Tales from River’s End - Passport to Adventure

   Greetings from River’s End.

Seems like our fall weather has turned into freaky Indian Summer. We’ve had a lot of rain and the San Bernard is mostly fresh water again. Yesterday, Roy spotted a great “V” and thought it was our Snow Geese making an early visitation. But it turned out to be a great number of White Pelicans, who settled as one on Pelican Lake just beyond the bank of the river. Then, for an unseen reason, they rose as one being and left. Pretty strange nature observation, but then, we River’s Enders live right on Music Bend of the Bernard where strange things have been known to happen.

In the Autumn, when the days begin to shorten, and the sun begins it’s slow slide into the Gulf of Mexico, the winds pick up and the sky and everything that seems to touch it, takes on a pink glow. The Scots call this time of day, the gloaming – a great descriptive word this close to Halloween. The tides begin to recede, leaving the thousands of individual oysters back up McNeil’s bayou and the back lakes, exposed like thousands of skeletal fingers reaching up from the silt looking for something to grab.

Your senses are piqued, everything seems surreal. And then you hear it. Faint, at first, carried by the coastal breeze over the back lakes. Then, it hits the river and is amplified, and you stand, mesmerized, by the unearthly strains. The hair on the back of your neck stands up and you feel goose bumps crawling up your arms.....The Fiddler’s back.

For over a century, people have been hearing the strange stains of an unearthly fiddle at Music Bend on the San Bernard. In fact, it’s our greatest claim to fame. Many versions of the tale have been told, but I happen to like the one Catherine Munson Foster put down in her book, Ghosts Along the Brazos. In this tale, two fishermen lived along the banks of the Bernard, and one of them was a fiddler who played at local functions. Seems like he got a portion of a song in his head and could not quite remember the rest of it. So, he kept playing the portion he remembered over and over again, hoping the rest of the song would pop into his head. It never did. The unmusical fisherman finally had enough, and chopped off the Fiddler’s head and threw him into the river.  To this day, even in death, the Fiddler still tries to get the song right from time to time. If you keep an open mind and come to the river at gloaming, you may still hear him play. I know I have.

While the Fiddler’s been around here a while, other unexplained things happen to our local gentry. Take, for instance, the bone chilling air that hits you when you enter Lisa and Judgie Schubles’ widow’s walk. There’s no air conditioning vents there, so why the blast of cold air?

Then, there’s the mysterious golden haired child who haunts C.R. 441-A. Sometime last year, Linda Churchill and her daughter, Jessica (who was about 16 at the time), were driving down 2918 one night about to take the left hand “Y” of the road coming onto 441-A when Jessica became startled. “Mom, did you see that little girl in the middle of the road? She’s going to get hit!”  Well, Linda had not seen the 8-9 year old little girl then, but Jessica insisted they stop and look for her. They never found her. If that wasn’t unsettling enough, in another instance, Linda was bringing home some groceries. As she made the turn to the left onto 441-A, her groceries began to shift. Now, that in itself would not be spooky, but she wasn’t going fast enough for the groceries to shift. So the sound made her turn around and look into the back seat. Whoa! What she saw made her take a second look. Her groceries had been pushed aside to the opposite side of the truck that the turn would have made them fall. And sitting silently in the back seat of the truck was the little blonde headed girl. When Linda turned around, the little girl was in the road, and then she disappeared.

Roy and I, too, have experienced this little girl’s unsettling presence. We were leaving Fisherman’s Isle on 441-A, and just as we approached Nelson’s River’s Inn, a golden haired child about 8 or 9 appeared out of nowhere in front of the car. Roy couldn’t stop, and he exclaimed, “Did you see that little girl? I think I hit her.” I saw the girl he described to my right on the side of the road as she was “running away”. But her “running away” turned into a vanishing act in front of my eyes. We also stopped the car and looked for the child. We didn’t find her either.

But, I have a theory why people see ghostly visages here. I think that some people have such strong emotional ties to River’s End and the river, that, even in death, they can’t seem to leave the place. And,  people here now, who share the same ties to the land and the water, attract the spirits because we are, indeed, kindred spirits. I like to think that the spirit of our neighbor, Jack Burton, who died earlier this year, still visits us in the form of some of the birds that hang around his old house. I just can’t be certain. Maybe I’ll ask the Fiddler next time he plays. 

So, now what’s happening at the end of the river? Check back in a while and maybe I can entertain you with some other flight of fancy. Here’s wishing you a friendly spirit, a good story and your own River’s End. -