Six Feet Over: Adventures in the Afterlife (23 page)

“Pink would just never have thought of that,” says Lester.

“Nope,” says Lloyd. “He would have considered that crooked.”

The old farmhouse where Pink lived when he had the
visions of his father still stands, and Lloyd and Lester offer to take me there. Lester and Ruby Jean squeeze into my rented Hyundai, and Lloyd and his son Brad follow in Lloyd’s truck. Lester is driving the Hyundai, so that I can take notes while we talk. At one point he puts the left turn signal on, though there’s no road or driveway in view on our left, just an open field of tall grasses. The house sits on the far perimeter of the field, and that is where Lester is headed. “Used to be some tracks here, but not no more.” The weeds brush the underside of the Hyundai, making worrisome car-wash sounds inside the car. Lester and Ruby Jean seem accustomed to driving in fields. “Lester, there’s the old persimmon tree,” trills Ruby Jean.

“Uh-huh,” says Lester. He drives in overgrown fields at more or less the same speed as he drives on asphalt. “Grandma made the best persimmon pie, didn’t she?”

One side of Pink’s house is obscured by a thick climb of honeysuckle. Parts of the house are down to framing now, partly because it’s been abandoned so long, and partly because Lloyd pulled some boards away to make a pie safe. The men take me on a tour, pointing out the kitchen, their mama’s courting room, the bedroom, the outhouse, the earthen wells to keep the milk cool. There’s a doorway out the back wall of the bedroom. If John A. Chaffin came out here to play ghost in his father’s overcoat, that’s probably how he’d have come in. I tell Lloyd and Lester about the SPR officer’s theory. “Har,” says Lester. “I doubt that. John was just like Pink. Didn’t talk much. Didn’t go for foolishness.”

IS IT POSSIBLE to dress up like a ghost and fool people into thinking they’ve seen the real deal? Happily, there is published research to answer this question, research carried out at no
lesser institution than Cambridge University. For six nights in the summer of 1959, members of the Cambridge University Society for Research in Parapsychology took turns dressing up in a white muslin sheet and walking around in a well-traversed field behind the King’s College campus. Occasionally they would raise their arms, as ghosts will do. Other members of the team hid in bushes to observe the reactions of passersby. Although some eighty people were judged to have been in a position to see the figure, not one reacted or even gave it a second glance. The researchers found this surprising, especially given that the small herd of cows that grazed the field did, unlike the pedestrians, show considerable interest,
*
such that two or three at a time would follow along behind the “ghost.” To my acute disappointment, “An Experiment in Apparitional Observation and Findings,” published in the September 1959
Journal of the Society for Psychical Research
, includes no photographs.

Several months later, the researchers revised their experiment, changing the venue and adding “low moans” and, on one occasion, phosphorescent paint. One trial was set in a graveyard right off a main road and clearly in the sight line of drivers in both directions. Here observers hid in the bushes not only to record reactions, but to “avert traffic accidents” and “reassure anyone who became hysterical.” But again, not a single person of the hundred-plus who saw the figure thought it
was a ghost, including two students from India. “Although we are superstitious in our country,” the men told one of the researchers, “we could see his legs and feet and knew it was a man dressed up in some white garment.”

In their final effort, the research team abandoned traditional ghost-appropriate settings and moved the experiment into a movie theater that was screening an X-rated film. The author of the paper, A. D. Cornell, explained that the X rating was chosen to ensure no children were traumatized by the ghost, as though that somehow explained the choice of a porn theater as a setting for a ghost experiment. This time the “ghost” walked slowly across the screen during a trailer. The phosphorescence was not used this time, and presumably low moans were deemed redundant. No mention is made of the specific images showing on the screen behind the ghost, but clearly they were a good deal more interesting: The audience was polled after the film, and forty-six percent of them didn’t notice the man in the sheet. Among those who did, not one thought he’d seen a ghost. (One man said he’d seen a polar bear.)

