On Setember 23, 1880, on a farm about twelve miles outside Gallatin, Tennessee, a farmer named David Lang disappeared from the face of the earth. There were several witnesses to this happening. One minute he was walking in his nearly bare field, the next, he vanished before the eyes of at least five witnessess. A check found no fisures in the earth, indeed, the field was over a large section of bedrock with no cracks in it. Within a year of the disappearance, a large stand of thick grass grew in a circle around the spot. Bugs did not go there, and animals shyed away from it. One day, his children went to the spot and called their father… and got an answer. For days, they tried to call to him, but the answers got fainter and fainter, and then disappeared forever.

No one has ever been able to find a good explanation for this.

In the West Indies, Barbados in particular, in the parish of Christ Church at Oistin’s Bay, a story of hauntings at a crypt for the local well to do has been around since the early 1800s. What lends credence to this story is the fact that the governor of the time, while trying to prove the haunting false, managed to prove it true, and it is well documented that way.

The crypt in question was on the side of a hill, on a coral bed, and the crypt itself was made of coral. It’s primary occupants were members of the family of one Thomas Chase, known for his severe cruelty to anyone who angered him. Indeed, two of the “dancing coffins” in the crypt were his children, one who starved herself to death, and one, a baby, that was reportedly killed when her father went into a fit of rage. Thomas himself was eventually an occupant of the tomb as well. And the haunting? Well, it seems that every time they opened the crypt to add a coffin, all the other coffins were off their shelves, standing on their ends. Acording to the governor’s documentation, this happened even after ALL access points were sealed off and new locks were installed. Eventually, the governor got enough, and all of the bodies were removed and buried elsewhere, in varied locations, at which time we assumed the haunting stopped, as there were no more caskets left to dance.

Just a quick note to let you know that our local news channel, KAIT in Jonesboro, Arkansas, is running a story on the White River Monster on tonight’s news at ten. For those of you who are interested but can’t tune in, the URL is www.kait8.com. The website is, unfortunately, VERY ad heavy and hard to navigate, and I would NOT normally recomend that people go there, but they probably will have the story on the web site by tomorrow. They aren’t very up to the minute about anything, but it should be there eventually.

Josie Arlington was a notorious New Orleans madam, though other than her rather unsavory occupation, it isn’t clear that she was involved in anything else illegal. Her date of birth has been lost to time, presumably because, in her profession, you just didn’t tell. She died in 1914 and was buried in Metairie Cemetary in New Orleans (I have no idea how this particular cemetary fared when Katrina hit… ).Soon after her death, locals became convinced that her crypt was haunted. The statue of the woman in front of the crypt was said to take on a life of it’s own and wander the graveyard at night. It was discovered upon investigation that a nearby streetlamp, coupled with the wind, was casting an eerie glow on the statue, presumably causing the rumors. She was at some point moved to an undisclosed location in the same cemetary, and the rumors stopped.

I have been to this one personally, in the dead of night, and I can confirm that THIS ghost story, at least, is an optical illusion. Rumors about the Bono Bridge have been floating around for years, with different reasons for the supposed hauntings. But the main story involves a dead railroad man (the bridge is an old one lane wooden bridge over railroad tracks, not water) and his wish to take anyone on the bridge into the afterlife with him. Supposedly, if you are there at night standing on the bridge when the train passes under it, if you are there on the WRONG night, the train will rise from the tracks and you will, essentially, become a bug on the windshield. Prayer is supposed to keep you from dying by making the train sink back to the tracks.

This ghost story relies on the “there are no atheists in foxholes” idea, because it is a self fullfilling prophect. The tracks approaching the bridge go over a small rise, then down into acutout area to go under the bridge. Because of the rise and the fast dip, at night it DOES look like the train is rising up to kill you. Then, presumably as you pray, it sinks down and goes through the dip under the bridge, which rattles your teeth loose but leaves you otherwise intact.