A Farm, a Haunting, and Family Secrets Laid Bare
Words by Jeremy B. Jones | Paintings by Jason Holley
October ??, 2025
Across the creek, there are screams. The water lifts the sounds cleanly from the cornfield and ushers them to me like lost children. My people are over there — my grandparents and great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents — all laid to rest in the cemetery off Townsend Road. Meanwhile I’m over here in the land of the living, standing beside the barn in the dark and wondering, for a beat too long, if they’ve been called up tonight.
Of course, I know no trumpets have sounded. There has been no resurrection beside Lively’s cow pasture in Fruitland, North Carolina. There are only high school kids dressed as the undead, slinking through the woods and outbuildings to make buses of church youth groups and entangled sweethearts yell for their lives at 10 dollars a pop on Halloween. Still, I wish they’d keep it down. My ancestors are trying to sleep.
I set out from the barn and head toward the bridge and the noise in the pitch black, the Haunted Farm calling me. Despite the weeks of screams and the lines of cars, I’ve not yet been to “Western North Carolina’s scariest attraction,” sprawled out beside the family cemetery in our corner of nowhere. It’s time I found out what all the shouting’s about.
I don’t know why, but I dart into the trees at the sound of tires crunching gravel behind me. As the headlights approach and I step deeper past the tree line, I remember the familiar thrill of being tucked away as the world moves around me. As a kid, I loved Manhunter, a jacked-up version of hide and seek we played in these woods at night. Something opened up in me when my eyes adjusted to the dark and I ghosted through acres of our family land, knowing I could vanish in a flash. I was all instincts and imagination. And the world was suddenly new and curious.
I crouch down in the cornfield as a tractor pulls a trailer full of thrilled and scared and bundled-up civilians back toward the zombies and chainsaws and the cemetery holding the people I’d come from. I want boyhood invisibility tonight, to be a ghost amid the spectacle. I want to find this land new and curious.
Drifting my way into the makeshift parking lot in the pasture, I accidentally spook the kid collecting parking money. He nearly falls backward at the sight of me emerging from nowhere beside him, so I try to muster something human and cordial — “Hey there” — as I step into the bright lights and pay my money to be haunted.
• • •
All this land — the quiet barn I’ve left behind and the strobe lights of the Haunted Farm that have lured me in — was settled by my forebears. My dad’s people arrived to one side of the creek over a century ago, and my mom’s arrived to the other side a century before that, not long after the Cherokee people had been forced west. As a kid, I was let loose with a bagful of daylight and could never get far from family land. My grandma — my dad’s mom — would walk out her backdoor, reach in through the open car window, and blow the horn three times when my cousins and I were meant to leave our imagined world and follow that homing beacon through the woods.
As an adult, I moved away. But after a decade or so I felt pulled back, scrambling out of another life to find the well-worn trail back home. Resettled, my head suddenly filled with questions about the family who’d turned over the soil by the creek for generations. As a boy, I’d assumed that growing up on land scattered with the houses of my uncles and grandparents and great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents was normal. Once I left, I realized it wasn’t. I met countless people across the country with no sense of ancestry, no deep connection to any one place. Why had my people dug into this very spot for so long?
More to the point, I’d become a father. I found myself looking back in order to figure a way forward. We’d brought kids into a country sliding away from democracy, celebrating cruelty, and scrambling from natural disaster to natural disaster. What could the ground beneath my feet and the people now laid in it teach me about how to bring a kid up in a world that felt at once magical and terrifying? What could they teach me about abiding, come what will?
The Haunted Farm sits on the land of my mom’s second cousin, and it had been a working farm until a decade ago, when it became another casualty of the country’s corporate farm complex. Now zombies are the cash crop. The barn may hold a handful of cows and a tractor in the offseason, but mostly it’s outfitted to create terror once summer ends.
I fall into line behind a young couple clinging tightly to each other and consider striking up a conversation about how those headstones just over there belong to my family. Isn’t that weird? I could say, gesturing at the graves as the kids squint into the darkness. I mean, if anyone is haunting this farm, it’s them.
