Coffin Hollow and Other Ghost Tales

COFFIN HOLLOW
and Other Ghost Tales

Ruth Ann Musick

COFFIN HOLLOW
and Other Ghost Tales

With a foreword by William Hugh Jansen
Illustrations by Archie L. Musick

THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KENTUCKY

Copyright © 1977 by The University Press of Kentucky Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth, serving Bellarmine College, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Club, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University.

Editorial and Sales Offices:
The University Press of Kentucky 663 South Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky 40508-4008

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Coffin Hollow, and other ghost tales / [edited by] Ruth Ann
   Musick; with a foreword by William Hugh Jansen ; ill. by Archie L.
   Musick.—Lexington : University Press of Kentucky, ©1977.
   Bibliography: p. 193-[194]
   1. Tales, American-West Virginia. 2. Ghosts-West Virginia.
I. Musick, Ruth Ann.
GR110.W4C63    398.2'5'09754    76-51157
ISBN 0-8131-1416-0        MARC

This book is printed on acid-free recycled paper meeting the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials.

Manufactured in the United States of America

To my brother,
ARCHIE L. MUSICK,
and to my former students,
who contributed so many
of these tales

CONTENTS

A Foreword

Preface

Tales

Notes

Bibliography

A FOREWORD

In Memoriam
RUTH ANN MUSICK
(1899-1974)

Great quantities of enthusiasm, of selfless interest in the projects of others, of unflagging dedication to students whose virtues she always discovered with no difficulty whatsoever — all tightly compressed into a quite small, feminine, intense compass: that was the late Ruth Ann Musick, most recent in the line of fine but lonely scholars who have personified West Virginia folklore both within and beyond the boundaries of that state. During her many years in the English department of Fairmont State College, she was practically a public relations agent for folklore within West Virginia. She made radio broadcasts; she wrote newspaper columns; she founded, edited, and wrote for the
West Virginia Folklore Journal. A
fine dramatic narrator herself, she was ready at any time to tell a West Virginia tale. The present volume is the fourth composed of folk material collected by her in West Virginia.

She had a graduate degree in mathematics as well as her doctorate in English (with emphasis upon creative writing) from the State University of Iowa. With no formal training in folkloristics, Dr. Musick struggled heroically to make herself a professional folklorist, frequently handicapped by limitations of time, library facilities, and funds. When I first knew Ruth Ann Musick, she was assiduously taking notes and attending every session from early morning to late night in Dr. Stith Thompson's summer Folklore Institute at Indiana University. No one could have more appreciated the opportunities afforded by the splendid library or the chance to study with famous authorities gathered from all over the world.

She was an early disciple of Vance Randolph. It would be difficult to find a more scholarly or a more unlikely mentor. Until her death she remained a concerned and loyal follower. One of her last letters expressed deep worry that some song manuscripts entrusted to her long ago by Randolph might now go unpublished.

Somehow peculiarly typical of her is her last correspondence with this memorialist. With no ostentation, no self-pity, she cited the grim probabilities about her impending death as reason for despair about finishing her projects. Her concern was for her student informants and collectors whose materials might never be seen and for her respected folklorist peers who might not therefore fully appreciate the wealth of folklore that distinguished her adopted state. With an embarrassing modesty that I once erroneously took for irony, she sought approval (granted, of course!) of a plan to present her manuscripts to Fairmont State College, trusting that there they would be available to all scholars.

In what is likely to be a more productive plan, Dr. Musick finally charged two dedicated literary executrixes with the responsibility of administering her unpublished folklore materials. Judy Prozzillo Byers and Catherine Faris not only intend to prepare various manuscripts for publication but also are encouraging the establishment of a folklore archive (with the Musick manuscripts) and a folklore institute at Fairmont State College — all proposed as a continuation of Ruth Ann Musick's efforts.

In the last twenty years of her life, Dr. Musick, whose early interest in folklore had been predominantly in ballad and folk song, concentrated more and more upon the legend, upon the narrative performed in the belief that it is literally or, occasionally, figuratively true. In
Folktales Told around the World
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), his latest and greatest work, Dr. Richard M. Dorson points out that
legend
should be understood as one genre of
folktale,
that scholarly neglect alone has caused
legend
and
folktale
to be considered somehow mutually exclusive terms. He notes that although the Grimms'
Marchen
(fairy tales) have innumerable English translations, their
Sagen
(legends) have not even once been published in English. Dr. Dorson attributes the neglect to the fact that legends are too allusive, too unstructured, too fragmentary (p. xx).

