible moaning sound, the saddest sound I’d ever heard.

Just like that, the figure disappeared, and the night was quiet again. “Is anyone out there?” I yelled, but there was still no answer. After a long pause, I slowly reached for the door handle with shaking fingers.

Then something pounced onto the hood of my truck. I looked out the cracked windshield, and what I saw was no man. It was a beast, with long dirty hair and huge, mangled jaws from which two long, sharp fangs jutted out. And it had two burning green eyes, fueled by some otherworldy evil I couldn’t begin to comprehend.

I tried to scream but found myself mute, hypnotized by those green eyes. And as the creature and I stared at each other in silence, the battlefield began to transform around us. The darkness gave way to a strange green glow. There was no road, no cars and no monuments. Instead, I was surrounded by smoke, fire, scorched grass and the charred remains of warfare. The sickening stench of burning flesh filled my nostrils. At my feet were piles of bodies in blue and grey unforms, drenched equally in blood. Some were missing arms, others legs. There were heads without bodies, their eyes shut tightly as if afraid of their ultimate fate. And everywhere were the low and agonizing moans of pain and death, filling the skies along with the black smoke in a hellish symphony.

Suddenly, a curtain of darkness fell down on the battlefield. I could hear a car horn behind me. The creature leapt off my hood and disappeared into the night. It was then I realized I was back in the wrecked truck. A couple of rangers ran down the hillside to my aid. “Are you alright?” they asked.

“Did you see that animal that attacked me?” I asked them breathlessly. “The one with the green eyes?”

The two rangers looked at me strangely. “That’s a serious bump you got on your head, son,” they answered. “You must be seein’ things.”

“But something jumped on my truck,” I yelped. “I saw it!”

But the rangers never found evidence of any creature. Even when daylight broke, and my truck was towed away, not a single animal print could be found. And I soon gave up my argument about the creature, fearing that people would think I was crazy.

Believe it or not, in later years I ended up becoming a park ranger myself at Chickamauga Battlefield. The area was no longer just a shortcut between Chattanooga and Lafayette. To me it was hollowed ground, from which I could point out every military maneuver, every act of bravery, and every tragic defeat.

But as time passed, other folks insisted that they, too, had spotted the mysterious “Green Eyes” while driving through the park at night. And they would ask me what I saw that fateful night as a teenage boy. You know what I told them? I would say that what I encountered that night was no monster, but the shadow of death that creeps around every town, alleyway and battlefield where men go to war – and will keep doing so as a reminder of our tragic mistakes.

- THE END -

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Written by Craig Dominey

They say there are places on this planet which have seen such tragedy and sorrow that they are forever cursed. It’s as if the earth itself holds some dark supernatural force beyond our understanding. A few years ago, I found such a cursed place just a few miles west of Atlanta, Georgia – a tiny hamlet called New Hope. And even though many people don’t believe the story I’m about to tell, my visit there haunts my dreams to this day.

At one time, I was a 35-year-old small business owner living in a tiny town in rural Virginia. This town was so tiny and remote that it took us several years to finally discover a brand new invention that was already revolutionizing the world – the Internet. But once I was online, I quickly left my nine to five job and went into business for myself in the new “dot com” economy.

I didn’t have a brilliant business mind, but my father, a rabid Civil War enthusiast, had taught me to do one thing very well – hunt for Civil War artifacts. Bullets, belt buckles, coins, uniform buttons – the Virginia battlefields were full of them. So I quickly opened up my own Web site hawking Civil War memorabilia at high prices.

I’m a bit ashamed to admit it now, but profit was much more important to me in those days than respect for the dead. It didn’t matter to me if a battlefield was located on protected land or not. Under cover of darkness, I would sneak onto the property with my shovel and trusty metal detector, and would steal away as many artifacts as I could find. But it wasn’t long before other relic hunters got in on the act, and competition became fierce. Verbal threats and fistfights became common amongst rival hunters, and I knew it was time to hunt for relics elsewhere.

