October, 2009. Growing Up with Ghosts: Mary Postlethwaite, Louise the Unfortunate, and other Natchez characters as dear as relatives.

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Anna, Patty and I were sitting on the front porch of Anna’s eighteen-fifties cottage in a collection of mismatched chairs, the ashtrays full and a bottle of red wine almost gone. Patty poured the rest of it into my glass, and told us about the Fairy Orb Party.

“There was this fairy orb expert in town and she taught us how to spot fairy orbs in photographs and how to call the fairies out at night,” she remembered. “We tried calling them, but she said the weather wasn’t just right. Then we did this fairy dance—kind of interpretive dance in the yard and we paid her ten dollars.”

Anna and I gave knowing Natchezean nods. If you’ve lived in Natchez, chances are, you’ve heard of the late Maggie Burkely, our beloved local psychic who never seemed to meet a stranger (perhaps she’d known us all before). Her house is a huge pink ornate Victorian with white columns and a deep front porch, which teeters on the edge of the bluffs in Natchez overlooking the Mississippi river two hundred feet below. When asked why she never moved from the potential mudslide, she’d smile and say, “I’ll know when I have to.”

Well acquainted with Maggie, the three of us compared bizarre encounters—past lives explored, eerily accurate futures told, magical foods, fantastic parties. I missed the Fairy Orb party, but I did have my psyche cleansed by a traveling soul seer who held court on Maggie’s front porch for a week. The experience left me floating in a state of wellbeing for two weeks and only cost $25.

As one bottle of wine led to another, so did stories of growing up with strange Natchez characters and legends in our historic and historically naughty hometown. Oddly enough, these stories and characters are as dear to us as relatives and just as comfortably familiar.

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