However, as Dr. Dorson also indicates, legends have recently begun to receive scholarly attention. Although the Baughman
Type and Motif Index of the Folktales of England and North America
is an invaluable aid (witness Dr. Musick's notes in this volume) to establishing the traditional quality of specific legends, it has clear self-imposed linguistic and geographic limitations. And it will be a long time before a majority of the legends of England and, particularly, North America are published and available for type- and motif-indexing. Although ten of Dr. Musick's articles are in the Baughman
Index,
naturally neither this volume nor her
Telltale Lilac Bush
of 1965 is so indexed. Someday inevitably there will be a supplement to Baughman or a separate legend index, and it will draw upon the Musick volumes.

Legends, of course, are not restricted to the oral tradition, a fact that zealous folklorists sometimes forget. Historians have recorded legends; journalists have committed legends; professional writers, serious and comic, skilled and inept, have created some legends and recorded others. Most — all, we hopefully assume — legends have spent a major part of their existence in the oral tradition. Most are born in the oral tradition, and some of these move into a literary tradition. Others, born in the literary tradition, move easily into the oral tradition. And for a single legend the transition may happen over and over. Who could trace the migrations of “The Vanishing Hitch-hiker” through a cinema version, a television show, a country western song, several journalistic articles, and dozens of straight-faced “news” accounts, particularly when each “nontraditional” appearance may be sandwiched into the midst of authentic orally performed “traditional” appearances?

Coffin Hollow
stands in the middle of the traditional-nontraditional, literary-oral debate. With candor that it would be foolish to mistake for naivete — it is really quite wittingly defiant — Dr. Musick points out in her preface that despite her four tape machines, 90 percent or more of the legends here were presented to her in writing by her students. She maintains vehemently and quite correctly that these legends are from oral tradition, and in general her documentation and citation of motifs bear out her contention.

The oral tradition has an aural aspect, an aspect that appeals to, and is recognized by, experienced listeners to oral performance. It is an aspect created in the performance by the listener, and it gives to oral narrative performance part of its aesthetic value. One effect of the aural aspect is that the experienced folk listener is not bothered by, does not even notice, the allusive unstructured, fragmentary shortcomings cited above by Dr. Dorson as reasons for the scholars' disaffection for the legend.

It is this aural aspect that Dr. Musick's students ignored as they represented in writing for experienced readers (not for experienced listeners) narratives in the oral tradition. It can be cogently argued that any other procedure would be impossible, but that argument belongs elsewhere. The procedure used here presents readable (by readers' standards) legends, legends that have been given narrative form by recorders who were writing down tales they knew but to which they themselves applied literary rather than folk standards. The allusions (i.e., the substitution or insertion of local family and geographical names into tales told about other families and other places, a process committed not by the present recorder but by some skilled narrator in the perhaps remote past) make independent tales out of versions of one type. The structural patterns lead to climaxes and to closing statements that create a sense of completion.

Indeed there are stories here that are too polished. Oral narrators love the trick of withholding an important detail from their audiences until the very end of the performance, where it suddenly enlightens or shocks. This device is used too adroitly in a few tales — e.g., 85, 86, 87 (where the punch is withheld until the last three words), 92, and 95. But polished or no, the core is from the oral tradition and each narrative is a recognizable legend.

There are other and more important points that distinguish the
Coffin Hollow
collection as legendary and as oral tradition. It has the hitchhiking ghosts that one expects of any collection, the headless trainmen, the murdered pack peddlers, the ineradicable bloodstains that go with any Appalachian collection, and the bitter Civil War legends common to the Border States. Very exciting is the proliferation of a single tale type; there are eleven quite independent forms of “The Vanishing Hitchhiker” (Baughman number E332.3.3.1), one of which (50) is not so identified by the arrangement. There are two full versions and one partial version of conventional Tale Type 326, all beautifully localized and convincingly “true” or allusive: 22, 44, and 81 (in part). Tale 51 is really built around E544: Ghost leaves evidence of his appearance, a motif made famous fifty years ago by Alexander Woollcott and known long before that. There is even a shaggy dog story (45).

Of the many fascinating motifs let me mention but two: the magic properties acquired by an apple tree on which a man has been unjustly hanged (35 and 56) and the headless dog that steals rides behind a man on horseback (47). I suspect a continental European source for the apple tree, but I have no guess about the origin of the headless dog of Tug Fork (though it obviously builds on E332.3.1).

Folk speech here (not dialect: see Dr. Musick's preface) also excitingly comments on the oral tradition. In an area that knows pickup trucks, sedans, coupes, and hardtops, a buggy is made implausibly capacious (36), but at the same time in a state where coal mining is a major occupation,
slack
is used correctly in a very peculiar British miners' definition (37). I also would propose that the place name
Darkish Knob
(27) represents a misunderstanding on the part of recorder and informant of a place name legend for
Darkies' Knob.

There are many other points to be made. The appearance here of narrative infelicities that would go unnoticed in the aural-oral context again bespeaks the origin of the material. And some very successful tales are in the collection — e.g., 13 and the emotional 55, with its beautiful use of the motif of the unquiet spirit.