Little Sister Death (16 page)
But the Beales, as has been said, were an important family in Halifax County and young Jacob the most eminent bachelor, and when his heart bade him seek the hand of Becky Cotton he did so with the same unreserved determination that he used in his business pursuits, and all opposition fell before him, so that they were married in October of that year.
The Cottons were most gratified to welcome young Beale into the bosom of their family. They presented as a dowry a young Negro man named Vestal and a good stout Negress called Chloe, as well as several good head of livestock and sundry other items of value.
The newly married Beales built a house on a part of Henry Beale’s holdings, and for some twenty years Jacob continued his duties as overseer of the family lands, during which time he continued to prosper materially as well as other ways, nine children being born to him, six of whom survived: Jacob Jr., Elizabeth, Anne, Sewell, Drewry, and the baby, daughter Virginia, comely from birth and from all accounts the apple of Jacob’s eye. She was flaxenhaired and blue-eyed, named for the good Virginia soil that had so abetted her father’s continued enrichment.
Chloe, the slave woman, was extremely fertile as well, presenting him with eight children, all of whom lived and were healthy, eventually maturing and breeding and adding to the wealth he was accumulating.
The only cloud on Mr. Beale’s horizon was that about 1830 his wife developed some type of female affliction that prevented the birth of further children, and from all accounts prevented the Beales from having a normal husband-and-wife relationship.
He was a most thrifty man, extremely close with his money, so that it surprised many when he bought a parcel of land in Tennessee and prepared to move, but he did so in the face of malicious rumors that surfaced and were spread. There had been hints of heinous deeds, most certainly unfounded and probably born out of the jealousy the deprived must feel for those who gather about them effortlessly the trappings of material wealth, and one need only peruse the affidavits signed by the men who knew Jacob Beale in his lifetime and witnessed his persecution at the hands of the Haunt to recognize immediately the forthrightness and candor of his nature.
The most persistent of these innuendoes made reference to a scandal involving an itinerant traveling preacher and his young sister. This preacher was a worshiper of the serpents he used in his services and his sister, possessing an affinity for the snakes, tended them. In the fall of 1837 the preacher came to Halifax County and, for a sum of money, was allowed to set up his tent on the Beale land.
Within the week the nude body of the young girl was found in the woods near the Beale holdings, strangled and assaulted in a manner whose description would appeal only to the prurient. Probably for reasons of blackmail, the preacher accused Jacob Beale, claiming that he had seen his little sister strolling into the woods with Beale a day or two before the body was discovered. He went so far as to swear out warrants and cause them to be served, but before the matter could be brought before a grand jury the preacher himself disappeared, most everyone supposing that he had grown afraid of the consequences when his ruse was discovered, others assuming that he might have committed the atrocious act himself.
However base and unfounded these stories might have been, they could be part of the reason he departed Virginia. For whatever reason, in 1838 he came to Tennessee and purchased a 1,600-acre tract of land in the Sinking Creek area of Limestone County, an area recently moved to by some of Mr. Beale’s friends. The house on the place was one of the best in the state at that time, being a large log dwelling two stories high and weatherboarded with cedar.
Immediately the Beales began to improve their new holdings, planting a large orchard between the road and the house and clearing the thick timber away for new grounds, the logs serving as building material for slavequarters and for other outbuildings, as well as a great barn that remains standing today, though the original house has been torn down and a larger one built some distance away.
In those days neighbors helped one another with their tasks, there being log rollings and barn raisings and cornhuskings. These communal endeavors, as well as attendance at church, which neared one hundred percent, served to engender a closeness among these people.
Jacob Beale almost immediately caused a schoolhouse to be built and hired a schoolteacher, paying the first year’s salary out of his own pocket. This alone should serve to refute the lies about Mr. Beale’s stinginess. Though he was sometimes harsh in his dealings and forthright in his needs, he was never less than honest, and during years when his neighbors failed to prosper, through bad luck or ill weather, he was not averse to loaning them money until their own conditions improved. Such improvement was not always the case, however, and over the years the Beale holdings increased due to defaulted notes and mortgages.
