On the fourth day of pre-move-in prep, I was installing lights above what used to be the dining room when suddenly I was besieged by terror as though someone had jumped out behind me and screamed “Boo!!” I turned around, instinctively, fully expecting to see someone standing behind me, but there was nobody there. Nothing had happened. I’d never felt anything like this.

Trembling, I stepped down off my step ladder. I remembered hearing that ghosts and said out loud to the room, “Alright, listen. I know you’re here now. It’s OK. You’re allowed to be here; this is your place first. But I’m going through a divorce and it’s the middle of a pandemic so I need peace. I canNOT see you or hear you, and I need you to let me live here. It’s the only place I can afford, and I’m going to be crying in my robe a lot late at night. I can’t deal with being haunted at the same time.”

Silence.

I felt insane. Maybe I was cracking up. It’d been that kind of year so far; why shouldn’t I have a total mental collapse?

In the peace that followed, I - predictably - fell completely apart. Over the next year, I would start a torrid, ill-fated, deeply-enmeshed, long-distance relationship, get obsessed enough with r/WallStreetBets to make a little money on the Reddit’s GameStop phenomenon, and spiral out completely as I clung to my new home as a safe harbor, sometimes spending whole days in bed, on a sober support group chat in the weeks Bear wasn’t staying at my place. After my beloved 15-year-old cat Benny died 8 months after I moved in, I began share lunch on the floor of my kitchen a few days a week with Charlie, the landlord’s cat. Sometimes Charlie was the only friend I would see in real life for weeks.

I don’t remember when it happened, exactly. I don’t even remember who experienced the first. But one day, one of us got the urge to put on Bob Seger.

It’s important to know that I’m not a fan of Bob Seger; nothing against him, but he’s just never been my vibe. So it was surprising when suddenly we both agreed that we needed to play “Old Time Rock & Roll.” Immediately as the song began to vibrate through the rooms, the apartment became lighter somehow, easier to breathe in. Almost like opening the doors and turning on a fan in a smoky bar.

It happened again a couple months later, this time with Billy Joel. Same thing, I’m not really a fan. (Look, I know. I’m so white that it took me seeing him in concert twice before I could admit to myself that he just wasn’t my jam. No hard feelings.) One day, one of us got a feeling that we should start playing “Big Shot”, and it seemed easier to breathe in the home again. Somehow.

It would take me at least a couple years to put together that the two songs were released in 1978. In the next year and a half, the “song requests” started happening surprisingly frequently, all of them songs that were popular in the late 70’s; it happened so often that we started a ghost playlist of all of the request our roommate had.

The second Christmas we lived in the building, Bear got some legit paranormal investigation equipment from my ex (I prefer “wasband”), and I invited them over to use my space as a test run. I’m a loud-n-proud skeptic of using newfangled technology to talk to something as an ancient and mysterious as a soul, so I was surprised when, a week later my wasband called and said he had found something.

He played me a part of the audio recording from three hours in, when I started talking to the space. “I know you saw me go through a really rough season,” I said. “But I wanted you to know that this home has been a really wonderful haven for me to process my heartbreak and rebuild. You listened to my request for space that I needed and I really appreciate it. Thank you“

In the next moment, as clear as my own speech, a disembodied voice answered “You’re welcome.”

When I started work on my book about local ghosts, I recruited the Association for Paranormal Study to come investigate my neighborhood after I’d heard a firsthand account about them helping to remove an entity from a local home a few years prior. I kept a stone face and gave little information as the medium of the group walked around the block, and confirmed many of the stories I’ve heard from others.

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Starting early the next morning, I would wake early, grab a burrito from Waves Market to warm on the dashboard as I drove down Highway 12, parking at Day Use spots and throwing my new vessel into the sound. That’s where I would paddle out into the silence until my muscles ached, all the while praying for something - a squall, a whale, a tsunami - to swallow me alive.
Nothing ever did except my sadness, which would overtake me once the silence closed in and I would sob, my tears splashing into the endless salt water holding me.

I’d paddle until my hunger overrode my agonizing heartbreak and then turn back, lash Gertie to the top of my ride, and drive on, catatonic and savoring the same burrito until I found another spot to try again. Rinse and repeat. A methodical madness.

I did this for a couple days, in a blur of grief mania until one morning, I arrived at the Day Use lot just north of Buxton, and put Gertie into the sound just as the sun turned from its rising hues.

Straining through tears, I paddled like I was being driven by some otherworldly force, until there was nothing but water and sky reaching to the horizon all around me.

That’s when I started screaming. I screamed about my mental illness and the years it had stolen from me. I screamed about the perfect childhood I was unable to give the Bear because of my brain and hormones being in constant conflict. I screamed about the truths my ex and I had denied about ourselves since we started, a couple young parents desperate to do the right thing. I screamed about the doctors who had failed me and the reproductive amputation I’d had to have to both save and shorten my life. I screamed about the loneliness I’d been steeping in and the agony of watching my peers start their lives while mine had been in a chronic holding pattern of symptoms I struggled to find answers for on my own. I screamed about all the needless arguments I’d tried to walk away from that were placeholders for actual intimacy. I screamed until I was sobbing and then I wept until my sides ached and limbs tingled with exhaustion.

I stared at the sun high above me from where I lay curled in the seat. The quiet was enormous, only broken by the tiny pats of waves lapping against the kayak. A breeze brushed across my shoulders, nudging a few stray hairs toward the coast.

I pulled it into my lungs and exhaled.

I did it again.

Then there was peace.

I thought about staying in that empty space at the end of my chapter. Falling asleep floating in the blue, becoming another ghost story of the Pamlico. I’d thought of ending my life hundreds of times at this point, but this moment felt like the clearest invitation for surrender. Calm. Clean. Complete.

I lay across the hull, tingling and numb until the sun shifted and began to make its descent to the west.

The thought of Bear having to carry this heartache if I vanished sent razors across my heart. I’d had this thought before in moments like these; although none of those had occurred so far from home or help. In a daze, I clutched my paddle, sat up, and started pulling the island toward me, slowly.

It took a few minutes for it to appear on the horizon and suddenly I was awash with gratitude that the stillness of the wind meant I may not have drifted too far north to find my way back.

Still, I was running on fumes and not sure where my port was, so I just paddled, my rhythmic breath and paddle laps the only noise on the sound. Occasionally I looked up, hoping the endless strip of sea forest would begin to seem familiar soon.

Two hours later, completely exhausted, I drifted close to the beach, where two white-bearded men were standing waist-deep, hollering and waving me in for my last half-mile.

“Damn, girl!” one smiled as he reached for the hitch at Gertie’s helm and started pulling, “You okay?”

The other one handed me a water bottle and pushed from the back, “We’ve been watching you all day! We almost lost you at the horizon.”

After they pulled my boat ashore, they ushered me into a chair and took turns feeding me and telling me stories, both to revive my spirit. In my dehydrated, lifeless haze, I took the fruits, sandwiches, and water they showed upon me for hours, as they regaled me with stories about their lives. The two were retired veterans and cops, who spent their autumns together drinking and swimming at the sound together. Currently, they were growing out their facial hair because, when they went back home at Halloween, they’d spend the next two months playing Santa Claus in their hometown.

The Santas talked for hours, joking with each other, handing me more and more food, but never offering me any of the beer they shared between themselves. They asked a little about me, but I told them a little about Bear and where I was from, not having much energy for anything else. Finally, when the sun began to glow pink, the Santas secured my kayak to my roof rack and, as one finished tying the loose ends, the other placed a hand on my shoulder and looked me dead in the eyes,

 “I don’t know what you were running from out there, but I’m glad you came back to it.”

I fell into him, sobbing. He held me for a minute, just enough to be compassionate without overstepping into impropriety, and then held me back at arms length.
He smiled, “You take care of yourself.”

The other Santa smiled from behind his shoulder. I wiped my tears and waved as I drove away.

I’m thinking about them this week as I’m back out on Hatteras Island, vacationing with Bear and taking a kayak out into the sound every chance I get. The first 24 hours I was here, I must’ve spent half of them on the water. I’m a different version of me than the one who was here a few years ago.

Since I saw the Santas, I’ve taken the time and space to return to myself, through hard therapies, somatic practices, and intensively laying out boundaries with folks who’re bad for me. In that return, I’ve gotten to blossom. My body is healthier, my mind clearer and more focused. I’ve been able to heal some thing with folks I love, clear up some chronic ailments that were symptoms of stress, write a book, start a business. In fact, this week, for the first time, I can afford a modest but lovely canal-side vacation rental using money I’ve made telling ghost stories. This is a personal fantasy come true.

Dear Santa, I’m glad I came back to me, too.
(If y’all’re reading this: Thank you both for the sandwiches, kindness, and the sound wisdom. )

Hello from bed, where I spent the last couple days in a half-disassociative state after maybe going too hard as a means to evade the maelstrom of feelings I’m having about Bear’s move to college.

I’m going to be honest; for many years, I planned to wrap things up about now. When I found out I was pregnant with Bear at 24 years old, I’d been both actively and passively suicidal for more than half my life due to crippling depression and overwhelming anxiety. At the time, I was living with my parents and 9 months out of my second hospitalization for suicidal intent, an inevitable conclusion to how my mental state had been deteriorating for years. It was not a good time to become a mom. But, see, I’d had a premonition of a blonde-haired-blue-eyed little girl even before I missed a period, so being this person’s mom felt divinely inspired. I took a pregnancy test the very day of that vision and, two years later, that exact giggling little blonde girl lived in my house. And, because I had The Best Kid on the Planet, I needed to fight as hard as I could to be better. Mental illness doesn’t just go away because one becomes a parent, though, and a lot of times, in the darkness that persisted throughout Bear’s childhood, I told myself that all I had to do is make sure this precious, perfect baby became self-sustaining and then I could check out. But while I could, I’d try my best to be the present, loving, perfect mom they deserved.

I’ve joked that Bear is my “anchor baby” but instead of tethering me to a foreign nation, I’m bound here to this mortal coil. It’s not really a joke. Without them, I wouldn’t have made it to 25 years old, let alone my current 43.

A few weeks ago, I took Bear to the mountains for an impromptu DIY graduation ceremony, which included visiting the Blue Ridge Parkway to conduct our own sunset photo shoot. We then drove through tunnels while blasting Bowie, fireflies rushing past us like stars, me wiping tears away from behind the wheel where I fought to keep steady while suppressing sobs. It was cinematic and perfect.

Earlier that day, Bear had slept in while I’d knocked out some admin work. I was on the balcony, pacing while on the phone when I heard whimpering coming from the tree next to me. I look over and was making eye-contact with a bear cub, 35 ft off the ground and terrified. I hung up the phone and began recording, stepping forward and immediately noticing that mama bear was 15 ft below me, watching her kid from the ground. She looked at me for a moment as if to say “Give ‘em a minute. They’ll figure it out.” Sure enough, within seconds, the cub stopped whimpering, skittered down the tree, and tromped into the woods with mom.

I was stunned.

The next day, my former husband and I took Bear to their college orientation, where they made friends within the first 10 minutes that they wandered off with. I was elated. We spent all day seeing further evidence that this was the perfect place for our kid, from the social group to the campus to the city they’d be calling “home”. After an exhaustive day, I returned back to the cabin just as the sun set, sat on the balcony, and ate tiramisu on the porch as rain slowly drenched me.

I found myself talking to God, softly at first until I was pacing and clutching the rail while I cried toward the valley. I cried about gratitude and pride and joy and this deep, sudden well of heartbreak that I didn’t know I’d need to navigate.

I felt like I couldn’t breathe. I learned how to be an adult through the lens of being a parent. For many years, Bear was my sole reason to get out of bed and trudge through another exhausting, mentally-torturous day. I know this is too much pressure to put on a kid, but it’s also true. In my worst moments, the only single human I care about is this one, even over myself. I know Bear isn’t dying; the needs I’m meeting are just shifting, but it still feels like the floor is falling out from under me.

It went on for awhile. I’m still surprised my body could hold so many feelings. And then I think it suddenly found the whole thing too painful and sent me into a little bit of a manic state to snap me out of it. Or I booked too many plans to be able to feel anything. Either way, I needed to go.

