The Widow

The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window. It was this very cabin, many years ago, where Sheriff John Ford sat on his horse, staring at the dull, orange, glow flickering in the dark window. He looked out over the pond to his left. A thick, white, fog hung over the water. There was an uneasiness in his stomach. It felt like tiny butterflies, fluttering their wings.

The property had belonged to a deceased local boy, Clarence Feltner. The sheriff had known him well. When Clarence had married his childhood sweetheart, Ford had even attended the wedding. The ceremony had been on this property. He'd been a fine young man, the sheriff remembered. But even a good man is capable of making terrible mistakes when faced with his own mortality.

Such was the case with Clarence. It had happened just a year before. The Civil war was in full swing. Like many other patriotic young men, Clarence had made the decision to enlist in the Union army. He had a deep empathy for the plight of the oppressed. He felt duty bound by honor and by all that was good and righteous to join the fight.

It's easy for a young man to run into battle with a heart full of fire and a head filled with dreams of glory. This is particularly true when his cause is just. In the fog of war however, when you're swimming in blood and your ears ring with the cries of your dying brothers, things aren't so simple. Men often find that they're not as courageous as they think they are. Clarence was there when the battle of Leatherwood commenced. As the muskets thundered and chaos ensued, he found himself frozen in fear.

He was enthralled by the madness and death around him, until he noticed that he had caught the attention of a confederate soldier. Time slowed to a crawl. He watched the musket rise in slow motion, staring straight into the business end of the barrel. It was like looking into the mouth of hell. He was about to be swallowed up into the cold, black, belly of death.

In that moment, something snapped in him. Maybe it was survival instinct. Maybe it was adrenaline. Whatever the case, it snapped him back to reality and his body reacted on pure impulse. He bolted off into a dead run for the tree line about fifty yards to the east. His heartbeat thumped in his ears like war drums.

The offbeat rhythm of his heartbeat and his boots pounding on the soil rang in his head like a thousand horse hooves galloping into battle. He was almost to the woods when he heard the shot ring out. The musket ball ripped through the right side of his lower back, just under his ribs, exiting just above his pelvic bone. It didn't feel as much like being penetrated as being hit by a bull from behind.

He hit the ground like a sack of potatoes, his gut burning as if someone had plunged a hot coal into it. He couldn't give up now. He had to make it to the woods. He tore at the ground with his fingers, putting every ounce of energy into getting into the trees. He kept expecting the soldier to walk up behind him, and put one final shot into the back of his head. But the shot never came. He crawled and crawled, until he finally slipped into the darkness of sleep.

Some time later, he awakened in the woods. The pain was unbearable. He tore the sleeves from his shirt and knotted them together as a makeshift tourniquet. There was a lot of blood, but he figured it must not have hit any vital organs, otherwise he would be dead. He wrapped his waist, pulling the fabric as tight as he could.

The battle must be over, he thought. He could hear moans and cries from the camp, but no more shooting. Now and then he would hear someone call out for a medic. He knew it was wrong, but he was going home. He didn't know how he would make it, but he was determined to die trying.

It took two horribly painful days. The battle was roughly twenty miles from his cabin. But in his condition, he was lucky to make it back at all. He had limped his way back, keeping to the woods. He walked until he collapsed, slept where he fell, then walked some more. Against all odds, he made it.

When he showed up at the door, Maryanne fell into his arms weeping for joy. She only realized how bad he was hurt, when he nearly collpapsed under her weight. She had cried and prayed every night that God would return him to her, and now he had. She knew that things were going to be better now. Sadly, that was not to be.

Maryanne nursed her husband back to health over the next few months. He was finally healed up and getting around better. So much so, that on the morning of March third, he was out in front of the cabin splitting firewood. Maryanne was preparing breakfast when she heard the distant galloping of horses. As they got closer it grew louder, much like the fear growing in her heart. She watched out the window as Clarence looked up from his work, leaving the axe stuck in the stump he was splitting on. When they rode into view, her heart sank. They were wearing union uniforms. Her greatest fear was realized.

