LITTLE ROCK — Is there anything scarier than the woods at night? Leaves rustle, branches crack and birds flutter unnervingly overhead. It is easy to become lost, confused and irrational as darkness descends. In the days before highways and automobiles, White Countians often found themselves enclosed in the woods as theymade their way home at night, which, naturally, became fodder for vivid imaginations and tales of the supernatural.
Paul E. Miller, local historian and president of the White County Historical Society from 1993-94, has heard his share of spooky stories centered on the rural woods of White County. Some are simply amusing.
"There was a man who lived across the road from a cemetery and he saw something white that looked like it was rising up from one of the graves," Miller recalled. After watching for a while with growing unease, the man summoned his courage and went into the graveyard, ready to confront the apparition. As he neared the gravestone in question, though, he found his ghost to be nothing more than a large moth catching the light from a tombstone as it zipped up and down.
Unlike the tale of the ghostly moth, some tales of the supernatural gain credence as they are passed along. In an article he penned for the White County Heritage, Miller recalled the story of the "headless woman of Flat Creek."
Legend has it that a couple driving a wagon pulled by a gray horse and a white horse on the treacherous path near Flat Creek had an accident of unknown origin in which foul play was suspected, but never proven. The man, woman and gray horse were said to have died in the crash; the woman being decapitated. The head was never recovered, and the white horse ran into the deep woods and was never caught, but was occasionally seen. Reports began to circulate of the headless female ghost riding the horse, always upstream between 3-4 a.m. on Fridays.
"One older man started on a trip to Judsonia and approached the creek from the north. He could hear a woman's song and could see a form washing her feet while the white horse stood near," Miller's article said. Theold man, after seeing the ghostly woman, reportedly took to his bed and was dead before the end of the week.
Miller remembered that a group of kids returning from a party walked several miles around Flat Creek to get home one night after seeing a white form floating nearby. As it turned out, their moonlight jaunt was for nothing, as the morning revealed that the "ghost" was nothing more than a newspaper caught in a tree.
For many years sightings of the ghostly horse and rider persisted. However, when a squirrel hunter found the carcass of the white horse, the woman's ghost ceased to be seen.
A spot known to locals as "Ten Mile Bottoms" has also spawned stories of the supernatural in northern White County.
The Heritage recalled the creek as nothing more than a small stream lined on each side with jagged cliffs and bluff that was enclosed with dense woods and inhabited by wild animals. There were no houses in the rugged valley, only a rough wagon road that had to be crossed by residents to reach town. The journey would begin before daylight and end after dark, causing imaginations to work overtime on the spooky journeys. Travelers routinely reported eyes peering at them from the trees. Apparitions were said to appear upon the descent into the valley on one side and disappear as the travelers emerged on the other side.
One tale circulated abouta man who was coming home late one night when angels in the form of four little girls came and sat on the four corners of his wagon bed. They rode with him all the way through the valley and disappeared when he topped the hill on the other side.
Another Ten Mile Bottom tale told of a man who saw a huge dog trotting beside his wagon all the way through the bottoms. He used his whip on the dog; the whip split it through the middle, but the dog did not make a sound and grew back together, only to keep trotting beside the wagon. The dog, like the little girls, was said to disappear when the man reached the top of the hill.
Sounds of echoes up and down the valley were also heard and were what many attributed to the calls of monsters.
"When men came to the valley in an ox wagon to camp and hunt in Ten Mile Bottoms, they set up camp on a little round knoll called Tater Hill," the Heritage article reads. "One of the men told of sitting under a tree on the first night with his gun, waiting for game to come within shooting range. Something stepped in front of him. It stood upright, like a man, about 10 feet tall and covered with hair. Its mouth was turned up and down rather than from side to side on its face and its eyes shone like two coals of fire. The thing jumped up and down then ran through the woods calling 'Ya-hoo! Ya-hoo!' It received answering calls from allover the valley."
As civilization spread and it was no longer necessary to travel the bottoms at night, tales have stopped emerging from Ten Mile Bottoms, and a highway has replaced the rough wagon road. However, when venturing in the woods and creek bottoms of White County after dark, one might still feel the stare of distant eyes or hear a strange cry pierce the dark and wonder if it is imagination or a spirit of the past still lingering in the shadows long after the wagon wheels of weary travelers have faded away.
Three Rivers, Pages 123, 134 on 10/28/2007