The very next morning, I threw my things in the car, passed another bear on the descent down the mountain, drove four hours home, flung my things in a different bag and tried to get a decent amount of sleep before leaving for the airport at an ungodly 3 AM. Alright, so, 25 years ago, I was part of a message board where I made a lot of friends who have, at this point, become lifetimers, and one of those friends discovered that Big Freedia was - for some reason - playing a side stage at the Green River Festival and texted me about this one weekday morning in April. After a full decade of failed plans to hang out, we spontaneously decided to make a visit happen, and then her son surprised us both with tickets to see Jon Stewart at Tanglewood the night prior, which is why I was jumping on a plane at 4:20 AM to be in Hartford, CT by 9, so she could pick me up, drive me to her place in Wilbraham, pack up her car with picnickery, and drive another hour to the Berkshires so we could set up under a sprawling oak at 5 PM. WHEW

Photos inside Tanglewood aren’t allowed, which is a real drag because that place is unbelievable. It’s 500 acres on a mountaintop where the Boston Orchestra and Boston Pops spend their summers, and have since the 1930s. It also has this gorgeous mansion/museum where Nathaniel Hawthorne used to hang out and write

…that of course you can tour and of course I wanted to ask every docent a million questions about the hand-painted doorways, the insane Psychedelic Elephant Occult Opera that had been written in the 1970’s and performed on the property and the room that had recently had its renovation funded solely by a “William Joel” (yeah, it’s him.)

(I’m gonna say it: Jon Stewart was… fine. Still very hot and charismatic, but the comedy was a little hacky. How many times can a spry, handsome, celebrity complain about being an ugly old man while also popping up and down off his knees without any struggle in one set, you know?)

Anyway, after all this, I’m somehow still awake enough to shower before I collapse back at her place close to midnight.

The next morning is surreal. Y’all, it is JUNE and somehow only 68 degrees? And the sun is completely out? Dammit, I think I get the New England thing now.

Here’s where I admit I haven’t been to a music festival since Lilith Fair in ‘98. (Yes, I’ve been to concerts, and street festival-type music events, and I even made it to Burning Man in 2010, but not a music festival. I know.. It’s weird.) The Green River Festival, however, is a dreamy, lovely way to get back into the scene. It’s run and populated by arty, mountain-y hippie-types of the responsible, clean variety, and it’s a family-friendly affair, and it’s the chillest group of kids I’ve ever seen. Magic.

Listen, I’m gonna cut to the chase on this one. We went to see Big Freedia. We got right up front. At some point, I found myself twerking onstage with her.

Dear Lord. I truly cannot believe my thighs held up so well.

We spent the next day recovering, catching up, getting arguably the best $45 massages on the planet at a place that looks like it should be nothing but happy endings from the outside, and then suddenly I’m on another plane, back at home for enough time to bring in the mail, and then I’m driving up to Lincolnton, NC for another storytelling gig, this time at the Lincoln County Historical Society, three hours from home.

In my momentum, I left with a couple hours to spare which is why, halfway up the road, I realized I’d still never seen Körner's Folly, and took the exit toward the historic house.

I really thought I’d just do a quick walk-through, it’d take me an hour at most and then I’d be on my way… which makes no sense because I’ve met me and I know that I’m nosy, I ask questions, and I’m a yapper.

Anyway, Körner’s Folly is this fantastical wonderland that I’m livid isn’t as famous as Biltmore or the Winchester House. Back in 1880, a whimsical artist-of-every-skill-set named Jule Körner built a stunning Victorian home for his family that was both functional and showcased his endless interior design, architectural, painting, and decorating skills. Oh also? He funded this project by painting bull genitals on buildings across the Southeast for a tobacco company.

No, seriously. Jule was hired by Bull Durham Tobacco to paint advertisements on the sides of buildings across the South, but he would paint these barnside billboards late at night, when he would make the bull illustrations as anatomically correct as possible. So naturally, when the whole town would be gathered at the sign the next morning, horrified at this obscenity, Körner would be among the crowd and offer his services to “fix” the problem, which he would do by painting a smaller sign over the offending appendage.

I love it when an artist finds a lucrative niche that scandalizes folks.

Anyway, this house is unbelievable. The entire top floor of the home is a performance space where America’s first private little theatre was created. Listen, this whole article could be about the Körners. I’m obsessed with the whole family and could talk about them for days. I heard stories of an eldest daughter who wanted to see the world solo in a time when folks told her “no” and the quiet ways this family harbored and helped minorities and marginalized folks - even changing the spelling of their name from “Kerner” to the original German, so as not to be confused with their racist Kernersville kin. I stood in one of the few unrestored spaces of the house - a ballroom parlor with Jule’s original paintings - and caught myself getting far too emotional about this family I didn’t know who must have loved this gorgeous home that acted as a community hub of the conservative South. I pushed tears away again. I needed to keep moving.

In Lincolnton, I had a show at the absolutely gorgeous Historical Society Museum and event space. I was there all evening meeting folks from around the area who are excited to tell me about Knobby, the shiny-haired Bigfoot-style cryptid that lives in the area and the supposed gravesite of Jean Lafitte, who was buried under the name Lorenzo Ferrer just a couple blocks away from where we’re meeting.

I deeply love doing these shows. I feel the most alive, useful, and joyful than I think I ever have. I like being onstage when the audience begins to fill the seats to chat with new folks about their local legends and learn a little about the community I’m in for the evening. Getting to tour historical societies, elderly care facilities, and libraries checks every single one of my boxes as far as things I love: meeting new people, traveling to new places, talking about ghosts and legends, infodumping all the fun facts I’ve been collecting on my travels. I still cannot believe I’m getting paid to do this and that folks are excited to listen to me talk.

This gig also provided accommodations by way of a cottage in the back of a historic dollhouse-looking home in downtown, and I almost weep when I see that it includes a private pool. I’m supposed to drive back to the Triangle to catch Pete Holmes in Durham with friends for the evening, but the work stress of ignoring all my admin duties in lieu of twerking and travel compounded by this nonstop running-from-my-feelings spree catch up with me and I’m uhh.. unable to venture too far from the bathroom. I find ways to make the best of it by booking another night at the cottage and then taking meetings, answering emails, and sending invoices from the pool house. Despite putting in a full 8 hours, it felt the most like rest I’d had in weeks.

That evening, I swam until my legs burned and the moon was high overhead. Fireflies swarmed just over the water and I thought about how they were the same as the ones at Tanglewood. I thought about the baby bears we’d come across on our route to the venue that night, two cubs scattering as my friend turned down an unmarked backroad in the Berkshires. She gasped with excitement, and I couldn’t believe my luck. “These are the fourth and fifth bears I’ve seen this week!!” I’d exclaimed.

I guess that’s why it didn’t surprise me when, after I’d finally pulled myself out of the water, turned the lights off at the pool, and walked barefoot into the grassy yard behind my cottage to talk to the moon one last time before bed, there was already a bear there, who seemed to be enjoying the same peace I was.

I stood there watching her watch the moon for a moment, and as the soft air and gentle warmth of the night embraced us, all those emotions I’d been fleeing bubbled up inside me again. Suddenly I was crying.

I don’t know how I’m going to do this without having someone to love in my home, someone who acts as a rudder for all my major decisions, someone who gives me a reason to keep putting one foot in front of the other when I still have my doubts. But other than all of my self-pitying, I’m going to miss my smart, funny, creative, beautiful Bear so, so deeply when they’re off building the life they deserve out of the nest.

I was struggling to breathe again.

That’s when the bear looked away from the moon and spotted me. Normally black bears scurry away from people, but this one bobbed her head for a minute and held my gaze. It’s silly and egocentric to believe that animals exist for the spiritual benefit of humans but still, in that moment, tears still wet on my cheeks, I could swear she seemed to say “Give it a minute. You’ll figure it out.”

I never planned to give a speech, especially not today, the evening of Bear’s high school graduation. We’d been sitting outside, breathing the mountain air after fleeing the graduation ceremony - the thought of sitting through it too much for Bear to…um… bear - and, as per request, I was reading aloud from Willie Nelson’s memoir, which is a wise, bonkers, erratic, irreverent, bizarre tome of fantastic quotes.

Here’re some of my favorites:

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By 9:45 there are folks sitting on the floor, along the walls, being turned away. I talk for an hour and a half, loudly, with no mic. (Thank God for this booming voice of mine.)
My audience has stories of their own. One gal has brought literature about how High Point was known as “Little Chicago” at one point because a clothing store named Wright’s used to provide couture to elite mafiosi in an atmosphere away from fed surveillance. Later, I’m discussing the Love Valley Thing, a 1970 music festival held in a faux Wild West town built in Iredell county when a gentleman interrupts from the back “‘Scuse me, I hate to interrupt, but I just have to say that I was there!” This is when another gentleman on the front row turns around and shouts back, “Hey there, Earl!” The two went to high school together. Both were at the rock festival and the one on the front row tells us how he worked to help put together the 30-day festival and was paid only in weed and three meals a day. These are the types of interactions that light me up.

I sell out of all the books I’ve brought with me on the road immediately. A kind couple who stops for an autograph (!??!!??!) asks if I’d like to join them for lunch. They treat me to barbecue at a place called Sweet Old Bill’s before I hit the road.

3 PM
N. Davidson Library

This small branch is in Welcome, NC, and the librarians are kind enough to let me sit in the back room before the show to decompress on a sofa covered in 90’s style tapestry fabric with a library-book print. When I get to the performance space, a gal is already there, with a dozen eggs she’s brought from her farm as a gift. I’ve already been given a few gifts today - some handmade and some thoughtfully purchased - but I’m consistently floored. I worry that my reactions are too gigantic. I worry that all this seems like braggadoccia. I’m just full of gratitude and wonder. I can’t imagine a day where this wears off.

She tells me that she tried to get into the first show but couldn’t make it, so she drove to this one. Another woman who was at my first show arrives and sits on the second row. “Oh my god,” I pose. “Do I have groupies?!” They nod. I am stunned. “Do we need to think of a name for y’all?!?” This is wonderfully surreal.

None of it seems possible, really. I was always told not to talk loudly in libraries and here I am talking very, very loudly in a series of them. I was always told I talk too much or too loudly, that “nobody wants to hear you”, and furthermore “nobody cares.”
Turns out, none of that shit is true. I wonder what other nonsense I’ve been told that I held onto for too long.

I talk here for an hour-and-twenty and then apologize profusely as I sprint out the door. I have thirty-ish minutes to fight my way through the city’s rush hour.

6:30 PM
Forsyth County Public Library
Winston-Salem

This library is enormous - three stories tall with gorgeous atrium spaces and suspended walkways. At 5:15 I park on the street out front and walk into a lobby swarming with people.
‘Oh neat! A busy library! Good for them!’ I think.
A security guard recognizes me immediately and escorts me past a sprawling line into a full lecture hall where an AV team is setting up multiple cameras. There are about 300 people here. Many look at me excitedly.
’…Ohmygod.’ It hits me. I’ve had dreams like this. ‘They’re here for me.’
A kind-faced woman comes up and introduces herself to me, telling me I’ll be getting set up with another smiling gentleman while they’re setting up overflow rooms where folks can watch me through livestreams.

This is when my system goes offline. Sometimes I get too excited or overwhelmed or overstimulated, and my brain goes on autopilot. It started when I was a kid; sometimes in the midst of surreal overstimulation, I enter a strange dreamlike state that never arrives conveniently.

I don’t remember if I guffawed “Holy shit WHAT?!” or if I acted like a professional to this kind lady running around frantically on my behalf. I remember pulling my laptop out of my bag and connecting it to the projector in front of a few hundred folks. I remember chatting with the audience and telling a few family stories while the team was setting up, just before the kind gal came to tell me that they were at capacity and needed to turn folks away. I don’t remember what my face did in that moment. I remember talking for an hour and a half, and sometimes coming back online in the middle of this third performance of the day, the same way you sort of “wake up” halfway through your drive home, wondering how you got so far along and if you’ve missed a turn. I remember sitting and smiling at the line of people who were happy to accept a signed bookplate in lieu of a book and then doing an interview with Library NC who were there to watch. I remember gushing at them like a fangirl, telling them how much of a fan I am. I remember going to dinner with a team from WFDD, the public radio station in the area, who brought me a giant bag of swag and were excited that I’m coming to be part of their fall programming. And I remember, an hour later, falling in the door of an 80’s-themed AirBnb where I was invited to stay overnight. I remember playing Tetris on an old tube TV well into the night, my eyes glazed over as I took deep breaths and tried to return to my body.

