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 well-being 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.
“My mother used to get Mary Postlethwaite to baby sit us!” laughed Patty. Anna and I gasped. Mary Postlethwaite was an eccentric, highly intelligent local woman of a prominent family who dressed and behaved like what is referred to in our coarse modern vernacular as a “bag lady.” Although her appearance was off-putting, her encyclopedic knowledge of Natchez history garnered respect from anyone who dared strike up a conversation.
“We were petrified,” said Patty, “and fascinated. My mother really knew how to make us behave.”
“We do seem to have more peculiar people here than they do in other places,” said Anna, “and in our history.” There’s a reason why Natchez is infamously weird. In its earliest days, Natchez was a frontier town. Compared to old Virginia, this was The Wild West. Between 1716 and 1798 we had French, English, Spanish, and finally American governments. Not only were the transitional times long and lawless, right across the river was Louisiana, the land of remote swamps, great hiding places and a totally different government. If you broke the law here, you would simply cross the river and hide for a while before heading south to New Orleans.
In its earliest days, Natchez was a frontier town. Compared to old Virginia, this was The Wild West.
As fortunes grew quickly and on an enormous scale, European-style civility took root, and Natchez became a refuge for risk-taking entrepreneurs, eccentric millionaires, murderers, gamblers, and prostitutes. We had our share of war heroes, legendary beauties, and noble men of God as well. For a town whose population never exceeded thirty thousand, its individuals run the gamut between horrific and holy. By the nineteenth century, Natchez was the place to be if you were rich, famous, or just plain bad. Whether you were a river bandit or a cotton planter, if you couldn’t find a thrill in Natchez, you didn’t have a pulse.
So here we sit, sipping wine on Anna’s porch: descendants of the weird, swapping horror stories like recipes.
“Did your parents take you down Silver Street when you were little?” asked Anna.
In the eighteen hundreds the streets of Natchez Under the Hill held drunken brawls, saloons, brothels, horse tracks; and gambling houses provided juicy entertainment for anyone pulling into port or slumming down under. By our time, the force of the river current had eroded all but one street, Silver Street, literally washing away the bad part of town. Silver Street seems to plummet straight down to the river’s edge.
“And there was a house down there with chicken feet nailed all over the outside—we thought it might be a Voodoo house,” added Patty. My mother also told the story of a high-class prostitute whose son had spent his life in European boarding schools. A chance visit to Natchez Under the Hill, led him to his mother’s parlor whereupon he recognized her and impulsively shot and killed her. The Spanish Governor of Natchez took pity on him, acquitted him and financed a new life for him in Cuba.
Just a few miles up river another street, Learned’s Mill Road, runs perpendicular to the horizon down to the area known as the Thousand Steps.
“We played at the Thousand Steps down Learned’s Hill,” said Anna. “In the summer, at night, the kudzu is covered with lightening bugs; it’s like looking up at two hundred feet of twinkling Christmas lights—kind of takes the scariness out of the place—but not really.”
According to local historian Don Estes, during the War Between the States, African American Union Troops were segregated and quartered “Under the Hill” near the sawmill. They had to get up the steep bluffs daily to build Fort McPherson and, then, to man it.
“The steps lasted throughout my mother’s childhood,’ said Patty, “she played there and used to take us and tell us the story.”
The story is of this now peaceful thicket is one of human horror. Many locals believe that over ten thousand former slaves died under the promised protection of the Union Army. In July of 1863 during the occupation of Natchez, destitute freed slaves turned to the federal troops for aid. Overwhelmed by the huge number of people seeking refuge, the army placed them in a corral so that they could not escape. There, tainted water and poor food caused as many as seventy-five people to die every day. Union forces accepted no responsibility and seized all cemetery records of the time. Bodies are said to have been buried like cordwood.
If you could climb the thousand steps today you would reach the bluff top near the Natchez City Cemetery, with its quiet green hills, ancient oaks, old roses, oddball characters, river views and great spots to while away one’s misspent youth. Upon acquiring a drivers’ license in Natchez, it is customary to drive down cemetery road past the Turning Angel and park in the city cemetery.
The Turning Angel, a large monument near Cemetery Road, seems to turn and watch as you drive by. “I remember driving by and screaming because everyone else in the car was screaming, but I don’t know if I saw it turn,” said Anna. Don Estes explained that the monument seems to turn because of the angle of the road. “It’s an optical illusion, but she really does look like she’s turning,” he added.
This October, Don Estes will publish his long awaited book, Legends of The Natchez City Cemetery. As director of the cemetery for eight years, Estes researched, verified, and documented its strangest tales.
Patty, Anna, and I like the story of Florence Irene Ford, who died of yellow fever when she was ten years old. During her short life, Florence was extremely frightened of storms and whenever one occurred she would rush to her mother to find comfort. “My mother told me that when the little girl died, her mother was so struck with grief that she had Florence's casket made with a glass window at the child’s head,” said Patty. “Yes, and the grave was dug to make room by the coffin for steps that would allow her mother to go down to her and comfort Florence during storms,” added Anna. “I heard there were stuffed animals and toys down there too.” I said. In the mid-nineteen-fifties, a concrete wall was erected at the bottom of the stairway covering the glass window of Florence’s coffin to prevent vandalism.
So loved are our local legends that the City Cemetery puts on a show of sorts every November called Angels on the Bluff, in which local actors portray the deceased at their grave sites. Interestingly, many of the players are descendants of the parts they play.
No night of Natchez ghostly tales can end without mention of The Devil’s Punchbowl. Located on the river’s edge just north of the cemetery, it is one of nature’s freak occurrences. It is a gigantic, semicircular pit, covered in vines and trees with a pool of water in the bottom. Connected with this uncanny spot are countless stories of river pirates and buried treasure. River pirates were said to have been particularly bloodthirsty, killing for sport and pleasure. One such sport involved throwing bodies down into the Devil’s Punchbowl and wagering on which would hit the water first. The Mason Gang and the Harpe brothers were said to have posed as stranded flatboat men on the river and lured good-intentioned rescuers to their death inside the bowl. River pilots said that their compasses would go haywire when passing The Devil’s Punchbowl. It’s also been said that many a Natchez gal has been lured to the land’s edge of the Devil’s Punchbowl by dates with bad intentions.
With over twelve hundred structures on the National Register of Historic Places and at least that many more that are not registered, Natchez has more than its share of spooky places. Glenburnie, Auburn, and King’s Tavern each have gruesome stories of murder in their pasts. There are ghosts and goblins lurking around every old vine-wrapped tree and there’s a storyteller sitting on just about every front porch. Oh, I forgot to mention that downtown is undermined with canals and caves …