And so we can safely conclude that if John Chaffin had attempted something as uncharacteristic as dressing up as his father’s ghost and moaning in his brother’s bedroom doorway, James Pinkney Chaffin would not have been convinced. Though his cows, were they in a position to observe, would have been fascinated.

I HAVEN’T SPENT much time in the South, and I didn’t realize how helpful people are there. They help you even if you don’t ask for help. I went to Food Lion yesterday, and the checkout clerk told me my yogurt was on special if I had an
MVP card. “Trudy,” he said to the bagger when he found out I didn’t. “Give me your MVP card.” It’s the kind of place where you call a total stranger on the phone, and his wife will say, “Hang on, I’ll go run and see if I can catch him before he goes off on his tractor!” The closest thing to impoliteness that I’ve come across so far has been a license plate holder ordering me to
EAT BEEF
. Eat beef,
please
, I chide.

Thanks to southern hospitality and the kindness of strangers, finding the Chaffin wills turned out to be as simple as telephoning the records office. The woman who answered put me through to the clerk of the court, who regularly picks up his phone. The clerk, Ken Boger, said the old records were in the courthouse basement and I could come down any day of the week and he’d help me find them.

Today is that day. I’m meeting a Tennessee-based questioned document examiner and forensic handwriting expert named Grant Sperry. I found Sperry through the American Society of Questioned Document Examiners, of which he’s president. Sperry has been an expert witness in some three hundred federal and state cases, including the Waco mess, where his testimony resulted in the conviction of an assistant U.S. attorney who had denied any knowledge of the pyrotechnic devices used on the compound. Sperry found imprints of his notes about the devices on the page below the page where he’d written them. (Note to the careless: These guys can read the imprints of your writing on a pad as much as ten pages down from the page you wrote on.) Sperry was coming to North Carolina to visit his parents and the Chaffin case intrigued him, so he agreed to help me out for about, oh, 1/100th of what he charges the trial lawyers.

We’re waiting at the metal detector in the front vestibule, along with a pile of Sperry’s equipment. We’ve been here several minutes. After a while, a man in a security uniform spots
us. “Ain’t been nobody manning that for two months.” He waves us in.

It’s a busy Monday morning, but Boger gets right up from his desk to take us to the basement. Within five minutes, we’ve got both wills. Sperry sets up a makeshift desk on a stack of boxes full of old case files. Most are boxes designed to hold files, but one says:
ORRELLS WHOLE HOG SAUSAGE
. Sperry puts on bright blue latex gloves, picks up the wills one at a time, and lays them on a scanner. Now he’ll be able to look at them side by side on his computer screen and line up any two elements he chooses. Since both wills are handwritten, we’d thought that we had two lengthy handwriting samples to compare, but Sperry quickly determines that the body of the first will has been written out by someone other than the signer—presumably a lawyer, for the document is written in standard-issue legalese on legal-sized paper. The second will, he says, is all one handwriting. This one is a curious mixture of legalese and down-home sap, penned on a page from a ruled school tablet:

Sperry can tell right away that whoever wrote out the second will wasn’t attempting to copy someone else’s handwriting. The writing is too fluid and relaxed, too swiftly and
confidently written to be a forgery. Forged writing is more like drawing, he says. The person moves slowly and deliberately, stopping and starting and sometimes even touching up letters. I read about this in
Questioned Documents
, a classic in the field, written by the enormously learned and occasionally crabby Albert Osborn. “A genuine writing does not often suggest that the writer is thinking of what he is doing with his pen,” Osborne wrote, “while a dishonest writing, when examined with care, often shows quite conclusively that the writer was thinking of nothing else…. This is another subject beyond the understanding of the stupid observer.” It’s clear the second will was written with a relaxed hand. So either James L. Chaffin wrote the second will, or it was written by someone who wasn’t overly concerned with creating a convincing match for Chaffin’s hand.

Sperry moves on to a comparison of the James L. Chaffin signatures on the two wills. It’s likely that the first will was indeed signed by Chaffin, as there are two witnesses. Sperry’s job now is to see if the writer of the second will, which had no witnesses, is also James L. Chaffin. The task is complicated by the fourteen years that span the two documents. Handwriting—especially signatures—often changes over time.