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Listen, I was told not to talk shit by my first professional writing mentor, another local historian who gave me my first writing job as a reporter for MyrtleBeachRestaurantNews.com in 2008. As a young mom, I’d take my infant on assignment with me to report on new nibbles across the Grand Strand, often interviewing restaurateurs and chefs with Bear sleeping in a carryable carseat right on the table, mere inches from my notepad and my sample plates. Sometimes the visit would go so badly that I’d leave fuming and want to slander the company publicly, but my editor gave me incredibly wise words: “Don’t advertise for terrible people.”

And she was right. To this day, I prefer to only give ink or content attention to deserving folks, snuffing out the unworthy and dooming them to obscurity - a fate worse than being hated as far as marketing goes.

So I learned to keep it to myself… Until now, when I’ll keep it vague-ish.

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It was my first Christmas Eve alone, but for my cat Benny who had been my sole form of tangible comfort as I had been working through the tremendous grief of this breakup in the extreme isolation of the pandemic. I pulled him close, put on Dolly Parton’s “Hard Candy Christmas” (because I enjoy a soundtrack), and cried myself to sleep.

The next morning, I pulled myself together enough to trudge out the back door, hopeful about trying Christmas as a family even though our marriage was over. We were desperate to hold onto the good things that had kept us trying to make this mismatch work for more than 12 years, and we were still reasoning that, if we just adjusted the parts that weren’t working, we could still have a happy, close family.

It was annihilating what was left of me.

I pushed my back door open and felt a stop. I looked down to find a clear plastic bag of wrapped gifts just outside my storm door.

“Whaaaat is this?” I murmured into the cold.

I pulled the roughly-wrapped boxes out one by one and looked at them before unfolding the note.

It was from Randy, my next door neighbor, an elderly gentleman who greeted me with “Hey white girl!” whenever I saw him even though he, too, was a man whose folks clearly hailed from greater Caucasia. He called himself “The Vampire” because he only came out at night, and clearly suffered from post-Vietnam PTSD, as he always clutched a knife as he took out his trash or traveled back from his car across the 30 ft from his doorstep to the shared parking lot of our apartment building. He was always quick with a witticism or a filthy joke and had teased me about us running off together, although his flirtations were never inappropriate.

Inside the gifts were treasures he’d clearly scrambled to find amongst his hoarded apartment. A book from the mid-80’s about microwave meals. Another about space travel that featured my heroine, Sally Ride And an incredible, reversible Columbia jacket that was the brightest neon pink I’ve still ever seen.

I started sobbing again. It was so perfect. I wore the jacket all day, wrapped in the long, long hug I’d needed for so much of the last year.

Over the next couple years, I’d occasionally wake up to gifts. On Mother’s Day, I found a branch of our landlord/mayor-of-town’s azaleas stuffed into a crystal vase on my doorstep with a note about not letting Mr. Byrne know or he’d be “onto us!” Randy consistently checked in on me, gave me his calling cards, made sure I was eating. When I got a part-time job at a nearby bakery, I started leaving loaves of day-old bread on the doorsteps of my elderly neighbors, but Randy always got a box of cinnamon rolls topped with cream cheese icing as well, just so I could hear him jokingly rage about “some drunken crazy man” who always ate the frosting off at night before Randy could get to them in the morning.

The few times I went to visit Randy in his apartment, my heart hurt for him, too. He looked much much older than his 70 years, and his apartment was a hoard - filth sometimes splattering the walls, bottles of Jack Daniels cluttering corners, piles of clothing and mountains of books blocking the hallways and windows. His place in our historic building faced the sun, but you’d never know it given how dark he kept it. He often talked of going back to work as a pilot, which is why he was holding onto so many polyester suits piled in his bedroom where knife handles protruded from under his mattress. “In case I get jumped…” he explained, never making eye contact.

When I’d ask him about his life, he’d only tell me about the women he’d loved, the weird ones that got away - like his ex who wanted him to act like a dog in the bedroom so he left, but then one of his friends got together with her and loved it apparently. There were never talks about his time in the military, any children, any memories that weren’t silly anecdotes about his love life. He would point to a crinkled postcard on the wall of a topless, huge-haired 80’s model in a neon thong under the words “Missing you in sunny FLORIDA” and wink. “I’m just trying to get back down to see my girlfriend. She’s been naggin’ me.”

I’d notice that, on the nights when I’d come home late, he’d coincidentally take his trash out to the can just as I was getting out of my car, even at 1 AM, with enough time for him to offer the crook of his elbow to walk me the short distance from my door. The nights I walked home from work at the bakery or nearby arts center, his porch light only went off once I closed my front door behind me. There was a caged security light between our building and the back of the property that illuminated the small walkway. Randy had fought to get it installed, and if it burned out, Randy was the first to notice, nagging Mr. Byrne to replace it so “nobody got jumped in the dark.” If I went through a depression and didn’t leave the house for more than a few days, a text from Randy would appear, usually in the form of a joke instead of an inquisition as to whether or not I was alive.

I didn’t put the pieces together until he was gone- that he was acting as a guardian for me.

One morning in spring 2023, his car was crooked in its spot, and our upstairs neighbor Rachel was scrubbing the seats. Randy had had a stroke behind the wheel and was in the hospital. A 30-year-resident of the building and not at all understanding of Randy’s trauma, Rachel was furious at the state of Randy’s apartment; she took it upon herself to purge and clean out his home while he was away. When he came home a month later, Randy was 40 lbs lighter, a shell of himself and too exhausted to feel much of anything about the radical intrusion of his home. A couple months later, he passed.

At the time, I was unwell and had been mostly stuck in bed with Long Covid for many excruciating months since late 2022. I hadn’t had a chance to care for anyone in that time as I was struggling just to hold down a work-from-bed-and-not-in-a-sexy-way job, tend to Bear, and function. My heart ached at not being able to visit or help Randy - someone who lived just on the other side of a wall of my apartment.

I learned of his passing because suddenly, there was a group at his place to collect his things. I stopped a woman about my age to ask about funeral plans. She gave me a time and date, and told me the military would be present, honoring him with some enormous symbolic ceremonies. I was shocked.

“You know he was a war hero, right?” she said.

I didn’t.

“Oh yeah. He airlifted more men out from behind enemy lines than anyone in Vietnam. Got shot down over there and was a POW for a bit. Got some medals. But also, when he came home, he basically invented LifeFlight.”

“The hospital helicopters?”

“Yeah, he and a bunch of pilots he knew were the first to do it in the nation. He also worked for WRAL. He was incredible.”

I don’t remember what I said. It certainly couldn’t’ve been intelligible. As quickly as I could, I got myself in front of a computer to read his obituary.

Randolph Stuart Diuguid “Randy” died on August 11, 2023, age 74 years. Born in Wilmington, North Carolina, on November 19, 1948, the son of Blanche Heyser Diuguid and Frank S. Diuguid, Jr., he grew up in Raleigh, was active in the Lutheran Church and in the Boy Scouts of America, achieved the rank of Eagle Scout, and graduated from Broughton High School in 1966. Randy was an avid reader. Beginning in his youth, he had a keen interest in theology and, particularly, the teachings of Martin Luther. He retained an intellectual curiosity throughout his life.

He attended ECU for one year prior to enlisting in the US Army. He trained as an aircraft mechanic and an air traffic controller before being selected for Army Flight School. In March 1969, he graduated as an officer and pilot, and was assigned to the 175th Assault Helicopter Company in Vinh Long, Vietnam, in the Mekong Delta. Randy flew over 1,082 flight hours in combat and was shot down by the North Vietnamese one mile from the Cambodian border in November 1969. After the war he served a year in Stuttgart, Germany, and returned home where he was decorated at Fort Bragg in May 1971 with the Bronze Star, the Air Medal for Heroism, and with the Army Commendation Medal for his war-time service and for the medical evacuation of wounded in Vietnam.

Randy flew with the NC National Guard while continuing his education at NCSU. For the next forty years, he continued in aviation, flying helicopters, turbo-props, and jets all over the globe. He believed in and helped pioneer the LifeFlight concept and spent a significant part of his life saving lives through helicopter medical evacuation. He also flew the SKY 5 TV helicopter from 1982 to 1984. He aided in the development of safe TV helicopters and the use of microwave, reporting from the cockpit, and filming from the air, as well as beaming local news nationally via satellite. In 1984, only five helicopters in TV news nationwide had this capability--SKY 5 was one of these.

Safety was his overriding concern, even at a time when the helicopter industry ran up the worst accident record in aviation history. His helicopter flying encompassed all uses of the helicopter. Trained as a test pilot, he spent five years as a pilot flying for offshore oil in the Gulf of Mexico; two years flying off a tuna fishing vessel in the South; fought forest fires in the West, and with the NC Forest Services in 1985; three years as a dedicated LifeFlight pilot; and two more years flying cardiac care LifeFlight—the highest level of helo-medical care. He was a Captain and Chief Test Pilot for the only helicopter airline in the world, Pan Am Helicopter Airways, flying over New York City. In 1986, he was the recipient of an Air Ambassador award for five consecutive life-saving LifeFlights in one day in Tampa, Florida. Overall, he logged over 8,800 flight hours without an accident.

Randy is survived by three brothers, Frank “Scot” Diuguid, III, of Bracey, Virginia; William H. Diuguid and Bruce D. Diuguid, both of Raleigh, North Carolina; and preceded in death by his brother Douglas T. Diuguid.

A graveside memorial service with full military honors will be held at Raleigh Memorial Park, Raleigh, North Carolina, on August 26, 2023, at 10:00 a.m. The attendance of veterans and other service members and the general public, in honor of this veteran’s service to our country, would be greatly appreciated.

I sat, tears flowing freely, reading about his life through the kindnesses shared by his friends and colleagues across Facebook posts, celebrating the life of “Outlaw 13” and shaking my head. I had no idea. I had no idea.

This man lived his life in service to folks right up until he passed, despite the demons that haunted him. I know this because he’d quietly been doing it for me in a season when I needed a hero the very most.

In the month after his death, I brought a bottle of Jack Daniels black label to his stoop and sat to talk with him. I’d never shared a drink with him before, and whiskey isn’t my jam, so I just poured him a little glass with some ice while I told him how much his care meant to me in those first few years of living on my own, how deeply grateful I was for those gifts and his care. I also ranted about how pissed I was that he never told me he was great, but told him how grateful I was that I got to see it for myself. I apologized for being so stuck in my own life’s troubles, I couldn’t give anything back when he needed someone. I hoped he could forgive me.

These days, when I come home late, I ask the ghost of “the vampire” if he’ll watch me walk inside. I tell him about what I’m getting up to, and I laugh at the memory of him listening to my adventures and shaking his head, “mmmmmmmhm! Gonna keep my bail money ready!”

Sometimes I feel insane talking to myself at midnight in a parking lot, but I never feel alone. Randy’s light on the walkway keeps burning, so I never come home in the dark.

I’m writing to you from a steamy bathtub after a long day of storytelling at a festival where you are one of the paid performers next to some folks you idolize.

I thought that’d get your attention. (And not just because you don’t even know what a smartphone is yet.)

Listen, I know shit is fucking dark right now. I know that you’re still living…

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“I should be updating my subscribers,” I’m constantly thinking from the road. My Notes app is filled with snippets of essay hooks and observations I collect in the moment when I’m standing somewhere that’s inspiring me.

See? Here’re the notes I made driving up to Great Falls National Park last weekend, after spending three nights feverish, lethargic, and achy instead of performing at the Women’s Storytelling Festival:

And then disaster strikes: The minute I’m home, all of that creative energy leaves my system, and I spend months ignoring the drafts that are piling up and the guilt I feel inviting an audience into my musings just to give y’all… not much.

My bad. It’s been almost 10 years since I was a regular blogger. Turns out, it’s not at all like riding a bike.

The good news is that it’s spring! Which means my annual depression is back!… which, for me tends to be an ideal time to slow down, re-evaluate my energy, and touch back in with my written voice a little as a means to reorient and move through it.

Listen, every year I’m surprised when seasonal depression attacks me in March, as if I haven’t been experiencing this for decades at this point. (For what it’s worth, I also exclaim about the earliness of night every single December when the sun sets practically in the middle of the afternoon, so I guess I’m a sucker for novelty.) But this feels odd considering how completely I lived with literally-crippling depression before my total hysterectomy in 2017. This surgery got rid of the version of PMDD that had me stuck in bed two months of every year, catatonic, suicidal, and unable to function without intrusive thoughts derailing my simplest of motor skills no matter what diet/medication/prayer I tried. Mental illness has been more a companion and roommate than anyone else in my life since I was about 12. You’d think I’d notice when it’s come back to visit, especially when it’s right on schedule.