I remembered studying about Union General William T. Sherman’s devastating “March to the Sea” in Georgia, and figured that somewhere along that long path from Chattanooga, Tennessee, down through Atlanta, and south to Savannah there must be a treasure trove of artifacts. So that spring, I hopped in my truck and drove south to Georgia to see what I could find.

I was especially interested in a small town located near the Pickett’s Mill Battlefield called New Hope. It was here that one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War took place. And to understand my story, you must understand the carnage that took place there.

It was May 1864, and General Sherman had begun his relentless march toward Atlanta. His men were hungry and battle weary, but knew that to destroy Atlanta would mean destroying the heart of the Confederacy and finally bringing an end to this horrible war. Standing in Sherman’s way was a stubborn Confederate Army led by Joe Johnston. Johnston’s men resisted the Union onslaught, forcing Sherman into flanking maneuvers. But like a bloody chess game, Johnston countered each of Sherman’s moves, slamming his army into the Union forces day after day.

It was during one of these flanking maneuvers that Sherman’s men marched into the area of New Hope Church. What they didn’t know was that Confederate forces were lying in wait with sixteen cannons and some 5,000 men. As the Union troops struggled through the thick underbrush into the clearing, they were suddenly hit by a vicious firestorm of artillery. Confederate guns and cannons blasted away at them from behind makeshift log walls. The Union soldiers were sitting ducks.

As the battle raged on, legend has it that a vicious thunderstorm blew into the area – a storm unlike anything the men had ever seen. The skies turned black as night. Lightning flashed and thunder boomed around the battlefield, sometimes drowning out the relentless artillery barrage. Wounded Union soldiers desperately crawled through the torrential rain into a ravine to escape certain death from the Confederate guns. And it was said that, even with the storm and battle raging around them, one could still hear the agonizing moans of the wounded soldiers rising from the ravine.From that day forward, the Union troops gave a new name to the ravine near New Hope Church – “Hell Hole.”

Like other battlefields, New Hope was rumored to be haunted. It had a reputation amongst learned Civil War historians as being a creepy and unsettling place. But I had heard plenty of ghost stories about the battlefields in Virginia, and they had never stopped me before.

I drove into the town of New Hope just before sundown. It wasn’t as much a town as it was a country intersection, with a small auto repair shop, a couple of churches and a cemetery. But the historical markers lining the road betrayed its bloody past. I reasoned that the Confederate battle lines must have been spread out across the area where the cemetery now stood. There was a heavily wooded area beyond the graveyard that I reasoned must have been the location of the “Hell-Hole.” I spotted several homes on the other side of the woods, and decided to wait until nightfall to begin digging.

I parked across the street behind one of the churches and waited. An hour later, I was blessed with a beautiful, clear night sky and a full moon. As I crept through the cemetery with my equipment, I noticed that the tombstones seemed to reflect an eerie white light from the bright moon above. More fainthearted relic hunters might have turned back at that point, but not me.I reached the woods and soon found myself struggling through a thick jungle of thorn bushes, vines and trees. For a brief moment, I thought about what it must have been like to have been a solider back then, already weary and hungry and now having to fight your way through this hellish Georgia forest. But then my thoughts drifted back to the business at hand.

The ground suddenly sloped downward, and I figured I was on the lip of the ravine. Since I was now totally enveloped in the forest, I figured it was safe to use my flashlight. Shining it around the ravine, my heart sank. Some of the residents were now using the ravine as a garbage dump. There was plenty of scrap metal scattered about, including a rusted old car. But I had come this far, so I was going to at least give the place a try.I crept down into the ravine, chose an area that seemed the least polluted, and began clearing away some of the garbage. Once that was done, I swept the area with my metal detector and picked up plenty of readings. Whether or not this was from buried garbage I did not know, but I soon began digging in earnest.

In fact, I was so intent on my digging that I didn’t notice a strange noise – heavy raindrops plopping onto the thick canopy of leaves above. This seemed impossible to me, as the skies were beautifully clear just a few minutes before. But as the raindrops fell harder, I looked up into the sky and saw that a sudden storm front had blackened out the stars and moon, leaving me in total darkness.