Naturally, I’m imagining the ghost of Grandma floating into this crowd while everyone shivers and death metal blares from a hidden speaker. She’s yelling Boys! and giving that penetrating stare that means we’ve messed up. Soon, my mom’s grandma arrives in her wheelchair with her amputated leg, calling me Germany because she can’t pronounce my name. Behind her, my other great-grandmother, Azalee, floats past, wagging a crooked finger and leaning on a cane. I’m below them, smiling to myself at this imagined gathering when I realize that no one should ever come to a haunted farm on Halloween alone, especially when that person is nearing 40 and can’t control the urge to talk about genealogy and nostalgia with lovestruck teenagers in the woods.
The line crawls. Above the hundred or so people waiting and the loud music, a giant screen plays a compilation of scenes from horror movies. Something in the field down by the creek rises in 10-foot flames every 15 minutes or so. A bird-looking creeper walks through the crowd staring at us, until he’s eventually subbed out by a lumberjack zombie. The groups huddle to contend with the 30-degree night, alternating between hollering and laughing at the loud bangs and deadeyed teen actors. I stand alone among them, pulling my hat down and thinking about the afterlife.
The Christian tradition I come from insists that we’ll be called up from the ground to live on a new, perfected earth. A world without pain, without intolerance and arthritis and hatred. Swords bent into plowshares, the lion lying down with the lamb.
I get that vision, long for it even, but I do sometimes wonder about the particulars of resurrected bodies. Are we flesh and blood on this new earth, smooth skin and perfect cholesterol? Do we come back as we died: Grandma forever 87, Azalee with a cane? Or are we revived in our best bodies — my 17-year-old, competitive-sport-every-season flesh; Great Grandma Clara on two legs strong from working the field until dusk, dolled up because the Maxwell boy has come calling?
In truth, I don’t worry about these thoughts much. The sweet by and by will either happen or it won’t. There’s no preparing for it, no changing it. We’re called, I believe, to work toward that perfected earth now, to bend the swords on this earth, not to sit around waiting for the horn to blare.
And, yet, here I stand in the subfreezing night imagining the ancestors I knew and the ones I’ve never met reaching up out of the ground in taut, shiny bodies to smile across the field at me and say, Hey there.
• • •
Really, I’m waiting in line to be scared on Halloween because of some old diaries. A few years back, I stumbled upon a 40-year-old newspaper clipping in a box at Grandma’s house. The story told of the discovery of strange handsewn notebooks in an abandoned house. The pages were indecipherable, covered in something like hieroglyphics, but they eventually found their way into the hands of a retired NSA cryptanalyst who broke the code and transcribed the recorded life of a man named William Thomas Prestwood. My great-great-great-great-grandfather.
From 1808 until 1859, William Prestwood logged the mundane (“dug potatoes,” “skinned shin,” “paid taxes”) alongside the bizarre and personal (“dreampt seeing a man hung,” “saw phantom,” “stuck a stick in a snake’s head”) — all in a cipher he’d invented. The newspaper article described him as “an intellectual,” “a naturalist,” “a mathematician,” and “a tireless lover.” For 50 years, he chronicled his many sexual affairs from South Carolina to North Carolina, inventing new symbols for his lovers. His final entry before he died documented sex with a mistress.
Of course, I quickly tracked down a copy of the deciphered transcription. I spent a couple months flipping through the pages, looking for four-letter words and lewd acts. I found my ancestor sneaking into barn lofts and closets and pigpens with different women. Found him courting three women in one day. Found him running from the sheriff and plowing his fields drunk. But after a while, as I read the diaries chronologically and found his vulnerability and hypocrisy and desires hidden there; he shifted shapes before me. He was no longer a mere curiosity to smirk at but instead a flesh-and-blood man, full of contradiction and heart. And he was a man who’d, in some part, made me. I started carrying him with me everywhere, thought often about where he’d been on this day two centuries before, and had conversations with him in my head. William Prestwood became a welcomed ghost in my life.
I’ve been digging through census data and land grants and family stories and old photographs to better understand this ancestor I’ve resurrected, to better understand where I come from. Most of William’s sons died in the Civil War, but his grandson Asbury settled the land back across the creek, the land that raised me. If not for the dark and the crowds tonight, I could see that house from my spot in line. It’s waiting just across the creek, empty, and, by all accounts, haunted.