This isn’t a cry for help, by the way. These days, after decades of intensive experimentation and research, I know what causes it: my racing, oppressive thoughts about everything being awful and my unwillingness to tolerate it any longer are indicative of something physical going on. Specifically, I feel this overwhelming exhaustion/frustration with being alive when my system is releasing interleukins (or clusters of cytokines) and interferons when I’m fighting an infection or a North Carolina pollen storm. I felt the same way every single time I ovulated. Seems like my body can either provide a will to live or standard functional systems, but asking for both is unrealistic.

Hell, sometimes I can tell I’m about to start feeling an ear or sinus infection because my thoughts will suddenly become aggressively suicidal the day before. No seriously. I’ll be bebopping along and then suddenly “Hey, everything sucks, you should kill yourself” pops into my brain and I know I’ll be going to see a doc about some antibiotics within the week. It’s weird.

But I know how to take care of it in spring. I know I need to take antihistamines, stick to a diet that isn’t inflammatory, make sure to move my body and see real humans outside of my house, stay sober, do things that keep me from ruminating on everything that ever went wrong.

This is all far, far more science than I ever planned on learning. I was an arty theatre kid and English major for Chrissake.

It also took a lot of trial and error. I used to believe all the thoughts (because they’re very convincing. Their arguments are evidence-based and thorough; when I’m tired, it’s hard for me to argue with me.) and slowly spiral, as the thoughts fed the reality where I became less and less productive and more and more overwrought with guilt and shame until the whole thing crescendoed into an attempt to call the whole thing off, so to speak. It’s been 20 years since the last time I had a grippy-sock hospital visit; although if we’d had the finances I would’ve benefitted from a nicer one than the holding-cell treatment style found at most short-term inpatient facilities. As it was, there were many spring meltdowns that involved me calling in reinforcements to help take care of my kid, holing myself up in my room, and languishing in physical and mental agony while waiting for the storm to pass.

It’s been awhile since I had that, either.

And to be fair, despite what we’ve heard about Christmas being the most depressing season, suicide rates peak most in spring, with the majority of these events and mental hospitalizations happening in April through June. I learned this awhile back and was surprised and somewhat comforted to learn that my grouchiness isn’t unique amid the floral rebirth of spring.

So now here I am mid-pollen season, achy, grumpy, exhausted, and sick of everything. Sounds like a good time to get back to my gratitude list in the form of a travel journal.

I’m happiest when I’m exploring, whether it’s turning pages, picking a new brain, or seeing somewhere new. Sometimes when I catch myself scrolling too much, I realize I’m trying to scratch the itch that can only be satiated by moving, wandering on a trail or traveling on a backroad seeking bucolic ruins to explore.

Some weekends, Bear and I will leave early with our cameras, stop by Bojangles for a biscuit, and then spend the day driving across the countryside to explore abandoned homesteads before developers annihilate them. It’s one of my favorite rituals, and I’ve collected enough photos over the last few years that I’m currently prepping them to be part of my first gallery showing this July.

Part of this process includes scouring thrift stores, antiques malls, and yard sales for old picture frames. I want this show to look like a collection of photos one would find in an old Southern home. The theme of the show is the vanishing North Carolina I’m mourning; all the photos are taken on old film cameras - a Rolleiflex from the 1940s, a Canon AE-1 from the 1970s - and I want the presentation of them to match that aesthetic instead of the large, glossy polished images found in most galleries. I want this art to feel tangible, accessible, and lived-in. I also just like looking for treasures at antiques malls.

And frankly, if the creation of the art isn’t enjoyable, I’m just not gon’ do it.

The other thing that keeps me from being swallowed by the Void is touring.

I started traveling with my “Keep NC Weird” show a year ago, after my friend Chris Hocker of Strange Carolinas fame referred me for a program at the Durham Public Library and I put together this presentation of oddities I’ve been hearing about my whole life. I’ve been able to take this show from the coast to the mountains, talking about the weird history, ghost stories, and people who’ve called North Carolina home (we had Blackbeard AND Andre the Giant!!) and it’s honestly been this incredible way to get me out of a rut.

I make a day of it, waking up early, moseying to my destination, stopping at mom-and-pop restaurants on my way and asking them about their ghosts, cool local spots off the beaten path, local history. Other than stops at Bojangles, I’m not one to be found in whatever shiny new chain restaurant just popped up - catch me in a greasy spoon named after the owner’s weird nickname. Bonus points if the building is in an old house or made entirely of cinderblock.

I keep thinking I’ll start a Fieri-style series on these places, but I’ve learned that folks tell me more and treat me kinder if I’m not there to “mAkE CoNtEnT”, so instead, I turn off my business/stage accent and just talk to the staff. That’s when the magic happens.

Last year, in Statesville (which has been among my favorite of the stops so far) I pulled a U-ey when I saw this old house that had a sign out front indicating there would be a country-style buffet and, not only was I right on the money, but the owners were delighted to tell me about their ghost while I ate chicken’n’dumplin’s. Jackpot.

I planned to tell y’all about the day, meandering through the rolling hills of Iredell County between three library stops, talking to the locals about the Kangaroo Man of Allison Woods and asking which of ‘em remembered The Love Valley Thing, North Carolina’s answer to Woodstock that happened just up the road in 1970. The Allman Brothers headlined the three-day festival, held in Love Valley, a western-style town built for East Coast cowboys in 1954 that still stands today as the Cowboy Capital of the East.

I’d also tell y’all about the prize from that trip being this incredible book by former Statesville journalist Marty P. Harris, who published this collection of photos and quotes he gathered while backpacking across the Old North State in 1987. It is incredible, with gorgeous photos and vignettes of a South that I remember only softly.

Instead, the essay of this lovely, magical day sat in my Drafts vault for nine months, a half-baked pile of whimsy, along with the others.

So I’m getting back to it. Writing as a meditation more than therapy or survival.

The thing is, as I push through this Season of Pollen and Despair, there’s a lot to look forward to. And a lot I’ll want to talk about the minute it happens. And, after 30-some years of this weird, stubborn, monotonous demon launching attacks at me, it still hasn’t taken me out yet, and hasn’t come close in a very long time.

I used to say I have depression, but these days I’ve got that fucker’s number.

So away we go.

It’s hard to explain why I trust him. It’s even harder to explain why I’ve brought my kid along.

“Mom, I’m 18. I can do what I want. Let’s go,” I’m told as Bear bounds out of the car, cutting off my audible moment of panic.

We’ve spent the day in Smithfield, North Carolina, home of Ava Gardner, one of the brightest stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age, whose family reached out and invited me to visit the Ava Gardner Museum after I made a short TikTok video biography about this local gal who made it big. Somehow, despite growing up in the same state where she was born and loving old movies, Gardner was one I missed until recently, when I started digging a little into her life and y’all?

I’m obsessed with this woman.

I had no idea what a strong, kind, generous, anti-racist, independent powerhouse Ava was. All I knew before we came on this adventure was that “she didn’t have a great reputation around here”, according to the old-timers who told me about her when I was growing up. How utterly foolish of me for not realizing that this is code for “folks didn’t like a woman who wouldn’t be controlled and lived life loudly and on her own terms.”
I really should know better by now.

Anyway, Ava was born a poor-as-dirt daughter of a sharecropper out in the rural township of Brogdon (which is 8 miles outside Smithfield… which is 32 miles southwest of Raleigh), North Carolina, in another microscopic area called “Grabtown”. She loved running around barefoot, climbing trees and watertowers, and getting into trouble sitting with her friends of color in the segregated section of the movie theatre and beating the shit out of dudes who messed with her. When she was 18, she visited her sister in New York City, whose husband asked her to pose for a photo in the window of his store. A year later, an MGM talent scout saw her face, recognized greatness when he saw it, and asked to bring her in for a screen test. Apparently, Ava’s Johnston County accent was so thick nobody in LA could understand her and her screen test was done in silence. However, with a face and figure like that, they went ahead and got her some training, put her in some movies, and she would’ve lived the life of a chorus girl if she hadn’t gone ahead and married the biggest star in the MGM Studio family, Mickey Rooney.

This absolute clown married her and started cheating on her immediately so, in a bold move, she left him just a year later. He went on to marry 7 more unlucky women. She married Artie Shaw a couple years later and then divorced that guy because he treated her like an idiot just because she was from a small town in the South. All the while her star ascended, she became a leading lady, and the press started hounding her, especially when she got into an absolutely insane relationship with Frank Sinatra. You know those people who are madly in love but terrible for each other in ways that’s a pain in the ass to everyone in their vicinity? That’s these two. Anyway, this lasted a few crazy, on-and-off, violent years before the couple split but I’m gonna be honest: Ava’s love life is the least interesting thing about this woman. I don’t care that their breakup is what saved Frank’s career because he started cranking out sad songs in her wake, but I do think it’s funny that Rooney came to her museum and signed a bumper sticker that reads “Honk if you’ve married Mickey Rooney”. It’s here on display.

It’s the artifacts at the museum that really bring her stories to life more than anything else I’ve read: The certificate from the NAACP that shows she became a lifetime member in 1968, the couture she’d mailed to fans and underprivileged girls because she had no use for them anymore and wanted them to be worn by someone deserving, the gun that was given to her on the set of “Night of the Iguana” with bullets that have her costars’ names engraved on them as a joke from the director during a time when rumors were circulating about the cast loathing each other.

Here, I learn about a woman who ascended above the Hollywood noise. A North Carolina girl at heart, she walked everywhere she could barefoot even after she moved to Madrid. She never stayed tethered to anywhere that wouldn’t let her shine, and many of her family in Smithfield earnestly believed that the reason she grew into a happy, wealthy elderly woman was because she escaped the Hollywood machine and moved somewhere she could breathe. Gardner was a pioneer for dismantling the exploitative ownership system of the early-days film studios, fighting for actors’ rights, but she was also a consistently fierce advocate for her friends and neighbors of color, campaigning with presidential candidate Henry A Wallace in 1948 on his integrationist platform - a move that sent MGM into hysterics, threatening her livelihood. She answered by hanging up the phone, daring them to cut off one of their highest-profiting actors.

Over her lifetime, this unfathomable beauty was mocked, ridiculed, assaulted, stalked, and disparaged, but she never lost her shine. I get emotional looking at photos of her becoming an older woman living a life of peace and self-earned luxury.

I gasp at a photo of her waterskiing to work each morning on her way to the set of “Iguana”; in it, she is my age.

I was invited here by Joe Creech, a retired military local and relative of Ava’s who is on the board of directors for the museum. He saw a slightly misinformed video I made about Gardner on TikTok and was gracious enough to correct me in my DMs, where I made quick work of asking every single thing I could about this gal who was once billed “The World’s Most Beautiful Animal”. Joe and his wife Bev are my tour guides for the day, showing me around the museum and filling me in on the stories that aren’t included on the placards. He points to a dress made of silk given to Ava by some obsessed billionaire aviator dude named Howard Hughes who wouldn’t take “no” for an answer.

“They were arguing in a restaurant and she clocked him on the head and knocked him out,” Joe’s eyes twinkle as he talks about the most glamorous assault I’ve ever heard. He has dozens of stories like this and of the collection itself, like how Ava’s relatives bringing the star’s old belongings to the museum in old Food Lion bags and how most of the collection was provided by a man who was obsessed with her since they were kids.

“He used to ride by Ava and her sisters on his bike, teasing them. So one day, Ava chased him down, tackled him off his bike, and kissed him hard.” This man (whose name escapes me even though Joe repeats it a dozen times) went on to purchase her childhood home and fill it with Ava ephemera even though he had long moved to Florida. No insights on how his wife felt about this.

Joe and Bev entertain my wonder and endless questions for hours as we make our way around the collection and I am utterly euphoric when Joe invites me back into the archives where I get to see unphotographable treasures like her original MGM lot ID and SAG card. I’m excitedly chattering with the archivist when I notice Joe getting antsy and realize we’re only an hour out from sunset.

Earlier, he’d asked if I wanted to ride with him out to what he described as the “house with the murder conspiracy” and I had to admit, I didn’t know what he was talking about. It somehow got muddled in the talk about riding out to see Ava’s birthplace and childhood homes, and I conflated the idea that there’d been a murder at one of Ava’s residences, but listen, he had me with “do you wanna ride out…” because the answer is always a resounding “YAY I’M BRINGING CHEERWINE!” when it comes to me and road trips.

15 minutes and 7.5 miles driving down ever-narrowing country highways, and I realize that, out of context, this doesn't look great for a single gal with a kid.