When Clarence had first made it home, and explained to Maryanne that he had fled from the battle, she had been terrified. She knew that it was possible that he could be wanted by the military for desertion, a crime that was punishable by death. They lived in fear as he healed. Afraid that at any moment there could come a knock on the door that would spell his doom. After a while, they had assumed he was in the clear.

He had explained to her that there was so much chaos and death, that he would likely have been written off as dead. They told themselves this lie for so long, that they had both willfully believed it. It helped them get past the fear. It was an illusion that was now shattered, along with her psyche.

What happened next was both brutal and macabre. She watched as the men climbed from their horses and subdued Clarence. Two soldiers bound his hands behind his back, as another removed the axe from the stump. They forced Clarence to his knees and pushed him down onto the stump. An officer who led the party climbed from his horse and walked up in front of the terrified man. He retrieved a roll of paper from his breast pocket, broke the seal, and began to read in an authoritative voice.

Maryanne couldn't make out the words. They were blotted out by an all consuming, high pitched ringing in her ears. She was in complete shock. The officer looked to the soldier holding her husband's axe and gave him a nod. All of the color drained out of Maryanne's vision as she watched him hoist the axe up over his head. She looked into Clarence's face, finding his eyes were locked on hers.

The axe came down, separating his head from his body. It bounced off the ground, rolling toward the cabin and rocking to a stop. Maryanne stood inanimate, looking into Clarence's eyes. With a single blink, she watched the life seep from them. In a split second, she died a million deaths, and was ressurected a widow. She broke out of her paralysis, bursting out the front door and collapsing over her husband's head. She cradled it like a baby, wailing in an unearthly howl.

The officer walked over and reached out the roll of paper to her. She stared at him with the hatred of a thousand demons and never said a word. She didn't need to say it. Her sentiments were evident. He dropped the execution order on the ground before her, and returned to the others. They climbed on their horses and simply rode away. A few days later, the funeral was performed by a local minister right by the pond.

The Sheriff remembered how distraught Maryanne had been at the funeral. She was almost catatonic. She stared at the casket for the whole service, her face emotionless and pale. They buried Clarence at his favorite fishing spot on the south side of the pond. It was marked with a simple headstone no more than a stones throw from where the sheriff now sat on his horse.

A couple of local girls had been going up to check on Maryanne. The women around town chattered about the poor state of the young widow. They would gossip about how awful it must be to live in the head of that hollow all alone. Others would speak of how terrible it must be to have to see the grave of her husband every time she opened the front door. But it was only two young girls who cared enough to help.

That's why the sheriff was here. He had recieved a visit from one of the girls with quite a disturbing story to tell. Elizabeth Caudill was a fourteen year old girl, who lived about a mile down the hollow from Maryanne. She and her best friend, Amanda had been taking turns going up to the Feltner place about once a week, with a basket of food. The girls said her condition had worsened with every trip.

Elizabeth reported that the first time she had gone up to the Feltner place, it had taken quite some time her for to open the door. When she did, she hadn't even acknowledged the girl. She opened the door blank faced and silent, returning to sit in her rocking chair. Elizabeth had tried to converse with her, but got no response. Maryanne stared into space, rocking slowly. The young woman left the basket she had brought on the table and left.

While she had felt a great deal of unease, she chocked up the widow's strange behavior to her grief. She had told her mother about the incident. Her mother had explained to her that some people mourn in strange ways, and that she would probably come out of it over time. Amanda had taken the next trip up to the cabin. She told Elizabeth that her experience was similar, adding that the basket of food Elizabeth brought the week before was still on the table untouched.

Maryanne hadn't even come to the door this time. After knocking and calling out several times, Amanda let herself in. She too left the cabin without any response from Maryanne. Elizabeth told her what her mother had said, and assured her they just needed to keep checking in on her. Amanda agreed and they remained hopeful that things would improve.