• • •
They stagger us into the woods, sending each group down a dark trail when the coast is clear. From the line, we watch people disappear and then wait for the inevitable screams.
“You’re here by yourself?” the worker asks, eyes full of suspicion when it’s my turn to wait at the head of the trail and stare into nothingness. The sheriff’s deputy standing beside her turns to look at me when he hears the question, amusement tugging the corners of his eyes.
“Just me,” I smile, but she gives me a look that’s part skepticism and part disappointment and then releases me into the forest.
It takes longer than I expect for them to come for me. After I’ve crunched down the path for a couple minutes, something finally leaps from behind a tree, a gruff voice roaring as the creature lands inches away.
It does nothing for me. My heart rate is steady; I look straight into the monster’s human eyes. Maybe I smile. I don’t know if it’s because I’m alone on the trail, with no one else’s screams to ramp up the fear, or if it’s because of my childhood knowledge of these woods, or if it’s because of the detachment I’ve fashioned by calling this trip research and sticking a tape recorder in my pocket, but whatever the case, I watch all the coming jump scares like one might view a science fair. I observe curiously.
Some of the zombies grow visibly annoyed to put in the effort and get no return on this investment. I feel bad. I try to encourage them: “Whoa, that was a good one, man,” I say to a dejected one. “Oh! Smart hiding spot, didn’t see you coming,” I offer to another, but I don’t know if my praise rings true without the shrieks. It’s not you, it’s me, I want to say to each emerging figure, but instead I keep winding through the woods toward the barn.
The whole experience of the Haunted Farm revolves around a single story, a mythical center to all the fear: an Appalachian feud carrying on even after everyone is buried. The Lively and Tate families, the story goes, have continually spilled blood over this plot of land because of the Romeo-and-Juliet tale of Missy Lively and Billy Joe Tate. On the night the couple had planned to elope, Billy Joe’s body was found in these woods and Missy was left crying by Clear Creek in her white dress. She lost her mind and vanished.
That’s why a crazed butcher has rushed me from the corner of the barn. I’m into it. I love a little history with my zombie apocalypse. As the man with a chainsaw steps from the cornfield and chases us down, I’m wondering if there could be any historical truth to the blood feud. We hop aboard a trailer and head for the creek, but the tractor can’t outrun the man, who climbs aboard, laughing maniacally as the chainsaw roars above us and people scream for their lives. I give him a thumbs-up as he steps back off and flames rise up behind him.
• • •
“They tell this about this place,” my great grandmother Azalee says in a recently unearthed audio recording, “that it was old man Pinner who owned it and he was real mean and he was abusive to his wife.”
She’s talking about the house above the barn, the house my great-great-grandfather Asbury Prestwood bought around 1906. All my life I’d heard it was haunted. My cousins and uncles told me about how a man had killed his wife in the house — chopped her head clean off. When Asbury bought the house just after the turn of the century, it had been the property of the county, seized after the grisly murder.
Though no one’s lived full-time in the house since the 1940s, we spent a lot of time in and around it as kids. Granddaddy was often fixing busted pipes and replacing rotten boards, so we tagged along. And we heard the ghost. Or, more accurately, we heard her head as it rolled down the stairs, thump thump thump, and sent us scrambling from the porch to disappear into the woods.
Amid all my recent digging into the past, I went in search of the ghost story. On paper, I found Asbury buying the house and 124 acres in 1906 from a Freeman family, not the county. And no Freemans had been murdered in the process, no severed heads conveyed in the sale, so I wrote the haunting off as an empty story aimed at impressionable children. I wrote off, too, the photograph from my uncle’s wedding outside of the house, a blurry white figure floating in the window.
But then someone turned up the audio recording of Azalee telling stories sometime in the 1970s, and I wondered if I’d gotten it wrong.
“And one day,” she continues, “he gets mad at her and he cut her head off. And now her spirit comes rolling down these stairs; you can hear it bump bump bump from step to step.”
The story she tells on the recording is more or less the same story I heard as a boy. Domestic abuse, decapitation, noisy stairs. But she includes one noticeable difference: the previous owner’s name, old man Pinner. And her telling provides a clear ending: “That old man got ashamed of hisself, and he went out here and hanged hisself on an apple tree between here and the highway.”