'Hunh…' I think. 'I'm not demonstrating the importance of thoroughly vetting strangers from the internet before following them out to a second location for my progeny very well.'

Every single bit of social training I've learned from murder podcasts goes out the window when we pull up to the abandoned 90-year-old Creech residence. I have a moment where I wonder aloud, "Hey, is this okay?" before my kid and I agree that, for some reason, we just get good vibes from this Joe fella we've met only a few hours before. And, since our intuitions haven't steered us wrong, we follow him into the house.

Immediately, my anxiety spikes. Somehow, despite being abandoned since the 1960s, with the doors opened and the house exposed to the elements, it's in remarkable condition. My fears of falling through rotten floors are quickly assuaged as I notice intact carpeting and old newspaper laying peacefully around the house. Still, I have this horrible feeling the moment we pass through the threshold.

Joe is telling us about murder of Mattie Creech, which happened in this house in 1949. One dark and stormy summer evening, Mattie came to this home, which was occupied by Ava’s sister Elsie Mae Gardner Creech. Mattie had married James Creech, a wealthy, college-educated tobacconist who was a mean, violent drunk and it was him that she was escaping this evening. “Jimmy” came by the house and tried to coax Mattie home by offering her a bag of peaches, but when she told him to go home, he flew into a rage. Joe shows me the room where the confrontation happened and keeps walking us down the hall toward the back of the house as my anxiety grows. The family, hearing Jimmy return, fled down this hallway and into the bedroom when they heard him screaming that he was going to kill his wife.

“This is where I stop,” I say, standing in the doorway. I was shaking and trying desperately to keep my cool.

“Really?” Joe is surprised. He’s standing inside the room with Bear.

“Yeah,” I laugh so, so awkwardly. “It’s weird. I’m a fraidy cat.”

“I’d think you’d be -” Joe starts.

“I know. I know. It’s so silly.”

‘Ohgodohgodohgod’ my brain screams. I’m leaning against the doorway, fighting my eyes from rolling back in my head, fighting my stomach to keep from churning, fighting my consciousness from escaping.

“Alright, well,” Joe continues. “Elsie, Mattie, and [a man who was staying with the family named] Johnnie Grimes were pressed against the door holding it shut right there. Jimmy shot a hole in it and it tore through Mattie. Her body matter splattered all over the room.”

My blood runs cold. I’m standing exactly where Jimmy had murdered his wife. Suddenly, I’m able to move again.

Joe walks us through the scene, telling us about how the family had escaped through the back door and out into the stormy midnight. The two youngest tenants escaped across the street, one family member attempted to hide under the front porch, and Elsie Mae fell into the mud as she jumped off the small porch on the back of the house. She was laying on the ground when she heard Jimmy come out to the stoop, his shoes just inches from where she lay, and scream “Elsie Mae, I’m going to kill you!” She then heard him walk back into the room, fire another shot into Mattie’s head, and stagger back out the front door.

My blood runs cold. I’m standing exactly where Jimmy had murdered his wife. Suddenly, I’m able to move again.

Joe walks us through the scene, telling us about how the family had escaped through the back do

I am riveted. It’s the most cinematic story I’ve ever heard about an abandoned house I’m still standing in and I ask a million questions. We see the rest of the house, (where “Mama Creech” refused to return but where tenants stayed until the 60’s) and Joe AirDrops me the audio of Mary Edna Grantham, who was one of the kids staying at the crowded house that night retelling her memory of the events. It is 42 minutes long and I try not to laugh about what an incredible birthday gift this is.

The conspiracy is, simply, that when Jimmy was executed by the state for his crimes, it made news because he was the first man in North Carolina with a college education to face capital punishment. That this happened to the sister of Ava Gardner also didn’t help. A reporter outside the execution chamber saw a jacket inside that looked like it belonged to Frank Sinatra and, needing a standout line for his article, published a conspiracy that Ava and Frank had paid off the local government and flown this murderer to Cuba for god only knows what reasons.

I don’t know how this day could get better, but as the sun sets, we follow Joe to a two-story farmhouse at a quiet intersection amid fields and forests. Joe tells us that this is where Ava was born, where she first crawled out onto the roof over the porch and was saved by being coaxed back inside with a peach (I notice a theme here!) by a man named Rat.

Joe explains that the birthplace marker is actually at the next location, a place once known as the Teacherage, where Ava and her siblings grew up and where the boy she dazzled with a violent childhood kiss once collected her belongings. It is now a private residence, halfway between the murder house and the birthplace, on tiny backroads a half-mile apart.

Joe waves broadly “Allll of this is Creech property. This is all my family.” He shows us where Ava first climbed a water tower when she was 5 and had to be rescued by her brother - a pattern that continued for years.

What I love the most about these stories is that, the more I gush about loving this woman, the more he admits “If she were standing here, she’d tell you she was just a woman with a job. She’d want to talk to you about what you do. I never knew she was a movie star when I’d see her when I was a kid. She’d just be ‘Aunt Ava’, smoking, laughing, and swearing with everybody.”

There’s a moment when I’m standing in front of her birthplace and I remember having seen the sculpture made of Ava as Venus by Alberto Vargas earlier that afternoon for “One Touch of Venus”, a film in which Gardner plays the goddess herself. Joe is telling me about her sleeping in the tobacco barn at nights, running barefoot around these dirt roads, and climbing water towers nearby and I get choked up realizing how much she and I have in common.

Venus was a North Carolina gal. Just like me.

Somehow, like the dream premonition in the woods, I am able to quickly compartmentalize the terror of having a full on paranormal experience while naked and in a bathtub. I refuse to entertain it for another minute. There is a storm to weather.

That night, I am the most anxious I’ve been since I arrived. Not just because I’d heard a gang of spectres outside my bathroom, but because, by sundown, heavy snowfall has been accumulating for five solid hours and shows no sign of letting up. I watch the garden lights come on under the maze of pruned boxwoods just below my window, illuminating the snow blowing sideways. I try not to think about “The Shining”.

The old manor is loud with the sounds of wind pressing against the doors and windows, and my fingers are numb despite wearing a blanket over two layers of clothes. If the power goes out in the middle of the night while there is a blizzard and I am the only person on this entire 26-acre estate stuck in a pitch black haunted mansion, I will lose any semblance of sanity I have left.

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For a collector and teller of North Carolina ghost stories, being left alone in a historic haunted mansion that has hosted literary greats since 1922 during a snowstorm under a full Imbolc moon sounds like an absolute dream come true. Somehow, this role has instead fallen to me, The World’s Biggest Fraidy Cat who, for some reason, has decided that this is the quest-of-a-lifetime I must complete.

Y’all, I don’t know why I’ve committed to this. Maybe I’m a masochist. Maybe my curiosity knows no bounds. Maybe it’s because my therapist and I have been working on facing the fears that hold me back from the things I dream of doing. Maybe because I want to recreate that final dance number from “Saltburn” at least once in my life.

Since I’ve started talking about Southern lore, history, and off-the-wall fun facts on TikTok and Instagram, I’ve garnered attention from all kinds of incredible establishments (like the Ava Garner Museum, the Moravian Archives in Old Salem,) who’ve wanted me to come visit, share stories, and learn about their history/work. I’ve already gotten to visit the Moravian Archives, the Ava Gardner Museum, and this week, I’ve been invited to the Weymouth Center of Arts & Humanities in Southern Pines, North Carolina.

Despite growing up in this area, attending school a couple blocks away, and visiting the Campbell House across the street possibly a thousand times, I didn’t know much about the Weymouth Center outside of it being a big fancy old place I attended to perform in piano competitions when I was in junior high school some 30 years ago. As a lifelong writer, North Carolina historian, and holder of an English BA in Literary Arts, that I didn’t know about the Weymouth Center’s role as one of the major hubs of creative energy that fueled the Southern Renaissance is frankly embarrassing.

I learn best in person, by seeing things up close and asking approximately 700,003 questions of whoever is giving a tour. Luckily, program director Julie Borshak is as delighted to share her vast wealth of knowledge about a place she loves as I am and was happy to tell me everything she knew about the Chateau-style manor. Built in 1922 by writer James Boyd, this sprawling estate sits on 26 acres and backs up to a section of Weymouth Woods State Park, a 900 acre nature preserve that was once part of Boyd’s land.

After I’ve chatted with staff, unpacked my things, and gotten a comprehensive tour of the grounds, including the stables and the Lamont Cottage where Katharine Boyd lived before she married James (which is strange and I’m not quite sure I understand why she built a whole house on the property where her boyfriend was, but I’m sure the answer has something to do with untold wealth) I head off into the woods, eager to see the nearby Oldest Known Longleaf Pine Tree in the World. This is something I did not know existed in my childhood hometown, let alone a half mile from the Weymouth Center.

It is while I’m hiking that my first moment of supernatural terror occurs.

I need to be quick if I’m going to find this tree, which I’ve heard is nothing remarkable in a forest that is full of 400-year-old pines. The pine forest is stark and scrubby, with indications of a recent controlled burn singed across the tree trunks that I keep mistaking for human forms as the sun dips below the treeline.

Once when I was a child, I had a very vivid nightmare in which I was in a forest and I was terrified. Specifically, I was at a trail switchback point and everywhere I looked were trees with two solid white bands about a foot apart, circling the trunks with black in between them. I have had thousands of nightmares in my life, but this is one that I wrote in my first diary and have thought of at least once every few years for the last 40-ish. Imagine my horror when, as I’m staggering through the woods toward where my GPS is telling me this ancient pine is, I look up from my phone and realize I am in the exact perspective of that dream. Suddenly, I am awash with an unspeakable terror. Shaking, I turn in the dead winter silence, looking around me and recognizing this premonition in full as the forest grows darker.

I simply cannot believe it. What does this mean!?

I am startled when an older couple appears on the path behind me; blustering out of my stupor, I ask if they know where the old pine is. They point through the woods and tell me my best bet is to go off-trail in a direct line. Somehow I’m able to tuck my fear in my pocket to bushwack to the tree, which is, as I’d heard, not much different than the thousands around it.

That night, in defiance of my lifelong cowardice, I dive headfirst into the file of newspaper clippings and written testimony about the Weymouth Center’s paranormal phenomena that was given to me by Borshak. She is the first employee of the facility to want to publicize the hauntings of this gorgeous manor and we hit it off immediately by sharing spooky stories together.

I listen, enrapt, as she tells me about the ghost of Isabel, a friend of the Boyds who was staying in the house when she received a letter from her husband who was away fighting in WWII writing to say that he’d heard rumors of her infidelities and would be divorcing her once he arrived home. In her despair, Isabel took a gun to the balcony just outside of her room, fired a practice round into the air, and then, with a second shot, turned herself into a ghost. This is the spirit most of the staff talks about encountering in the house.

However, the spirit of Katharine Boyd remains around the front bedroom where she passed away and staff make sure to greet her in the morning and tell her “goodnight” in the evenings. Staff have shared stories of feeling touched as they lock up at night, hearing voices from elsewhere in the home when alone in the building, and watching heavy exterior doors unlatch, open as though someone is coming in, and then gently close again. In this file, there is a 5-page long (single spaced! 11 pt font!) email from a former employee chronicling the hauntings she experienced in the early 1990’s that were so terrifying she continued to have nightmares about the house for two decades following and refused to ever return. She spoke of “constant activity”, seeing objects move on their own, hearing whole parties going on in empty parts of the house and once, being shoved down a staircase by an unseen hand so hard that she was frightened it had terminated her pregnancy.

I regret reading this so late into the night and, even though I am not alone in the house the first night, I sleep with my bedroom lights on.

I spend a couple full days writing in the newly-renovated Lamont Cottage, where Mrs. Boyd lived before she married Mr. Boyd and where the writing vibes are immaculate. Looking out the window at my childhood habitat, I understand why wintering anywhere else in the world has made me terribly depressed. Thank God for evergreens.

On Friday, I give a luncheon storytelling presentation about North Carolina’s oddities and spookiest history in the grand ballroom of the house, giggling to myself that this is the same room where, late one night almost 100 years ago, Thomas Wolfe drunkenly broke in in the middle of the night and passed out on a couch where staff found him snoring the next morning. Apparently, he had arrived by train a day earlier than expected and, in an inebriated state so late at night, didn’t know the correct protocol for checking in when his friends were inside sleeping.

The storm is set to start early the next morning, so the other writer in residence takes her leave, and the staff all give me their personal numbers in case something happens. More than one offers her personal residence as a sanctuary in case I lose power. I have been left with a full refrigerator of charcuterie and sandwiches left over from my event, an industrial camping battery pack, and instructions to help myself to “any wine or beer if things get too dire”.