In these first years in Tennessee, before being afflicted by the Haunt, Mr. Beale entered into the spirit of the community, though he was of a stern and religious nature and not given to frivolities such as dancing and strong drink, which he thought of as sinful.
On the eve of the haunting, Virginia was fourteen and Elizabeth and Jacob Jr. were married, having become betrothed to members of the community and built their homes on one-hundred-acre tracts their father granted them. Life seemed to have fallen into a pattern of content, and Jacob Beale must have contemplated happily the tapestry that the loom of life was weaving for him; he would have been less than human had he not. He had a large, healthy family that had never hungered for food or shelter, sons and daughters who were marrying well, Elizabeth marrying a young sawmill owner named Zadok Kirk and Jacob Jr. taking as his bride Julia Primm, the daughter of the Baptist preacher Joseph Primm, who will recur in the narrative at a later time.
Drewry was at an impressionable age when the Haunting began, and he was so afflicted by the things he saw the Haunt do to his father and sister that he never married, living his entire life in the fear of the monster’s predicted return and never allowing during his lifetime the publications of any of his journals, though huge sums of money were offered by various national periodicals. Virginia Beale became known in the national press as the Queen of the Haunted Dell, and received worldwide attention in the press, as clippings from newspapers in London, England, attest.
As to the nature of the haunting, the phenomenon in question was referred to as the Haunt, for want of a better term. The Haunt was invariably called “she” owing to her feminine voice, notwithstanding the obscenities it spoke.
Life passed uneventfully for the first two or three years in Tennessee. Jacob Beale and his family were by all accounts well thought of and admired by their neighbors, and Jacob became an important factor in the local elections. Possessing a fine speaking voice and being a large, handsome man with a fine head of curly grey hair, he cut an impressive figure in his splittail coat and beaver hat when his many business dealings drew him to Memphis or Nashville.
At fourteen, pretty blueeyed Virginia Beale, or Ginny, was already sought after by local swain, one of her suitors being Thomas Campbell, the schoolteacher her father had hired. Another was Eulis Varner, a likable local boy of great promise. At the time their family trouble began (Drewry referring to it thusly in his journals), she was gay and carefree, nothing ahead of her but the unbroken serenity of her future, playing with her brothers and sister in the surrounding woods and learning by heart all the names of the birds and wildflowers, making pets of the rabbits and young deer with which the forest abounded, and secure in the love of a doting father.
One day Jacob walked over his fields to see how his crops were faring, as harvest time was nigh and the weather critical. He was walking across the field toward his overseer, Vestal, when he stopped to stare at an unusual black animal watching him from a corn middle. The animal looked like a dog, but of a breed Mr. Beale was not familiar with; it was high in the shoulders and had a long, snoutlike mouth.
He had his gun with him, the slaves having reported snakes about the place, and the peculiar fixity of the beast’s eyes so perturbed Mr. Beale that he aimed and fired. The dog appeared to fall but then vanished and left no trace.
Ginny claimed to have seen a woman strolling in the orchard, wringing her hands and crying, who beckoned to her and called her by name. Having no reason to suspect that the figure was other than flesh and blood, and possessed of a concern for the woman’s apparent grief, Ginny approached, only to see her vanish in the summer twilight.
Drewry shot at a great brown bird, a bird such as none of them had ever seen. It alighted one dusk in an enormous cedar with a great flapping of its wings, and it was of such a malevolent appearance that his first thought was to destroy it. Drewry was one of the finest marksmen in the county, being generally the winner of all the turkey shoots and bird hunts, but though the bird seemed to drop from the cedar he could find not so much as a feather to attest the trueness of his shot, and was wont to blame his poor aim on the failing light of dusk.
There was much work to do that fall, and Jacob Beale, with many slaves to supervise and all the crops to gather, with the attendant sorghum-making and woodcutting for winter, putting up of food and also of grain for the animals, gave all these events short shrift.