The rest of the recording is full of details of the Prestwoods moving into the mountains, leaving the land where my ancestor diarist had lived, of loading boxcars with steamer trunks and driving the livestock with a schooner wagon. She tells of typical Sunday dinners and the work to keep a house and a farm. She returns over and over to Clementine, her mother-in-law. “She was the smartest woman I’ve ever known.”
Mostly, she tells of Clementine’s work, of everything it took to keep the place running, of how she rose before anyone else to feed the chickens and milk the cows and fetch the water. From the wings of the recording, a nephew chimes in to say Asbury worked hard, too, but Azalee is having none of it: “She would be a-sitting in that room of a night, making the girls a dress by lamplight, and he would’ve already gone to bed and be a-snoring.”
But then the head would come rolling down the stairs, and Clementine’d run and jump into bed with Asbury — “clothes and all.”
In everything Azalee tells in the recording, there seems little exaggeration. As a boy, I knew her to be no-nonsense and unafraid. I can still picture her hand up in the front pews of the Southern Baptist Church that raised me, interrupting the preacher whenever she pleased to ask a question or set something straight. But this ghost spooked her:
“When I was a bride and came here, slept upstairs, I could hear it,” she says. “Albert’d be asleep and I’d scoot over to him just as close as I could get because I thought it might be somebody.”
As the tractor aims us back toward the haunted farm from the cornfield, I’m thinking of that haunted house back across the creek. We pass a pale woman rocking in a chair in front of the barn, her dead eyes tracking us, and I wonder if the murdered Pinner wife is confined to the Prestwood house, forever thumping the stairs, or if she might slip out of a night to sit here with Missy Lively? Maybe they stroll down to the water together in the dark, recalling old, alive times. What might they conspire to do together on this land with all the time in the world and no one to stop them?
“There, that’s the end of my tale,” Azalee says as the tape clicks off.
Resurrecting an ancestor brings with it all kinds of complications. For one, I know more about my great-great-great-great grandfather than I do my closest friends. Across 50 years, William Prestwood laid out his private life in his handmade notebooks, tucked away in his code now broken for me. Second, there’s no putting him back in the box. There’s plenty I wish I didn’t know on those ciphered pages, rife with 19th century terribleness, and for better or worse, I have to claim him as one of my people.
Mathematically, I am 1.56 percent of William Prestwood. Or he is 1/64 of me. That’s nothing. His DNA has been whittled away by Fabius and Elizabeth and Asbury and Clementine and Albert and Azalee and Ray and Betty and David and Joy — and many more branches that never touched William’s. I may owe him for the pop my right elbow makes when I straighten it in the morning, but not much more. He’s long gone, barely a part of me. I contain multitudes.
And still, I want to know. I want to know where exactly he lies in my skin. I imagine myself in 64 sections, searching for William’s slice. But, of course, it’s not math. A life — this long line of begats — is not a mere matter of DNA, of genetics. The way William laid his hand on his son’s head might have carried through the fingers of Asbury and Albert and Betty, learned without any work at all. My daddy’s hand on my head might have been William — a gesture passed on without a gene. He could be anywhere right now. An unknowable memory guiding my hand when I rest it on my young boy’s wild hair just before bed.
All my people in the ground beside the Haunted Farm carry on in my skin, too, their genetic code repackaged into my body as it climbs down from the trailer into the parking lot. That’s a kind of haunting, I suppose. But as I search through the past by way of rolls of microfiche and trails in the dark, I keep thinking about the stories they’ve given me instead. What should their lived lives mean for me, a father trying to raise kids in an ever-shakier world? What is there to learn in these dark days, surrounded by ghosts?
• • •
I found no ghosts in the archives, no blood feuds. Sure enough, the owners of my ancestor’s house prior to the Freemans had been a couple: Burrell and Ellin Pinner. Old man Pinner. But I found no suicide, no decapitation. Ellin outlived Burrell by nearly a decade. No matter how long I searched old newspapers or how many local historians I pestered, I uncovered no grain of truth in this story we’d passed down for generations. But why its persistence?