A jarring blast of thunder shook the forest, and I quickly moved into the only shelter I could find – the inside of the junked car. I didn’t want to run out of the woods and be caught, and I hoped this was one of those hit and miss thunderstorms so prevalent in Georgia. But the storm grew louder and more intense, the booming thunder shaking the earth, and the torrential rain drenching everything, even through the thick trees.

It was then that I heard it – a low moan drifting out of the bottom of the ravine. At first I thought it must be some wounded animal, or perhaps a dog lost in the storm. But as it grew louder and louder, I realized the voice was definitely human. Soon other agonizing moans could be heard, seemingly feeding off the horrifying thunder crashing around me.Then I smelled a repugnant odor that I can only describe as the smell of rotted flesh. It must be from a dead animal, I thought, desperately trying to rationalize what I was experiencing. But the odor seemed to grow stronger and stronger as the moans grew louder.

A bolt of lightning suddenly illuminated the forest, and in that brief second I swore I saw a shadow darting though the woods – a human shadow. As the storm reached its crescendo, the intense lightning lit the forest like some harsh florescent light, the gnarled trees taking on odd and terrifying shapes. My blood ran cold as I spotted more of these shadows darting amongst the trees, as if fleeing in terror from the storm. And in the bright flashes of lightning, I began to notice details on the shadows – a military cap here, a rifle or bayonet there. They could only be one thing – soldiers.

But the worst was yet to come. The temperature seemed to drop twenty degrees around me, and I was hit with the most sick and agonizing feeling I had ever felt. I can only describe it as a feeling of devastating loss and pain, as if I had learned that my entire family had suddenly died at the same time. I couldn’t take it anymore – I kicked the car door open and hopped out into the storm. Then I was hit with a debilitating feeling of exhaustion that raced through my whole body, as if I had walked a hundred miles. I left all my equipment behind and desperately clawed and sputtered through the rain-drenched forest until the cemetery was finally in sight.

As I burst free of the forest, the storm inexplicably stopped. The clouds blew away, and I found myself standing in the midst of the glowing white tombstones. I had seen enough – I crossed the street and ran back to my car, only to spot the silhouette of a man standing beside it, peering into the windows. I stood frozen in my tracks until he yelled out in a warm, inviting Georgia drawl, “Hello there! I was getting worried about you!”It was the minister of the church. He had come out to check the building after the storm, and had discovered my car. Road maps and Civil War books scattered across the seats had betrayed me as the tourist I was.

I tried to avoid telling him what I was doing in New Hope by commenting on the thunderstorm that had passed, and how I had never experienced such a ferocious storm. The minister chuckled and replied, “Yeah, we seem to get them this time of year, especially on this date. Some folks think this place is haunted, but I don’t believe in such things.”

My blood suddenly ran cold, and I heard myself ask him, “What’s so special about today?”

The minister cocked an eyebrow at me and grinned. “Well, from all them Civil War books in your car, I thought you’d know. Today’s May 26th – the Battle of New Hope was fought 136 years ago today.” And that’s my story of the Hell Hole.

- THE END -

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Collected by Joel Chandler Harris.  Adapted by Akbar Imhotep with Craig Dominey

Now, does everyone know what a raccoon is? Ol’ banded eyes with the rings around his tail? Well, in this story, we’re not gonna call him Brer Raccoon. We’re not gonna call him Brer Banded Eyes. You know what we’re gonna call him? Brer Coon.

You see, ol’ Brer Coon and Brer Rabbit were friends. They were also fishermen – that is, Brer Rabbit, he fished for fish, and Brer Coon, he fished for frogs. Now, what happened was that, one day, them ol’ frogs got so wild that Brer Coon couldn’t catch any of ‘em. And when this happened, Brer Coon had some problems back at the household. You know why? Well, when he couldn’t catch any frogs, he didn’t have any frog meat to bring home. All the little Coon children got a little bit hungry – and when all the little Coon children got a little bit hungry, the little Coon wife got a little bit mad. And Brer Coon felt real, real sad about that.