Nonetheless, Sperry has reached a conclusion. “There’s an old axiom we have,” he says, peeling off his gloves. “You can’t write better than your best.” In other words, I could never do a convincing forgery of my mother’s signature. My mother had beautiful, gliding, even penmanship, and mine has always been rat scrabble. She could forge mine, but not vice versa. Once you reach your “age of graphic maturity”—usually sometime in your teens—you’ve hit the peak of your ability and are unlikely to get much better. If anything, your writing gets worse: Handwriting deteriorates with old age and its decrepitudes—bad vision, stiff fingers, hand tremors.

In the Chaffin case, the situation is backward—and thus suspicious. The skill level in the signatures on the 1905 will is substantially worse than in the 1919 will. Which doesn’t make sense if it’s the same writer. Sperry pulls up the 1905 signature, written when Chaffin was in his fifties. The letters are awkwardly formed and there are hesitations—not the type of hesitations that suggest forgery, but the type that suggest this person is not a highly skilled penman. That seems likely, given the state of education in Davie County around that time. According to James W. Wall’s
History of Davie County
, illiteracy was common among rural families in the mid-1800s. In 1860, when James L. Chaffin was fifteen, only 690 of 1,230 school-age boys in Davie County were enrolled in public schools, and the school year was just a few months long (in winter, when the fields lay fallow). Lester says Grandpa Pink only went as far as third grade, and had a total of nine months of schooling. It’s likely his father would have had even less.

“Now look at the later will,” says Sperry. “The letter formations are much more fluid. Look at the
fs
. How much less awkward they are.” And here Chaffin would have been seventy. “If the J. L. Chaffin signatures on the 1905 will are representative of that particular writer’s skill level, and I see no evidence that they are not, then that writer could not have written the signature on the 1919 will.” It would seem to be a fake.

Sperry also finds some of the language of the second will suspiciously sophisticated for a nearly illiterate farmer. “Wit” is legalese, as is the phrase “both personal and real estate divided equal.”

Sperry highlights a line in the 1919 will. “Look at the wording here,” he says. “He wants his property to be divided between his four children ‘
if they are living at my death … and if
not living give share to there children
…’ Let’s say the 1919 will was
forged and backdated by Chaffin’s other sons in an effort to get the land back from Susie Chaffin after Marshall died. We know there was some ill will between her and the other brothers. With that clause in place, she’s technically out of the picture: The will leaves Marshall’s share of the land to their son, not to her. So let’s imagine the scene on the day of the trial. The family goes to lunch—which is a matter of record—and the brothers sit her down and spell it out: ‘We’ve got ten witnesses prepared to vouch for this signature. You’ve got your choice, Susie. You can go in there and agree that it’s his handwriting and we’ll cut you a one-fourth share—even though you’re not entitled to it in this new will. Or you can let the jury decide, and risk losing it all.’ ”

Sperry’s theory makes some sense. And if the forger’s intent was to corner Susie and force her hand—rather than actually convince her of the second will’s authenticity—then the breezy, unconcerned handwriting makes sense. Why bother fooling her, if you’ve got her where you want her?

WHOEVER CHOSE THE epitaph for the gravestone of James L. Chaffin would seem to have had a twinkle in his eye. It says:
THY WILL BE DONE
. Lester and Ruby Jean and I are out at the Ijames Baptist Church cemetery, visiting the family plots.

Lester has wandered over to the grave marker of a local acquaintance. “He shot hisself on the back porch.” He continues on down the rows, narrating death in the flat, evenly paced tones of a stock report. “There’s that baby died in the four-wheeler accident. And Thom’s son there: struck by lightning on a combine—” Ruby Jean cuts him off. “Look at this, Mary. Man put his two wives on the same tombstone. Wonder how they’d
have felt about that!” Three stones down is the grave of one Flossie Gobble. You don’t have to meet some people to know you’d like them, and Flossie Gobble is one of those people.