When Elizabeth took her turn to go up and check on Maryanne the following Sunday, she found the widow at Clarence's grave. She first thought this was an improvement, until she approached her. Maryanne was on all fours at the grave, mumbling incoherently. Elizabeth stood by quietly,to observre. Maryanne began drawing in the fresh soil with her finger. The young girl crept up behind, to see what she was writing.

She began to notice a rhythm to the babbling. She still couldn't make out what she was saying, but she was certain there was a repetitive pattern to it. As she got closer, she began to be able to make out what the widow was carving into the earth. They were symbols of some sort. There were circles, triangles, and other shapes that she wasn't familiar with. Some of them were underlined. Some had lines or marks over them.

Maryanne hadn't noticed her presence. She just kept mumbling and drawing on the ground. She was covered with dirt, and what appeared to be ashes. Elizabeth was taken aback by it all. Everything in her was telling her to flee, but she just couldn't bring herself to do it. Her compassion for this woman, who had suffered such a horrible loss, was greater than her fear.

"Maryanne", she said softly. The widow swung around sharply toward her. The blank stare that had been on her ghostly pale face for two weeks was gone. Her eyes were afire, bloodshot and wiley. "It's me... Elizabeth. I've brought some food." She sat the basket down on the ground beside her, squatting down to get eye level with Maryanne. The widow dropped her head, furrowing her brow like a feral animal who felt threatened.

Elizabeth scuttled backwards, shocked by her appearance. "Maryanne, it's okay" she whispered, her lips trembling. "Let me help you. I can help you clean yourself up. You really need to eat something dear." She slowly tried to reach out a hand to Maryanne.

"No!" The widow screamed, jumping back against Clarence's head stone. "I cannot leave! He's coming back to me. The angel told me so." She gripped the tombstone behind her back, haunched on her toes, knees bent, in an eerily unsual position. The voice Elizabeth claimed, was inhuman. Her eyes bulged from her head. Foam streamed from the corners of her mouth. She didn't even look human. Half out of fear and half out of shock, she scrambled to her feet and ran home as hard and fast as she could.

Elizabeth ran to her mother in tears, and told her what had happened. She told her that she was never going back up to that cabin because the devil had taken Maryanne. Her mother was not a woman who given to superstition. She half scolded her daughter for letting her imagination frighten her.

She had finally convinced Elizabeth that she let her mind play tricks on her. Maryanne, she said, was just riddled with grief and lost in the world. It was their Christian duty to be a comfort to such a person, not to make up wild stories about them. She told Amanda about her experience the next day, and she too thought that she had just overreacted.

"Either of us would probably be in the same condition had we lived through such a tragedy." Amanda said. Elizabeth's logical side said that her mother and friend were right. Her gut told her it wasn't that simple. Seeing that she was still upset, Amanda told her not to worry. After all, it was her turn to go next time. "You'll see." she said. "Everything's going to be fine."

Elizabeth thought about the horrifying look in the widow's eyes all week long. On Sunday morning, Amanda had stopped by to let her know that she was on her way to Maryanne's. Elizabeth was concerned. "Maybe you should ask your brother to go with you Amanda" she said. I know you think that I'm just being a big baby, but something is wrong with that woman."

"I'll be fine", Amanda replied. She took Elizabeth by the hand and looked deep into her eyes and reassured her. "Listen, if it will make you feel better, I'll stop by on my way back and let you know that I'm ok. Trust me. It's fine." It wasn't fine. Amanda never returned. Elizabeth waited for what felt like hours.

Maybe she forgot to stop? No, Elizabeth had been watching like a hawk since she left. Theres no way she could have slipped by. Maybe she managed to get Maryanne into the cabin, and she was cleaning her up and feeding her? It was possible, she thought. Soon her optimism turned. Maybe, something horrible had happened. Maybe Maryanne was in an even more feral state now. Maybe she had hurt Amanda... or worse.