As has been said, he was by nature a most stern and pragmatic man, and even severely reprimanded Ginny, by all accounts his favorite. According to Drewry’s journal, he told them, relenting a little his severity, that in Tennessee there were many fowl and animals strange to them, that they were seeing normal animals and attaching the trappings of superstition.
The winter, a harsh one with many snows, seemed to have passed uneventfully, the Beales reporting nothing out of the way, though Vestal swore he saw a light bobbing about the winter cornfields and that on the way to visit his wife, who lived at a neighboring farm, he habitually met a black dog in the same spot of the road every night, no matter what time his progress brought him to that point.
Then in the early spring, when the trees were greening out, Ginny was on her way home from school when she chanced to look down into a meadow that bordered the path she was on. There was a great oak tree there where the children used to play, and swinging from one of its topmost branches was a young girl. The girl wore a dress of brown homespun, a butternut color, and she had long yellow hair like Ginny, who did not recognize her and drew nearer to call to her, thinking her new to the neighborhood and not yet entered in school.
The girl was watching her, holding the limb by her arms and swinging slowly in the air. Ginny crossed the splitrail fence and stooped to put down her books, and when she looked up the girl was gone. The branch still tossed with released weight.
From that the haunting grew in intensity, as if it drew nourishment from the fecund growth of that long ago wilderness spring, or had some urgent need to make itself known so strongly that even Jacob Beale himself could no longer deny its existence.
Noises began to be heard at night, soft and furtive, so that the Beale family felt the house had become infested with rats; during the night gnawing sounds would issue forth until it seemed that the very beds were being consumed as they lay upon them, and there was a persistent chewing behind the paneling, but when lights were lit and carried from room to room nothing seemed to have been disturbed.
There were the sounds of dogs fighting, as if chained together to battle to the death, bounding and leaping over the furniture. One night a great flapping of wings in the attic that moved from one corner to the other, as if some winged beast the size and weight of a heifer calf was cavorting there.
During the day the Beales would ransack the house from top to bottom, some of the flooring and paneling even being removed and replaced in an effort to locate the source of their troubles, all of which was in vain. Cats and dogs were brought into the house at nightfall to try and scent out the infestation, the animals behaving peculiarly and immediately seeking an egress; no dog ever spent the night willingly in Jacob Beale’s house after the haunting began. This was tried early and abandoned, as the dogs created such a cacophony of noise with their howling and whimpering, not ceasing even when Jacob Beale arose to beat them, that the family seemed almost to prefer the sounds of the Haunt.
These were trying times for the Beales, and though they could not have known it, they were to continue for four more years.
Jacob Beale was a man trying to get a crop in and keep his slaves under control, who were likewise affected by the haunting. Ignorant and superstitious, they were even more terrorized by the sounds and flitting lights than the white people were, some of them even slipping away and trying to escape, having to be returned by patrollers. Mr. Beale was under great pressure at this time, as were to a lesser degree the members of his family. Unable to sleep at night and having to carry on his business and financial transactions in the daytime, he now became afflicted by a singular malady. His tongue and jaws seemed to be most affected, swelling and paining him so intensely that he was at times unable to speak or eat. These spells were generally of short duration, however, enabling him to continue his business affairs rather than completely giving up and taking to his bed.
At first he tried to blame the nocturnal noises on the effects of the earth quaking, earthquakes being on the mind of Tennesseans, a severe quake having just recently struck Tennessee, affecting much of the countryside and creating Reelfoot Lake, which at that time was widely believed to be bottomless.
At last, however, he was forced to seek outside help, going for counsel to Brother Joseph Primm, preachers being known to possess a greater knowledge of such things than the common man.
It is not recorded what Brother Primm thought of these revelations, but he and his wife agreed to spend the night with the Beales and listen for themselves. Before retiring he offered a prayer and a song, praying piously and at great length for the good Lord to direct his attentions toward alleviating the circumstances that had brought his friend Beale to such a sorry state.