I get to sleep about 1 AM, after an evening of writing, texting friends about my unique weekend circumstances and trying not to psyche myself out from sounds of this old house. The crashing ice machine gives me a start every 45 minutes and the incessant dripping of faucets I’ve engaged to keep the pipes from freezing plays tricks on my brain, convincing me that someone is shuffling up and down the narrow corridors. Around 11 PM, my keyboard began slowly malfunctioning, the keys sticking, lagging, or just not typing anything. I futzed with this for a few minutes before I got tired of trying to troubleshoot; my fingers were freezing, I was exhausted, and I assumed I just needed to load some updates on this chronically-awake device. I opted out of drinking anything alcoholic in order to keep my wits about me and instead went for dim light, a book from one of the manor’s endless shelves, and a fraction of a dose of my prescribed Seroquel, which I only keep on me for sleep-on-the-road-in-strange-places purposes.

Every morning since I arrived, I been awoken by an unusual gentle, almost-erotic moan while I’ve been laying in bed. The morning of the storm, I finally realize this is from the construction crew working across the field in the backyard and not some horny ghost just outside my door.

In my pajamas, I pace through the house and find it exactly how I left it. A light on in every room. Balloons sitting in the center of the dance floor.

Somehow I feel the calmest I have since I arrived.

The truth is that the ghosts inside this place aren’t the ones I’m most afraid of. It’s the ones nestled around this neighborhood that sent me into an unexpected panic attack the first night I was here.

When I left at 14, I was at a dark inflection point that took years to work through. I’d always been loud and curious, someone who got her kicks oversharing, overachieving, and verbally processing through debate and questions—which earned me a lot of ire. In church, I was ridiculed and shamed when I asked clarifying questions about inconsistencies in the material. As a girl, my role was to listen and accept, even when things didn’t make sense. My peers didn’t love my exhaustive know-it-all demeanor, and later openly hated it when I grew boobs and started talking about social issues. School felt like a warzone. So did home, but for very different reasons.

I told friends, Girl Scout leaders, and school faculty that I’d started obsessing about ending my life in sixth grade. Because I carried myself well and made decent grades, I was shrugged off as melodramatic and attention-seeking. By the time we moved away in 1997, I’d learned to carry this pain alone and treat the world as an antagonist. My high school years saw my grades and will to live plummet as I accessed different means of self-medication. I was an angry, miserable, suffering child told it was my fault for being like this. It’s a version of myself I’ve worked hard to save.

Now, at 43, after more than two decades of therapy, the right medication, a hysterectomy at 34 to stop the hormone-fueled suicidal ideation, and removing people who hurt me and then told me I deserved it, I’m someone different. I’m not locked in perpetual fight-or-flight. I don’t ruminate on the past trying to make sense of how I got it wrong. Recovery is cool.

Which is why it surprised me when I descended into obsessive panic driving back into Southern Pines. My nerves felt as raw as if the skin was peeled clean off, like that time I cut the tip of my thumb off and stupidly ran it under cold water. The memories hit in one massive download. Suddenly, I was immersed in every event at every location I passed, the ache of nostalgia colliding with visceral trauma wracking my nervous system. Add to that my frustration for even having this reaction and suddenly my old Antagonist was screaming judgments at me, “Oh here we go with the drama again. Also, why can you still remember all my childhood friends’ birthdays, phone numbers, and addresses from 30 years ago, but can’t commit my own kid’s cell number to memory? ”

Why now? I’ve driven through this town dozens of times, sometimes taking my kid around to see old landmarks and my personal happy-memory places. Why was this anxiety leaping out at me now?

I’m a pro at managing this though. Adolescent Liz freaking out is met with middle-aged Recovery Liz, who’s been at this for more than half her life, capable of observing and tending with grounding exercises. Even when the Antagonist echoes the judgment of ghosts who were once close to me (“Jesus fucking Christ, Elizabeth, why are you like this all the goddamn time? This is so melodramatic. Can’t we just have a normal vacation? We’re just going to a pretty house. None of that shit exists anymore. It’s been decades. Why aren’t we over it yet? You’ve experienced way worse than being a white girl in the suburbs. Grow up already.”), Recovery Me makes quick work of shutting her down. The Antagonist is the real enemy—she’s the one who kept calling for me to end it all for so long, and we don’t waste time arguing with her. Recovery Liz takes the wheel, focuses our eyes on the leisurely drive through picturesque downtown, reminding myself nothing’s actually wrong. I’m safe. Nobody’s going to attack me. Deep breaths. Hands on the leather steering wheel. Eyes on quiet roads wending through evergreen forests. It’s fine. We’re fine.

The day of the storm, I spend the morning writing and then get distracted when my coffee kicks in and take the opportunity to film myself being dramatic, melancholy, and wearing something flowy and puffy-sleeved.

I need whimsy, dammit, or I will suffocate.

It begins snowing in early afternoon and suddenly, I am 8 years old again in this small town, unable to focus or do anything else because I cannot stop watching the flurries from my window. The world is quiet. There are no expectations and nobody cares about social norms.

There was one winter when I was about 12 when the town iced over and because my neighborhood was a 1-mile loop in a gulley only accessible by steep declines that were buried under two inches of ice, we were stranded. The kids spent days in the same playclothes, rocketing down ice-slicked hills on sleds, trash can lids, or in recycling bins. My siblings and I only remembered to eat when we heard our mom ringing her old school bell through the woods that backed up to our backyard.

It’s Pavlovian how this version of me engages immediately at the first fight of flurries. Within minutes, I am bundled up and leaving the manor to see who else is out and about.

After an hour wandering the grounds, chatting with other marvelers and taking photos, my fingers are numb, and I step back inside with visions of a warm bath. I have a bottle of green mint alcohol and a sack of eucalyptus Epsom salt for just such an occasion. I set up my own personal spa in the one bathroom with a deep tub and, as it fills, I walk from window to window, allowing myself to be enchanted by the snowfall. As I cross through the room that houses the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame I notice that one of the front-facing windows doesn’t have a screen, so I turn the latch and begin to push it open when I hear a terrified scream just below that makes me recoil.

“OH MY GOD!” a kid walking just below the window with an adult is pointing up toward the window. I step back, not wanting to be seen in my bathrobe. I can still hear him shouting. “Did you SEE THAT?! There’s someone in the house!!… No I SWEAR. There was a lady in THAT window!!…. no seriously, Dad!!”

I snicker to myself. I am the terrifying specter in the spooky haunted mansion. What a dream come true. This is truly the life I have envisioned for myself.

I feel myself finally relax, and I climb into the tub, unable to see out of the windows because of the thick steam clouding the room. I drift into a sweaty haze, breathing in deeply, and with every muscle that relaxes, I realize how tightly wound I’ve been since I got here.

My trance is interrupted when I hear voices and footsteps in the hall. A woman and a man or two, talking casually. “Shit.” I must’ve forgotten to lock the exterior door behind me when I came back inside and some hikers are looking around the museum. I also did not lock this bathroom door, foolishly assuming I didn’t need to.

Trying not to panic, I quickly lift myself from the tub, wrap myself in my robe, and slam my feet into my slippers. I peek my head into the hall, wondering if I should lock the downstairs exterior door now to keep out more visitors, or lock myself in the bathroom indefinitely for modesty reasons until the current ones are gone.

I ponder this for about 15 seconds at the top of the very staircase that the one former employee was pushed down when I realize I can’t hear any voices anymore. Quietly, I skip-run-glide through the top floor, listening at the staircases for the voices. Nothing.
I sneak down the front staircase nearest to the foyer. Nothing.
The front door is locked. So are the doors to the ballroom. And the dining room. And the back door to the kitchen.

I am locked into the house. And, until this moment, I had still sort of hoped I was alone.

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I’ve just taken myself to the David LaChapelle retrospective, one of two the museum is hosting this spring to honor UNC School of Arts’ most famous contemporary photographer, which I’ve looked forward to for months. I’ve been enrapt with LaChapelle since his work electrified me from newsstands in the early-90’s. As a childhood fan of Rainbow Brite and my Gran’s technicolor home (decorated by designer Bill Culp), I was dazzled by the pop satirist’s hypersaturated caricatures of Hollywood in ways I didn’t get much of living in a small, conservative town with “Southern” in its name.

So why, exactly, did seeing his enormous works right up close cause my simmering fury to boil over into tears? Why was this the thing that broke the dam?? I wonder as I let myself be beguiled by the carrot cake croutons some culinary genius has thrown on field greens and tossed with strawberry champagne vinaigrette.

Recently, I’ve caught myself re-watching “Will & Grace” for the 7,000th time, reciting along with the jokes and feeling like I could breathe only when the protagonists were telling each other hard truths, calling each other on their respective faults, and choosing to love each other anyway. The envy I feel for these characters is the same I feel when I watch those women from northern states who move through the world with brash outspokenness - stating their thoughts, hurling up boundaries, clocking others’ bullshit with ease. My God, what luxury.

I remember when I used to be this way, starting when I was very young. I remember being called “loud”, “bossy”, and “too much” even back in preschool. I also remember the people who didn’t like the way my mouth worked when I saw truths that made them look bad, and I remember how I got treated because of it. I remember how much it continues to hurt. I remember when I started being quiet and started swallowing myself to appease the folks around me, keeping their secrets, saying what they wanted me to, acting like everything was alright with me all the time.

To keep myself safe, I began preemptively telling myself the things I’d heard about my mouth, my art, my truths and repeating them ad nauseam in hopes to keep me in check. It mostly works, and when it doesn’t, I’m smart enough to know to apologize profusely to disarm the offended. I know how to charm folks, how to match energies, and keep the hard things I recognize to myself. But I don’t know where the line is, so I usually get real hurt before I express my discomfort, and then it explodes out of me in ways I’m embarrassed about and get accused of overreacting to. I often wonder what it’d feel like to just say the hard thing in the moment instead of waiting for it to build.

I also know exactly how to stop myself before I get to be “too much”; that’s the precious side of me I take into the woods, out on the water, or on the road and scream out into the void. I retreat a lot; not because I don’t like who I am, but because I want to give that honest side of myself the space to breathe away from people who tell me, show me, in a million ways that I’m not safe to around them.

I like that version of me best. I always have.

Don’t worry, Patient Reader; my therapist and I are working on it.

But standing in front of the LaChapelle’s enormous, excessively pigmented, obvious “too muchness”, all of my self-directed protective voices got very, very loud.

All the “Art is pointless; a materialistic waste that doesn’t change anything.” “You could never express yourself this freely because [insert stupid-ass reason three dozen close friends or family have said]”, “My God, you would be crucified if you attempted this type of imagery”, nonsense bubbled up until I was vibrating and then, standing in his Stations of the Cross series, crying and through gritted teeth, I hissed at myself

“JUST LET ME BREATHE”

And now I’m sitting here, savoring this salad that I’m eating next to an enormous woven sculpture by Patrick Dougherty hanging from the wall, and poking holes in every single one of those voices’ played-out arguments, citing the idiocy of their claims and trying not to cry at my server, who is handsome, doing a great job, and doesn’t need to field whatever I’m working through.

The truth is, Reader, my public writing sucks these days because it’s performative nonsense I wouldn’t read. I’m busy trying to make a bunch of invisible voices happy that ultimately amount to the same sentiment: “Don’t express yourself and don’t create authentically.” It’s bullshit. And I’m angry all the time because I’m swallowing this exterior cowardice and I’m becoming a coward just like they’re projecting on me. Even as I write this, that realization is absolutely infuriating. What a slap in the face to a God who gave me the gifts of a loud voice and Cassandra’s ability to see patterns and truths.

Gross. And that’s enough.

Listen, I don’t read good-vibes-only travelogue drivel and I’m not proud to write it. I want to tell y’all the whole story when I travel because that’s the type of writing I enjoy. I like reading about humans being fucked-up, weirdo humans and I want to write as one of those fucked-up weirdos in the midst of it. I like writers like Cat Marnell, John Waters, Hunter S. Thompson and even Bill Bryson when he’s getting real with us. I like reading weirdos who write about other weirdos and I like meeting other weirdos. And I’m literally sick and exhausted of creating hot garbage to take care of feelings of folks I don’t even like and appease people who are probably working through their own silence.