It wastoo much to bear. She wanted to run up there, but she was too scared. What if she got there and her fears were correct? What if the widow attacked her as well. She had to get help. She decided to go to Sherrif Ford.

She ran into his office as white as a ghost and hyperventilating. It took a good fifteen minutes for him to get her calm enough to form words. She related the whole story to the sheriff as best she could. He hadn't been able to make a whole lot of sense out what she was saying. It was just too outlandish.

He was certain this was just a case of a young girl with very little life experience, who had let her imagination run away with her. But, with Amanda having gone up there and not coming back, he thought it prudent to at least take a ride up there and look around. He should probably drop by to check on Maryanne anyway.

A short ride later, here he sat, staring at the candle in the cabin's window. He climbed off his horse to take a look around the property. The cold evening air stung his cheeks like tiny daggers of ice. Though the evening sky was still a deep blue, the hollow was shrouded in darkness by the shadows of the mountains. He looked over by the pond, toward Clarence's grave. Something wasnt quite right.

There were small mounds of fresh dirt, piled up on either side of headstone. Walking over to investigate, he was shocked to find the grave uncovered. The wooden casket was wide open. The top had been pulled off and throw behind the tombstone in the tall grass. "What in the Sam hell is going on here" the sheriff mumbled under his breath. He took out his Colt revolver and pulled back the hammer until it clicked into place.

Who would do such a blasphemous thing? This couldn't have been Maryanne could it? She was a small and somewhat frail woman in her normal condition. From the shape she was in at the funeral, he couldn't imagine she would have the strength to dig up a grave and tear off a nailed down coffin lid. Staring down into the grave at the rotting corpse, the smell nearly took his breath away. But that wasn't the most disturbing part. What really made his skin crawl was what was missing.... the head.

Upon closer inspection, he noticed that something had been scrawled on the headstone. The writing was crude. It looked as if a child had scribbled the letters on with a muddy finger. It was so messily written it took the sheriff a minute to deciper it. He read it out loud, "rise." What could it mean? He noticed the basket of food that Elizabeth had reported leaving behind when she ran away. It was sitting there seemingly untouched. Looking around at the ground it through squinted eyes in the twilight, he noticed symbols etched into the ground in much the same way as the letters on the stone.

This had suddenly morphed from a quick trip to check on a grieving woman, to something else entirely. He made his way toward the front of the cabin, keeping the revolver trained ahead of him. Once he got a few steps from the front door, he called out in a stern voice. "Maryanne! It's Sheriff Ford. Are you in there?" He waited for a short spell for a response, but it didn't come.

He eased over to the window, and tried to look inside. Between the darkness of the inner cabin and the glow of the candle against the window pane, he couldn't really see anything. "Amanda, are you in there?" He had expected to run into the girl on his way up the hollow. Now, he was getting concerned. He didn't really buy into all the witchy baloney that Elizabeth was spouting, but it was obvious that something was going on here.

Who would dig up Clarences grave? More importantly, what kind of weirdo would take the head? Chances were, who ever dug up that grave also had Maryanne and Elizabeth. They had to still be near by, and he had to find them. He put his ear up to the door of the cabin to see if he could hear any movement inside. There were no voices, but there was some sort of strange, low, sound emanating from the cabin. It was an eerie creaking sound.

The sheriff moved out from in front of the door and called out once more. "Maryanne... Amanda.... If you're in there keep your head down. I'm armed and I'm coming in!" He gently took hold of the door knob. It was locked. He took a step back, and kicked the wooden door with all he had. It exploded from the door frame, swinging open and smacking hard against the wall.

He scanned the room with the barrel of the revolver. The cabin was dark, aside from a small circle about six feet in diameter just behind the candle that still burned in the windowsill. The stench of rot filled his nostrils. "Girls, it's the Sheriff Ford, if you're in here somewhere come to me now, slowly, with your hands up. I'm here to help." There was no answer or movement. The creaking sound was more pronounced now that he was inside. It was coming from a dark room in the back of the cabin. He eased over and picked up the candle from the windowsill.

