Okay but surrealism aside all of these Southern Gothic posts are literally how the South is and I’m cackling.
We’ve got creepy ass 24/7 diners that say open but you can’t find the staff for half an hour.
There’s a haunted house and a murder/ghost story in every town.
There’s always a fishing hole no one goes to because of a tragedy living in the waters.
The woods are dark and hunting season is the only time you enter them. So many ghost stories. Haunted everything.
The mountains are alive with the sound of screaming.
Devil’s tramping grounds, hollers, woods, stones, you name it, we got it.
The old people may be racist and bigoted, but they have skin-crawling tales of caution and they’re all true.
Everyone knows someone who’s drowned.
We’ve all got a weird cousin who left the family and never came back. No one knows the circumstances of their disappearance but they were always an “odd duck.”
Community is a foreign concept to many until autumn. People come in droves from the mountain valleys and hollers bearing crafts and baked goods for sale. Apple butter can be smelled from half a mile away and the sound of fiddles fill the air. You will not see these people again until next autumn.
There are cemeteries everywhere, but the ones unloved are left for a reason.
Do not step on the graves, but behind them. If you step on them, apologize to avoid haunting.
Old oak trees = do not fuck with the tree.
100% Facts, I’m not even joking.
when walking through a graveyard, avoid any involuntary (OR voluntary) invitations to spirits to follow you home
church on every corner but all of them are increasingly scary at night
tales of old voodoo, people still performing rituals and locals cautioning against disturbing piles of dead animals and other such things so as to avoid being cursed
groups of teens traveling to haunted locations for some fun and never going back, making it even more tempting for others to go out for some fun
someone died at the school. someone always died at the school and now they’re stuck, so the rumors say
creepy ol country fucks following your car with piercing eyes until you’re out of sight
there really is something about autumn that brings a community together. lots of bake sales, always at the church. even if you don’t go to church, you go to the bake sale. people opening pumpkin patches and children playing amongst the rows, crows cawing with laughter– it’s like a scene from a movie tbh
I really do have a weird cousin and nobody knows where tf he is
you’re friends or relatives with at least one practicing witch (or someone who knows one) whether you know it or not. it’s just like oh? you practice the craft? cool cool, my great grandpa did that.
the woods are fucking scary. even when the sun is up, the woods are dense and fucking scary. it’s so easy to get lost. also haunted.
superstitions like woah
There are abandoned deer stands in the woods. Every year more are built, and more are empty. Why?
Be nice to others in the graveyard, or you will trip and scrape yourself up. You’ll never find the root that tripped you.
Theres a quarry. No one has been there but we all know about it.
Theres catfish under the dam, huge ones. You’ve never seen one and neither has anyone you know, but everyone you know knows someone else who has seen them. The scientists confirm that the catfish are real.
Sometimes something in the lake bites you. Its just a fish, everyone says, laughing. It never feels like a fish.
The house off the highway is caved in and covered with ivy, trees and huge ferns growing right up against the walls. All you can see is the porch and the smashed in roof. No one could live there. There are baby toys on the porch. Someone lives there. You kind of want to live there.
The house that burnt down and was never rebuilt, the husk just stands there.
The house with its own gravity. Getting to it only takes 15 minutes or so. Getting away from it takes 30.
Sour ground. No one plants there, no one buries there, no one builds there. Its just a patch of funky smelling dirt. Why are you afraid?
Deer bound across the highway. Their eyes flash at you. Your headlights weren’t close enough to cause that.
Sometimes the statue in town square faces a different direction. No one notices. They all think you’re crazy for bringing it up.
“Don’t talk about it, you’ll invite it!” What is it? You don’t know. No one talks about it.
“There are snakes in the lake,” your mother warns you. She lets you swim anyway. “There are no snakes in the lake,” the local lake worker tell you. Your mother smiles and takes you home. She reassures you there are snakes in the lake. She lets you swim anyway.
The long, seemingly endless stretches of nighttime highway where you ask yourself “Is that the same gas station I passed fifteen minutes ago?” and you begin to worry that perhaps you’ve become stuck in some Sisyphean loop.
Every small town has an elderly widow with some money and a huge sprawling manse who may or may not have murdered her husband?
Speaking of elderly widows, they always seem to solemnly and religiously declare, “I would never be caught in public without my face on.” Exactly what they mean by their “face” you’re never quite sure.
If you live by the railroad tracks you can always hear the coyotes hollering when the trains pass by at night – but sometimes there’s something else among their sounds.
Absolutely everyone reassures one another that, yes, black panthers DO exist in Mississippi woods and, yes, they DO sound like a woman screaming bloody murder. Everyone knows someone who has seen or heard one. Everyone swears it was the most terrifying thing that ever happened to them. It only ever happens once in their life. Sometimes you wonder when your time will come.
Only one restaurant in town dares to stay open after 7 o’clock.
The woods are full to the brim with rickety old structures that nobody knows who they originally belonged to or whose land they’re even on. They just…appear.
There’s an age-old tradition that when a young person kills their first deer, they must either smear its blood on their face or drink the blood. No one questions this. Ever. It’s ritual and it is set in stone.
My grandmother used to tell me to always paint the roof of your porch blue so when spirits tried to enter your house, they’d get tricked and think it was the sky – they’d bump their heads and go away. However, if smarter ghosts managed to get inside just talk to them like a houseguest and ask them politely to not frighten or bother you. After all, that famous Southern hospitality goes a long way – even after death.
Small town mayors are like mysterious eldritch figures: When were they elected? Who elected them? Does anyone ever run against them? Has anyone seen the mayor lately? Rumor has it that Icey Ladner saw him the other day at the fried chicken place? Is the mayor even real or are they just an imagined figure looming over the town?
My hometown had a man who drank Dr. Tischner’s to get drunk and had a pet tick that lived in his ear. Another man and his brother were raised by their deaf mother and they spoke their own language. Almost exactly like Nell except they didn’t live in the woods. One woman used to get leftover biscuits from the local Hardee’s to feed her 19 cats. The cats preferred cinnamon roll dip with their biscuits. A guy that was my mother’s age would crash any car or burn any structure for insurance money – all you had to do was give him a little cash and booze. That’s Faulknerian if you ask me.
During hunting season, it’s completely normal to see two stray dogs in town fighting over a severed deer head.
Vaguely ominous church signs, the most recent in memory being “You’re on God’s most-wanted list.”
You will meet an old man who lives out of his truck. He carves arrowheads from glass and sells his wares at lonely four-way stops twenty miles from anywhere. You buy a necklace from him and he offers you a bag of jerky before you leave. You ask what kind it is and he says it don’t matter, he put enough pepper in it to kill just about anything.
You find the poorly-skinned remains of an unidentifiable animal in a rain-soaked parking lot. The smell of decay brings back a memory from childhood, but you can’t recall it completely.
The way the wind bends through the trees on a certain night and it smells like the tobacco your truck-driving uncle smoked when you were a child. You haven’t seen him in years. You wonder if he is dead. You wonder if this is how he says both hello and goodbye.
Published
Brie 