I want to write about the whole story here. Like, for example, how I didn’t know that the dude who invited me to join him on a work trip to research Old Christmas was a homicide detective until we got to the party full of Outer Banks outlaws and how, when I hugged my local friends ‘hello’ I had to murmur “ohmyGodI’msosorryIdidn’tknowthisdudewasacopuntil10minutesagosodon’tofferhimwhateveryouhave.” realquick in their ears. And I didn’t tell y’all that the next morning, when I was asking about how Old Christmas seemed more peaceful than legend had it, the friends who hosted me told me that it’s because the man whose son led Old Buck through the crowd had been murdered the previous Valentine’s Day and everyone in Rodanthe knows what happened but, because they had bad relations with the cops (for valid reasons), it had been ruled a suicide (which is impossible because he was found face-down in a mud puddle, gripping the grass like he was being held down which is not how one would take themselves out if they lived on a sandbar and owned a firearm) and everyone in the town knows who did it and is afraid of that guy so nothing happens other than starting a hashtag campaign to get the authorities to investigate. (inhaaaaaales) And I didn’t tell y’all that this information made me very excited and I’d be learning how to do citizens investigations from my aforementioned research colleague if he hadn’t fucked up and decided not to tell his wife that he’d invited a single woman to an island party overnight so now I’ve gotta put some distance there because I have exactly zero interest in appearing like a homewrecker… again…

See? I didn’t fabricate anything; I just didn’t tell all of the truth, which I believe is a lie. Which means my creations have been as frustrating as those godawful beige rainbows that’ve been trendy in suburban decor for the last few years. What’s the point of half the concept?

So now I’m chomping away, scrolling through all the work I’ve produced in the last two decades and seeing how my real voice has gotten quieter and quieter in all of it. Oh, I’m making palatable noise - it’s charming! and funny! and marketable! - but none of it is exciting to write and I’m not proud to show it off, really.

It feels like more swallowing the truth and performing nonsense which isn’t inspiring me to keep doing it.

So we’re not gonna do that here. Here, I’m going to dump all of it, so I can lighten up already.

Thanks, LaChapelle.

I remember when I started; it was the minute I learned how to hold a pencil and make shapes that others could magically understand in Mrs. Granger’s kindergarten class. Suddenly, I was obsessed with this ability to write in public code; I scribbled to myself in my diary, to my friends in notes passed in class and letters I sent across my small town, to the ether in stories that were absolutely terrible. My first short story was entitled “The Witch Called Mississippi” and it was because “Mississippi” was the longest, most exotic word I knew how to spell at the time. Plot didn’t matter back then; I wrote and illustrated this tome on that grey newsprint on which we learned penmanship - with the blue guidelines at the bottom and space for art at the top - and my mother stapled my manuscript between two halves of a file folder I’d decorated as the cover. Behold, my first publication.

In the decades that followed, I wrote constantly. My drive felt natural; I couldn’t sleep until I’d put my hand to paper at least for a little bit. Starting from when I was in 1st grade, I wrote short stories I later entered into local writers contests, and wrote letters back and forth to anyone who’d respond (Shout out to half of my Girl Scout troop, everyone I ever met at camp, and my dad’s cousin Jacque, whom I met at a family wedding when I was 8 and wrote letters with for years.) In the 6th grade, when mental illness first started wreaking havoc on my psyche, I got myself a packet of blue notebook paper that I wrote truly godawful poems on. I hoarded and wrote postcards from everywhere I could find them. I wrote series of letters to pass to classmates in the halls between classes that could fill volumes and read like novels. I kept multiple journals, often at the same time for different uses - a dream journal, a sad diary, a journal I shared with a significant other, a field diary, a daily notebook. When blogs were invented, I created a series of them, keeping one going almost daily for some 15 years. I wrote for yearbooks and newspapers and magazines and sketch comedy shows and local theatres and short films and online news sources. I met my ex-husband writing for the student magazine in college, and when we graduated and had a baby during a recession, I helped pay the bills by writing for the internet and various legitimate publications.

I took for granted that it would always be something that I’d just do. And then somehow, I didn’t anymore.

Oh, I still wrote professionally. I had stories picked up by major publications and I wrote commissioned work for others. I’d write out my feelings when I was in mental crisis, when my demons were threatening to destroy me. I had some great ideas for memoirs, novels, and children’s books that I was able to start before one of those demons shut the process down. I even co-authored a book about local ghost stories last year that absolutely wouldn’t’ve been completed if I hadn’t had a high-school English and Journalism teacher as a collaborator holding me accountable and rounding out my work. I write poems or short stories as gifts for people I loved, for baby showers or Christmas gifts.

But somewhere in there, I stopped doing it for fun, because I loved it, because it felt like breathing.

Somewhere along the line, this thing I’ve always loved doing started to feel like a childhood friend has ridden her bike up to my front door and asked if I wanna come play again, but I can’t remember how to get on my rusty old bike, and when I start to pedal, I find that my rhythm is off and I can’t move very far.

I even started this Substack a few months ago with the idea that writing about my travels the way I’d want to gush about to a friend would act as a gentle step toward getting me to say something I felt good about, something that feels like breathing again.

It doesn’t yet.

It’s the part of myself that I long for and miss the very most.

I don’t know if she’s gone or not yet, if the cacophany of digital media - with the masses screeching their hot takes, monetizing every scrap of content, exhausting themselves and us readers with incessant thinkpieces - has become too much for her to contend with. I don’t know if the pressure of having to create a finished product is too much, or if perfectionism has made me too vigilant, or scarcity mentality has made my adult mind feel like writing for fun is a waste. I don’t know if my last couple heartbreaks tore up something vulnerable inside me so badly it can’t be replaced and refuses to grow back. I don’t know if my imagination is squashed because I’ve watched the tide of the political climate turn into something dire and it feels unsafe to play, or if my voice has gone silent because in all my decades of protesting and writing thoughtful essays, my words never seemed to change the hearts of those who were controlling the tides in the first place. I don’t know.

But I do know that, in a season where I can control nothing else, and my voice is likely to be drowned out in the sea of self-involved personal narratives, and the window of creative expression seems ever-closing, it seems like a good of a time as any to see if I can resurrect her for a moment and hear what she has to say again.

was how I’d asked Michele to be my photographer on this gig, which led to us now holding on for dear life as our tour guide careens through thick lowland jungles, as we race the sunset.

A few weeks prior, Atlas Obscura miraculously* reached out from the ether, asking if I’d travel to write about St. Phillips Island - the nature preserve just outside Beaufort, SC that was once owned by Ted “actually-doing-great-conservation-work-with-his-zillions-of-dollars-while-also-having-stellar-taste-in-wives” Turner. After the media mogul built a surprisingly modest vacation home there in the 1980’s, he partnered with the Nature Conservancy to have the remaining land protected in perpetuity. Recently, the island had been acquired by the SC State Parks Department and was being offered as a vacation destination. I was commissioned to write a collaborative piece for AO and the SC Department of Tourism, and all I had to do was visit and gush about an island paradise where Jane Fonda probably hung out a few times.

Naturally, my first impulse was to see if I could bring a friend.

When the the AO hiring editor asked if I knew any South Carolinian photographers, I hurled Michele’s name out with such enthusiasm, I thought I’d knocked the satellite connecting the call out of orbit. (That Michele specialized in wedding, engagement, boudoir, newborn, and beachfront family portrait photography wasn’t important; I’d seen her work with a drone and believed in both our respective abilities to wing it.) Soon, I was speed-chattering the whole deal with Michele with an urgency that, in retrospect, was completely unnecessary given the terms.

“Um, I’d do this for free,” she admitted.

“Girl, ME TOO,” I confessed**

A week later we are on our way, with plans to meet park ranger Olivia at the docks of Hunting Island State Park after an early morning drive southbound through the Palmetto State - during which time I experience my first-ever Buccee's and spill the contents of a Publix sub down my meticulously-selected Professional-Travel-Writer-Top. I've just finished stripping down in the parking lot and changing into a spare sweater Michele brought when our tour guide arrives. We exchange brief introductions, board Olivia's tiny touring bullet, and within minutes, she’s blazing us across the inlet waters, deftly maneuvering through a massive field of crab pots with all the poise of a royal.

I’ve lived in the Carolinas my entire life, and spent twelve years as a year-round beach resident, but, even still, I manage to be enchanted every time I get to see a new expanse of endless marshes. Universes of wild reeds stacked with tiny mollusks above bustling cities of crabs scuttling around on plough mud that extend out to each horizon never fail to give me the same feeling of awe and insignificance others feel when looking at a starry night sky. Olivia whips through these corridors, now low as we skirt across the high tide, and Michele and I marvel at the bold whimsy of the very few humans who’ve dared perch homes on the marshes out here at the very farthest reaches of land, where the reeds reach the sea. Some homes sit abandoned after hurricanes rendered them untenable but others still stand defiant in their peaceful isolation.

The journey to the Turner house doesn’t end at the docks of St. Philip Island. We board a Ford Excursion that feels too large for the one sandy road that crosses the island. As we wend through the dense foliage, Olivia talks to us about the five separate ecosystems we drive through on the mile to the estate. I get the feeling she’s used to doing this drive quietly for tourists who’re only interested in sitting on a private beach, so watching her light up when Michele and I ask her an endless stream of excited questions feels special. Soon, we’re just a bunch of working gals sharing our special interests and gushing about each others’ cool gigs. Olivia pulls over to show us each different forest, the entire universes that exist on every live oak and palmetto, the biomes that developed in the ancient swales the creeks that meander through the swamps, the “boneyard” of decaying marine forestry that feeds the local wildlife and creates a unique haven for endangered migrating birds.

By the time we get to the house, it feels like an afterthought. Sure, the Queen of 80’s Workout Videos probably hung out here, and the fact that Ted took necessary measures to prevent any more development on the island (not even new trails) ever again is super cool, but honestly, it’s just a house with a great view and some family photos of a famous dude.

Michele snaps classy required pics of the home and breaks out her drone to get aerials of the property, dock, and boneyard, while I ask about the specifics of booking a stay (Only $7000 for a week includes the whole island, 5-bedroom house, and a full-time park ranger to lead tours and kayak excursions. Park rangers can bring their families, so many across the state petition for a chance for paid vacation in the caretaker’s house.)

All these details are in THE PUBLISHED ATLAS OBSCURA ARTICLE , but because it was written for tourists, I had to leave out all the things I loved most about the island. Like the ancient middens everywhere - piles of waste left by the Cusabo peoples who first settled there millennia ago - and how you can just casually find thousand-year-old pottery pieces on the wildlife trails with ancient engravings still intact.

Or how St. Phillips Island is just across a creek from St. Helena Island, the epicenter of the Gullah Geechee People, the massive coastal society borne of formerly enslaved people residing on Lowcountry islands whose unique art, music, cuisine, and dialect influenced so much of modern Southern culture.

Olivia takes us to the further reaches of the property in a Polaris as we chatter incessantly, asking her about her life, her work, and her current fascination with mycology. We gab about specific types of island fowl and herbal medicine, and, after we've wrapped at the house, we load back into the truck and start the drive back to the dock, giving ourselves plenty of time to stop along the way to yap about even more Southern ecosystems and the wreck of a small airplane that can be found just off the trail. We are parked and loading our things onto the boat when Michele realizes she's left the drone back at the house, right next to the Polaris. The sun is hanging low, and Olivia must get us back to the Hunting Island Park dock with enough time to return the boat before dark to avoid injury in the crab pot fields. With steely-eyed determination, she says, "Alright, let's go" and we are off.

The road that bisects the island is one of sharp curves, steep dips, and harsh roots and was never intended to facilitate our huge SUV flying through the jungle at breakneck speed. Yet, somehow, we manage the 30-minute drive in half the time our guide has ever accomplished it.

Our boat waits in low tide amid the reeds. Olivia’s professional anxiousness keeps us tense. She thrusts us through the canals, weaving through endless blind curves and darkening corridors as the sky grows a deeper fuschia.

She turns onto a straightaway and smiles. Suddenly, she cuts the engine. Michele and I glance at each other as our captain emerges from behind her windshield, pointing at two ripples moving up the amethyst lane. We gasp. In silence, a pair of bottlenose dolphins swim up to the hull, poking out their noses to examine us before continuing up the creek behind us, now leaping out of the water toward the sunset.

Michele and I find ourselves in a state of giddy ecstasy. The mist above the sea creates enough vapor for a prism to form next to the sun, just above the horizon. The sky is an electric gradient of oranges, pinks, and purples, and as we cackle in disbelief, we watch the dolphins bound through the reflection of the rainbow.

Olivia smiles, “This is worth getting home late for.”