He walked slowly, but deliberately toward the dark doorway. In one hand he held the candle out in front of him. In the other was the revolver, trained on the darkness on the interior of the room. As the dull glow from the candle washed out before him, he could start to make out a form in the back of the room. It was a person, sitting in a rocking chair. That was the sound he was hearing. The wooden rails of the chair, rocking against the floor.

His heart skipped a beat, realizing he was not alone in the darkness of the cabin. With the revolver pointed at the form's center of mass, he shouted at the individual. "Don't make any sudden moves! I'm Sheriff John Ford, I want you to put your hands over your head very slowly!" The form never acknowledged him. It just sat there... rocking. The sheriff moved closer, trying to cast a little more light on the subject. The eyes began to almost glow in the candles light. It was a woman, she looked old and haggard. Her matted hair hung down over her gaunt face. She never uttered a word.

"Do you need help?" the sheriff asked. There was no response. He continued to study her. As his eyes became more adjusted to the dark, he began to make out more detail. She was wearing an apron over a tattered dress. Despite having frail, almost skeletal limbs, her mid section seemed bloated and distended.

Could this hag of a creature be pregnant? He'd seen starving children, with distended stomachs. This was far bigger than that. As she became more illuminated in the candle's glow, he saw that her dress and apron were soiled beyond even being able to tell what colors they were. There was mud and blood from her head to her feet. The odor in the room made his stomach churn. He assumed it was coming from this filthy, terrifying old woman.

"Please Ma'am... I'm not very comfortable here." he said. I'm gonna tell you one more time. Raise your hands over your head." His pulse began to quicken. A cold sweat began forming on his forehead as he thought about the things Elizabeth had said. Maybe there really was some kind of witchcraft involved here. The unburied body, the missing head, this woman... maybe she was a witch. Just as the thought hit his mind, the woman bolted out of the chair with a unearthly shriek.

Within a split second, she was running at him with a butcher knife raised high above her head. The scream emitting from her sounded as if it came straight from the bowels of hell. There was no time for thought... no time for reason. He did the only thing he could. He pulled the trigger.

What he discovered after finding an oil lamp and lighting up the cabin shook him to his core. This was no creature of the night. It was not some wicked witch, pregnant with Satan's spawn. It was Maryanne, and she wasn't pregnant. Apparently Clarence's death had flipped some sort of switch in her. The pregancy turned out to be Clarence's rotten head, stuffed into the pocket on the front of her apron.

If that wasn't enough, as he searched the rest of the cabin he found something even worse. Amanda's body was in a corner, headless and full of stab wounds. Apparently the widow had attacked her upon arrival. She never had a chance. You may think this is the end of the story, but for the people of Bear claw hollow it was only the beginning.

Sheriff John Brown was found dead in his bed two days later. They claim his cause of death was a heart attack, but those who saw the body said that his face was frozen in a state unlike anything they'd ever seen. It was as if he had died in mid scream, eyes wide and bulging... literally scared to death. Even today, parents tell their teenagers to stay away from property. The locals call it Widow's Weep, and it's legend looms large over the hills of southeast Kentucky.

More than thirty people have went missing from the old pond since the death of the widow. The few that were ever found, were all found in the same place, no matter how many years apart they disappeared. They were found at bottom of the Widow's Weep pond... headless, with their hands bound behind their backs. You may not believe this story, but the people of Bear claw hollow know it to be true.

They say if you go up to the pond at midnight on a Sunday morning, you can see the glow of a candle in the window frame of the broken down shell of the old cabin. It's said that if you wade through the brush and overgrowth to investigate, and you get too close, you'll see the face of the widow in the window. But before you go trying to see for yourself, those who have seen her have gone missing or died under mysterious cirmumstances within a month. Are these just some tall tales? Or, is the curse of the widow for real? There's only one way to find out. Shall you?