So, one day, ol’ Brer Coon was walking slowly down toward the river, feeling so sad that his chin was about to drag the ground, when he ran into his good friend, Brer Rabbit. Ol’ Rabbit saw Brer Coon looking all sad and miserable, and he said, “Brer Coon! What’s the matter with you? What’s your situation?”

Brer Coon said, “Brer Rabbit, I got problems. You see them ol’ frogs out there in that river? They’ve gotten so wild that I can’t catch none of ‘em! And I just feel so sad.”

Well, Brer Rabbit looked down at the river, and he saw the frogs out there just having a good ol’ time, splashing around, jumping in and out of the river. So he turned to his friend and said, “You know what, Brer Coon? I’m gonna help you catch every last one of them ol’ frogs.”

Brer Coon suddenly got all excited and said, “Okay, Brer Rabbit, let’s go! What you want me to do?”

Brer Rabbit said, “Coon, go down to the sandbar and lay down just like you was dead.”

Brer Coon looked at him funny and said, “Lay down like I’m dead? What good’s that gonna do?”

Brer Rabbit said, “Never you mind – just go out there and lay down like you was d-e-a-d, dead!”

Well, ol’ Brer Coon moseyed on down to the sandbar. And when the frogs heard Brer Coon comin’, the Big Frog yelled out to his friends, “Y’all better look out! Here comes that ol’ Coon again!”

And all the frogs hopped out of the river to hide from Brer Coon. Brer Coon went ahead and laid down in the sand. After he’d been lying there for a while, Brer Rabbit came down to the river and hollered out to the Frogs, “Hey, y’all! This ol’ coon is dead!”

The Big Frog peeked out from his hiding place and said to his fellow frogs, “I don’t believe it. No sir, I don’t believe it.”

Brer Rabbit sat down on the sand next to his friend Brer Coon and bowed his head like he was in mourning. The frogs saw this and moved in closer and closer. Brer Coon wasn’t moving a muscle. Whenever a fly would land on Brer Coon’s nose, Brer Rabbit would brush it off.

So all the frogs eventually hopped up on the sandbar and gathered around Brer Coon. Once they all saw that Brer Coon was dead, they started hopping up and down with excitement. Brer Rabbit turned to them and said, “You know, if I was you frogs, you know what I’d do? I’d dig a hole for this coon so deep that he’d never get out!”

The Big Frog heartily chuckled and said, “Hey, that’s a good idea. How we gonna do it?”

Brer Rabbit said, “Dig the sand out from under him and let him down in the hole.”

So the frogs went and got their little frog shovels. Then they came back to the sandbar and started digging a hole right around where Brer Coon was laying, with that ol’ coon smack dab in the middle of it.

After they had been digging a while, the Big Frog stopped everybody from digging and called up to Brer Rabbit. “Is it deep enough?” he hollered.

Brer Rabbit screamed back, “Can you get out?”

The Big Frog looked around him and shouted back, “Yes, we can! Yes, we can!”

“Then it ain’t deep enough! ” yelled Brer Rabbit. “You gotta dig it deeper!”

So the frogs went back to work. This time, they dug it real, real, real, real, real deep. The Big Frog stopped everyone again and said, “This hole should be deep enough by now. Let’s see what that ol’ rabbit has to say.” So he called up to Brer Rabbit again. “Is it deep enough?”

Brer Rabbit screamed back, “Can you get out?”

The Big Frog looked around him and shouted back, “No, we can’t! No, we can’t!”

Well, at this point, Brer Rabbit hollered down in the hole at his good friend, Brer Coon – “Brer Coon! Rise up and get your meat!”

And that ol’ Brer Coon opened up his big black eyes, saw them frogs hoppin’ around and started grabbin ‘em left and right! After a while, Brer Rabbit threw a sack down in the hole, and Brer Coon bagged the frogs up, took ‘em home, and they had enough Frog meet to last them a real long time.  After that, Brer Coon and his family were real, real happy.

And that’s how Brer Coon got his meat.

- THE END -

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