*Because my sister loves me and referred me to an editor who asked “Do you know any writers familiar with the Carolinas?”

**This doesn’t apply anymore as I am now a fancy, accomplished travel reporter for the likes of Atlas Obscura.

“Shooting starts at 1, oysters’re at 5. Fistfights only really happen close to midnight, but it’s BYO booze, shuckers, and guns.” is what I’ve been told about tonight’s event, so I’m on my way to find at least one of the three. After years of wanting to experience the Rodanthe tradition of Old Christmas, I’ve finally made the four-hour drive to the Outer Banks for the annual party, and I’m trying my very best not to look like a giddy tourist. I pull into Waves Market, home of the best burritos on Hatteras Island, always served by a white dude with dreadlocks - this one sports a diamond dermal in his teardrop tattoo.

I’d stayed the night with my friend Abbe, a roller derby maven and musician I met driving ice cream trucks on Hatteras 7 years ago, and her boyfriend Jeremy, a surfer/artist/contractor who is planning on shooting at Old Christmas for the first time ever. Every time I visit their home, it is closer to the ocean, as the sea creeps up the street, swallowing houses that end up on the news. This community was originally named "Chicamacamico” by the indigenous folks, which literally translates to “land of sinking sands” as they quickly realized this sandbar had no semblance of permanence - a lesson people are still struggling to wrap their heads around as they build oceanfront houses on Hatteras. Last night, Abbe and Jeremy had a couple friends over for a drink and I mentioned needing to get a shucker for tonight. One of the duo laughed that they needed to get another one too - their favorite one washed away with their house nine months prior.

“It’s always shitty weather on Old Christmas,” is a refrain I’ve now heard from two of the three locals I’ve spoken to, all draped in layers of hoodies, as winter clothes are anomalous in this North Carolina surfing community. Everyone I’ve spoken to in the Tri-Village is remarking about the cold, which the wind puts at 18 degrees, howling between the rows of houses, causing them to tremble on their stilts.

Despite the weather, Hatteras isn’t nearly as dead as I’d often seen in the off-season. Usually, locals leave for the tropics from October through April, spending their tourist-free months surfing in Costa Rica, Puerto Rico, and Florida, but I’m surprised how many are still out and about. The Beach Buggy Association retirees are in town, with all manner of trucks headed to the beach decked out in fishing poles. I park next to a man climbing into a 40-year-old white hearse with a pole rack on the front and a bike rack on the back and wonder how, exactly, he gets his car over the dunes.

Still, I have no idea how big of a celebration I’m in for this evening. Old Christmas is still celebrated in Rodanthe as the day Christians honored the end of Advent before they changed to the Gregorian calendar. Legend has it that, because the islanders of European descent were so isolated, they didn’t learn about the change from January 6 to December 25 until decades after everyone on the mainland had adopted the new Christmas and, even when this news reached the town of Rodanthe, the locals had shrugged and continued their post-Epiphany tradition right up until today.

I have a number of things to look forward to this evening: At 1 pm, there will be an “oyster shoot”, which I’ve been led to believe will involve watching folks try to shoot oysters flung into the sky like skeet for prizes. Afterward, there will be an oyster feast, along with music, dancing, drinking, and a visit from Santa Claus and Old Buck. Old Buck is, of course, a mythical horse or… bull… thing… who emerges from the sea once a year to judge children - a career I did not realize was an option and will be dreaming about in perpetuity. Allegedly, if children decide to find out which of Santa’s lists they’re on, they only need to mount Old Buck; if they get to ride him, they’re “nice” and if he bucks, kicks, and hurls them off his back, they’ve made the Naughty List. In this town, there’s no need for Santa to deliver coal when there’s possible assault from livestock.

Admittedly, the thing I’m most looking forward to this evening is the tradition of locals settling their scores in the new year, so they can leave them in the past. From what I have been told, this involves neighbors bringing their beef to Old Christmas and engaging in fisticuffs until there is a victor - or the police arrive. I don’t know any of the rules, but at a place with drinks, guns, and shucking knives, it seems like things could get wild pretty quick, even if Santa is watching. Anyway, according to the research I’ve collected so far (i.e. read in various local magazines and newspapers) once the sun rises, the duo’s problems are washed out with the tides.

I can’t decide which shucker works best for this evening, so I just buy one of each. Clutching my coveted chicken burrito (the secret is that they put seasoned steak fries in the wrap, and they also serve them well into the night to serve the service industry workers. I may’ve had a couple in an outdoor shower many years ago after working on an ice cream truck all day. With a cold Leinenkugel’s Sunset Wheat and the moon rising overhead… My God what luxury. ), I check out at the register where the gal wearing three hoodies laughs “Always shitty weather for Old Christmas!”

At 1 o’clock, I arrive at the Rodanthe Community Center to watch the shooting contest that kicks off the party and this is where I learn that, despite the tiny village hosting this event for more than 200 years, nobody seems to have a solid answer of what, exactly, happens at Old Christmas.

“Yeah, they throw oyster shells up in the air and you shoot ‘em like skeet!” my friend Tracy’s dad recalls. This is what most of the locals I interview tell me, remembering this tradition fondly, laughing while wondering how the kids who ran around -unsupervised while their parents drank well into the night - were safe from stray bullets and shellfish shrapnel.

David O’Neal, whose family has hosted the party for decades shakes his head, “We’ve always used targets”

And indeed, a line of targets rest against a plywood wall running along the far end of the center’s basketball court, just next to the pirate’s-ship-themed playground - an homage to the island’s favorite mass-murdering visitor, Blackbeard.

The next thing I learn is that the event is not BYO gun. In fact, a whole makeshift table of plywood lying on sawhorses is lined with participants’ hopefully-not-loaded shotguns. The table is directly in the middle of the festivities, and participants place the gun barrels facing the area where a rusty oyster steamer is being set up between the main building and the skate park

The casual trust of everyone in this community that this type of public gun storage is safe is not lost on me, despite my Southernness. Neither is David’s next proclamation as he directs the crowd: “If you want to shoot but don’t have a gun, just use one of the ones on the table. Nobody’ll mind as long as they’re not up next.”

He begins to call names and marksmen step up to hit the target in rounds. I don’t quite understand the order of things, but after about 30 minutes, Jeremy runs up to me, smiling and wearing the only pair of noise-canceling headphones I’ve seen at the event. “Hey! Can you watch these for me!?” he grins. He is holding a bucket of the most enormous oysters I’ve ever seen on the East Coast. “I won!”

In 10 minutes, he returns with another bucket. And then a sack. When Abbe arrives, I gesture at the spoils of his victories I’m guarding. He’s undefeated. Reader, to tell you that I stayed at the house of the person who not only won but who had never participated feels like it would be lazy writing, but it’s true. I have photo evidence.

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Aside from the roasted oysters, dinner was a traditional “Chicken and Pastry”, which my friend Danielle (who has owned Dizzy’s Ice Cream Trucks on Hatteras for more than 20 years and is a magical sea witch rainbow of a human) tells me is basically strips of pie crust dunked in chicken stew. “It’s sometimes called ‘pie bread’; it’s like chicken and dumplings but sweeter.” Either way, it’s delicious.

We have it inside the community center where a cover band from Raleigh sings classic rock hits from the 1990’s (hhheaaavy sigh) and photos from Old Christmases past line the walls including horrifying images of what I assume is Old Buck.

Danielle tells me “You’re supposed to kick him in the ass.”

“Why?” I’m stunned.

“I don’t know, but usually the person on the back wears padding because you’re supposed to kick him in the ass.”

“Do kids ride him?”

She shrugs. So does everyone else I ask. Nobody knows where he comes from or why he appears, but he’s due anytime after dinner.

A woman swoops by every table “Merry Old Christmas, y’all! Oyster’s’re ready. C’m’in getcher selves some! ” She talks to all of us with the familiarity of a mother - cheerful but urgent. We obey.

Outside the wind is whipping and, despite the roaring fire in the oyster roaster, I am freezing. My hands are numb as I clutch my new shucker and Danielle informs me the ones I’ve purchased are inadequate. I lived at the beach in South Carolina for 12 years of my life; I should know better.

I hide my shame as she explains, pointing to hers: “You need one with the little swoop at the tip. Here, I got it.”

Just then, the doors of the oven are opened and a man pulls a steaming tray from the roaring fire. Someone shouts “HEEEREE COMES HEEEREE COMES!!!” as the man dashes to the side of the table and flips the tray over, scattering oysters across the plywood. Without hesitation, Danielle grabs one with her bare hand, pops one open and hands it to me, still dripping with brine. By the time it’s cooled down enough for me to slurp from the shell, she’s whittled open two more - one for Abbe and another for herself.

“Cheers!” we clink our grimy shells together and I slurp the giant, unseasoned oyster in one motion. It is, arguably, the most incredible thing I’ve ever put into my face. Suddenly all I want is to stand out in this irrational cold and crack open oysters until frostbite renders my fingers useless. Nothing else exists but oysters, dammit. Jesus who? Oysters are the reason for the season.

As I await fresh batches, I ask again about the legendary settling-of-scores because, honestly, this is the tradition of Old Christmas that interests me the most. Listen, I’m from the Southern suburbs where nobody says anything rude to anyone’s face but will talk shit behind your back all for the sake of “manners”. Coming from a world of WASPy passive-aggression and exhaustive grinning-through-loathing-in-excruciating-perpetuity that somehow constitutes normalcy, the idea of a tradition based around a confrontation that allows both parties to completely wipe the slate clean afterward feels like a luxury to me.

In fact, the brash honesty of Hatteras-ians (Hatterassers? Hatterians?) has always been so incredibly refreshing to witness. My islander friends don’t pull punches when telling each other the hard truths about themselves, but find ways to wrap these in humor. Back when I drove ice cream trucks, a man named Bruce Midgett (who was known to everyone in Rodanthe as “Angry Santa” because of his disheveled-Kringle-esque appearance and gruff demeanor) used to greet us every day by flipping us the bird, calling us “cunts” and throwing rocks at us from his driveway as we passed by his home, grumpy that our jingles disrupted his beauty rest. Every time I saw him, I waved as though I was seeing the actual Santa and was elated when he responded with harmless ire.

Tracy tells me, “It used to be the whole reason anybody came to Old Christmas was to fight back in the day.” His dad remembers, “It wasn’t just two people fighting to settle the score; it was whole families - just a mob fight. Folks would come in from Wanchese and get the cops to shut the whole thing down.”

To say I’m excited is an understatement, but, keeping an eye on the group tempers my enthusiasm. I can’t imagine anyone at this party throwing a punch. The crowd holds at a cozy 100-ish guests. Friends laugh and drink beer around the fire, older gals sit and chat with grandbabies on their knee, teenagers hang out near the drinks and desserts in the kitchen where they help serve dinners to stragglers, folks somehow find ways to dance to the band’s third performance of “Interstate Love Song.” It seems like the evening is mostly chill vibes.

“There’s a reason for that,” Jeremy tells me, indicating to a photo from a recent Old Christmas. “Justin O’Neal died last year and it devastated this community.” He explains that he was related to almost everyone at the event and had died of mysterious circumstances. This Old Christmas appears to be the first chance the family has taken to find joy together after a year of grief and searching for answers.

At 8:30, every single partygoer crowds into the small community center and awaits Old Buck’s arrival. Justin O’Neal’s son, Owen enters the room, taking his father’s place as Old Buck’s wrangler. He pulls a rope connected to a strange cow head that is trailing a zebra-print blanket draped over two shuffling human legs.

Danielle leans over and says “I was just told you’re supposed to pet his nose for good luck in the new year” and, indeed, everyone in the room reaches out to do so. There is no rolling of eyes or sneering about this ritual while Old Buck takes a lap around the room. Everyone at the party participates in petting the strange beast or kicking it in the butt. A man swoops a little girl onto Old Buck’s back, holds her there for a few seconds, then lowers her back to the ground. Within moments, Old Buck is led back out the door and the tradition is over. I am bewildered and enchanted.

I join my friends on the porch, where they are talking with Santa, played by Brent Midgett, “Angry Santa”’s actual brother. He is telling the story of his tattoos and how he ended up with a macaw from his last wife, whom he lived with in Hawaii. Beside us, the roaster crackles and trays of steaming oysters clatter in front of cheering islanders. Over at the skate park, kids whip around on scooters and skateboards, whooping when one pulls a stunt despite the freezing winds. We pull Santa in for a group picture before he joins his latest wife on the dance floor and, for the first time all day, I feel incredibly warm.

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