Or better yet, why all these stories of killed and abandoned women? “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion famously wrote, but what about these stories of life floating on after death? Do we tell ourselves these stories to keep the past alive, to keep our ancestors here with us? To make sense of what lingers? Or are they mere correctives: Don’t murder your wife or you’ll hang yourself in shame. Don’t break up young love or they’ll haunt your farm forever.
“We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five,” Didion continues. “We live entirely . . . by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images.” I wonder what disparate images hang around my family’s land to have created this story. That lonely farmhouse on a hill? A gnarled old apple tree apart from the others? A whistling breeze loosening the last leaves from bare branches?
Someone suggested to me recently that a family ghost story might be a kind of inherited trauma taking shape. Whether the floating figure in an old house is real or not, the living, breathing people have been hardwired to feel and sense the pain — to see the ghost. And, perhaps, to give it meaning.
So far there are no clear answers from researchers about transgenerational trauma. Many scientists in the growing field of epigenetic research believe enough studies have established that trauma can indeed be inherited, that it leaves a kind of chemical impression on someone’s genes. And this impression can be passed down. But the biology to fully understand this idea isn’t clear, and critics believe too much causality is being assumed without enough evidence: We tell ourselves stories . . .
I like the stories, though, and am of a mind to believe our bodies can do miraculous if not terrible things, even when we can’t parse out the how. If trauma can be laced into our inheritance, it might rise up from anywhere to thump down the stairs or tiptoe through the woods.
The diaries of my ancestor document scores of traumas, traumas that have been passed for generations into bodies living today: Indigenous people rounded up and marched west, enslaved people tortured and separated, women silenced and burdened. Some of these evils he witnesses, some of them he fights against, some of them he carries out. None of it is surprising: the South is a place haunted by suffering.
Leaving behind the lights and moving back toward the bridge, I can’t help but wonder if these haunted legacies surrounding us might really be second chances. What would it mean to meet our ghosts in the dark, face-to-face, and reckon with what’s in our skin? What if these apparitions aren’t whispers from the past but ferries into the future? What if we’re fashioned to process what our ancestors couldn’t?
• • •
The DNA in our skin is all letters — A, C, T, and G — spelling out the words, crafting the stories of our bodies. But what we inherit from the generations before us isn’t static. A geneticist explained it to me like this: Our genes are like burners on a stove. The world around us might turn up or turn down the flame, our environments changing the makeup of our bodies over time.
There is at once something obvious and miraculous in this. Of course we can change, but also, how astounding that we can change. Our very foundations can be altered — are being altered — in this moment. I find impenetrable hope in this knowledge. We’re raised up from nothing by the people who came before us. They copy themselves, give themselves away to make us, slip in trauma they can’t escape. But the people here now — the people who surround us, who touch our lives — could genetically modify us with that touch, could adjust everything we’re made of so that we’re different in our very core, transformed at a cellular level by the company we keep.
Which is to say, we’re built to change — to shape the world and to be shaped by it.
I fade back into the cornfield, invisible to both the quick and the dead, and glide toward the barn and the haunted-but-not-haunted Prestwood house. I know they’re still in the ground, but I conjure up my people anyway. I welcome their hauntings; I welcome the screams. I ignore the racket knocking at the edges of my brain — national news stories and existential worries — and listen instead for any bumps in the night that might guide me, might help me shape this little patch of nowhere into somewhere better, with bent swords for my kids to one day plow these fields. Tonight, I focus only on what’s before me, darkness but not wholly so, until my eyes adjust enough to find a way forward. ◊
Jeremy B Jones is the author of the memoir Bearwallow, which won gold in the 2015 Independent Publisher Book Awards and was named the 2014 Appalachian Book of the Year in nonfiction. His essays appear in Oxford American, Garden and Gun, and Brevity, among others, and he serves as series co-editor of the book series In Place from WVU Press. He teaches at Western Carolina University.
Jason Holley is a Texas born illustrator, educator, and exhibiting artist living in Los Angeles. His illustration career spans 25 years and he is widely recognized for his influence and contribution to the field. He has been a member of the faculty at ArtCenter College of Design since 1997 where he is an associate professor.
