It’s turning colder here in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The leaves have turned their beautiful fall colors, and half have already
fallen to the ground. Remodeling is continuing at a
good pace. Today I painted the deck
rails on the back deck and when I had almost finished, and was covered in paint
myself, a small totally white ghost spider decided to tip toe across my new
paint. She must’ve been a lady spider
because she daintily walked through the paint, lifting her front feet and holding
them high like she was trying to avoid getting them wet. Katie says that the white spider means good
luck, and I now believe her as we had amazing luck in shopping today, managing
to get the very last bucket of paint for the fence and the last 2 white rockers
for the front porch.
Katie reminded me of a scary memory from our past—a trip
through Lumberton, NC where we were accosted by a drunk man late
at night who zoomed around our car, slammed on his brakes and jumped out of his pickup truck with what looked like a rifle but
was maybe a baseball bat and headed for our car. I have never seen Ray react so quickly as he
through the car into reverse and backed the car up with tires squealing and spun us around to make a quick escape in the opposite
direction. Like a scene out of a James Bond movie! But I still get a racing heart when I
remember the incident.
We decided to explore our area a bit the other day and ended
up finally finding Jump Off Rock. Not an
easy task. Jump Off Rock has an Indian
legend attached to it that’s been passed down for many years. Over 300 years
ago a young Cherokee Indian Chief fell in love with a fair Indian maiden. They
often met on top of the rock ledge overlooking the valley below. When the young
Chief was called to war, the maiden promised him that she would wait for his
return from their favorite rock ledge. When the maiden received word that her
young Indian Chief had been killed in battle, she climbed to the edge of the
rock and jumped off, tribal hunters found her broken body below. Indian legend
has it that on moonlit nights you can see the ghost of the maiden on Jump Off
Rock. The sign says the area is closed
at sunset, so I may never see the moonlit ghost.
I may have a better chance at seeing a ghost in my very own
neighborhood. I just finished reading a
book called Tar Heel Ghosts by John Harden and in it is a story called “The
Haunted Mill of Willow Creek.”
Interesting as we live in Willow Creek Farms right by Willow Creek and
just across the pond from the old mill.
Turns out that a Robert Jones built the mill after the Revolutionary
War. This area had been inhabited by the
Cherokee Indians for many years before and the area where the mill sits was
exactly where the Indian women would grind their corn in the hollowed-out
places in the rocks, Willow Creek being by the Indian Trail—the old
trading path of the Cherokees.
Robert Jones ended up being shot & killed with an Indian
arrow & years later one of his sons and his wife were killed when the mill
burned. It stood abandoned for many
years. One night a Henry Hampton was
walking by the mill and decided to check it out as a possible place for him and
his hopefully—soon-to-be fiancé to fix up and settled down in. As he left the mill and was back up on the
road, he turned to see a shadowy figure that looked like a woman in a shawl following
him. She kept up with him all the way
home without a sound, even when he ran the last part of the way. When he got home, he locked himself inside
his house and looked out to see the woman was actually a ghostly man wrapped in
a blanket.
