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Hastings' haunted hill
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Published: October 23, 2009
Toward the end of the 19th century, Charles Hastings, my maternal grandfather, built a house near Kernersville on rising ground. The house and land eventually became known as Hastings Hill. Charles was known within the family as Chag.
So far as we know, Hastings Hill had no particular notoriety in matters of the paranormal. But in celebration of the Halloween season, here are a few of the family stories I inherited about the locale.
The first happened long before Chag ever built the house -- perhaps in the 1880s. He and hi older brother were bringing home two wagon loads of lumber but darkness had caught them a little short of home.
Now, North Carolina has more than its share of mysterious lights, of which those on Brown Mountain and the railroad track at Maco may be the most famous. Each has its own habitual location and its peculiar pattern of motion. Most have long since faded away in the bright dawn of technology as the Greek god Pan died -- so the legend goes -- on the night Christ was born.
Kernersville's resident light was unique. Located –as is usual in such stories -- on the "site of an old indian graveyard," the motion of the light opposite Hastings Hill described a sort of inverted letter "T." It would divide into two lights, which moved away from each other for a while but then reversed and came back together.
Upon touching, they merged into one light that instantly rose high in the air, paused for a moment and drifted straight back down to where it had been. There it divided again, the two lights gliding apart but returning again to merge and fly upward.
This could go on all night and it happened with sufficient regularity that it had come to be taken for granted, as the aurora borealis for all its beauty and mystery, is a commonplace in its high native latitudes.
On the night of the lumber wagons, the road and the two brothers passed near one end of the "T" and the light chose that time to manifest itself. The older brother, driving the front wagon, turned around and -- pointing at the approaching light -- said, "Chag, I believe that one's coming for you!" In a flash, Chag was up beside his brother and his horses followed the front wagon the rest of the way home, unsupervised.
Hastings Hill had a grass front yard that ended at an unmown field. One bright moonlit night the family, seated on the porch, watched what seemed to be a lantern weaving toward them up the hill.
The light got closer...close enough that it would have been possible to recognize whomever was carrying it. But no one was. It reached the far edge of the yard, turned to its right and silently followed the edge of the grass past the end of the porch, disappearing unmolested toward the back of the house. It was never seen again.
One summer night after two days of rain, everyone had gone to bed and the lamps had been extinguished. The windows were open to God's good air conditioning and the occasional bug.
Through the darkness came the sound of a horse or cow grazing very close, just under the window. Pulling, chewing, breathing, pulling some more, stamping...for half an hour or so. In farm country the sound was familiar. There was no compelling need to deal before breakfast with whatever had gotten loose.
Next morning whatever it had been was gone. But when Chag went out to see whether it had been horse or cow, there were no hoof prints in the soft damp earth.
Another night there was the startling sound of many galloping horses passing the house at a run. But looking out the window in surprise, the family saw only the open land in the moonlight.
One of Chag's brothers had gone west to find his fortune and had not been heard from for months.
One day my great grandmother looked out at the field behind the house and saw the prodigal walking toward the house, waving his hat. She ran into the next room and out the back door only to find the field and the back yard empty.
There was no trace of the missing brother. They talked about it over dinner. No one knew what to make of the mystery.
The next day, the brother did come home, hat an all, across the exact same field where "he" had been seen the previous day. But he had been no where near Kernersville the day before.
When Chag's mother was very old, it was Chag's custom on winter mornings to go in early and stoke-up the fire in her room. It was his custom while kneeling at the hearth to say his morning prayers.
One morning as he did this, he felt her walk up behind him quietly and he wished her a good morning. She did not reply. He turned and was startled not to see her there. He turned toward her bed, and she seemed to be sleeping there peacefully. When he approached he saw that she had passed away.
Today, Hastings Hill is just another house in a working-class neighborhood in Kernersville. The folks who live in it know nothing of mysterious lights or unexplained sounds in the night. I left it that way.
(Mooresville's Stan Thompson is a retired strategic planner and environmental futurist for BellSouth Telecommunications. His column appears every other week in the Tribune. Email him at: HST2nd@aol.com)
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