So the day finally arrived; the first day of hunting season, and to say Earl was excited would have been an understatement. He wound his way back to the old driveway he’d used to go to the old woodsman’s house, and this time he went further on down the overgrown road past the place. He noticed as he went by that it didn’t look like the old timer was home. In fact, it looked as if no one had even been there for a very long time.

It was a fine, cool autumn afternoon with sunshine that seemed to portend a good hunt. The weather forecast that morning had predicted a cold front would come through the area, and although the wind might cause the deer to lay up and not stir, if there would be any rain, the dampness would at least quieten the leaves he’d have to walk through. The old road was getting muddy, and even though it had been fairly dry of late, this was one of those areas where the ground just never seemed to get completely dry, so his truck did a lot of spinning in the ancient ruts, especially going up the many hills through the woods.

He found a bit of a clearing where he parked, and grabbed his pack and rifle, and set out to look for deer signs. Finally he was walking on what he was sure was a game trail through the ever-thickening brush, and for the first time he began to get a weird feeling, almost like he was being watched; like he wasn’t alone in those creepy woods. After what seemed like miles of that overgrown trail, he began to notice an area of unusual darkness in the thick woods up ahead. Was it some kind of dilapidated building out here in the middle of nowhere? It sure seemed to be, but what? As he approached he could make out the dark upright remains of what used to be a house, and it looked as though it had once been a big, two story building, now rotting and in disarray. The windows upstairs were all broken out, leaving black portals that felt like eyes watching for unsuspecting intruders into its domain.

The place gave Earl the creeps, it had an evil feel, and as he saw the old road, now only a trail, went on past it, he trudged ahead, trying not to look, but there seemed to be some irresistible attraction that kept drawing his gaze to that horrid house. As he was passing the closest point to the house, he saw a couple of aged crows complaining to each other in a huge sycamore tree. A few ochre leaves fluttered in the light breeze, and as Earl looked up into the tree, he noticed that clouds were starting to drift in ahead of the cold spell. He picked up his pace, both to try and get where he was going before the weather got bad, and to get away from the spooky place. A few starlings fluttered from the brush and finally! He was past the old house! He knew the weather was about to take a turn for the worse, but his attention was spurred back onto the hunt when he came upon a tree rub, where bucks rub all the velvet off their antlers which takes the bark off small saplings; it diverted his thoughts from the eerie woods, at least for now, and back to the big buck for which he’d come here.

As Earl stealthily walked further into the vine-infested darkness, he remembered the odd way the old man looked at him when he asked for permission to hunt there, and he remembered that he’d wondered what that was all about. It wouldn’t be the last time he gave it thought. A quarter of an hour after he passed the creepy old house, the wind started to pick up and the air rapidly began to cool. The cold front had arrived, and with it, the sky began to darken as the first of the rain began to come down. Earl’s hunting clothes were fairly weather resistant, so the light rain didn’t immediately bother him, but he knew it would soon get muddy, and walking would become difficult, but of more immediate concern, the gathering darkness of the woods seemed unusual, even for a storm, because it wasn’t all that late. He could still see fairly well though, and after all the trouble to get here, he wasn’t ready to give up on that deer, besides with the rain soaking the woods, his walking through the leaves was, as expected, much quieter.

About the time the game trail he’d been following played out, he noticed something odd – a very old moss-covered concrete wall, or what was left of it. It was out through the dark woods, and he could see that it was high near a corner and irregularly eroded as it stretched through the darkness until it reached the ground. If Earl had known it, he would have recognized this as being the last trace of an ancient drying oven for lumber, but he had no idea of the sordid history of the Duff Mill that once operated in the very place where he now stood.

A crack of thunder rumbled off to the northwest, and Earl started to grow concerned that he’d get caught out in the coming storm, hours away from his truck, and there was no way he was going to take shelter in that creepy old house he’d passed earlier. He wasn’t necessarily superstitious, but there was something extremely unsettling about that house! He began to look around the concrete wall to see if there was anything resembling cover around it. It had indeed become very dark for that time of the evening, but as he searched for shelter, a sudden flash of lightning revealed a tangled mat of thick vines draped inside the corner of the wall. It wasn’t exactly waterproof under the snarled briars, but he might be able to spread his poncho, which he always carried in his pack, over the vines and it might keep some of the rain off.

As he began to make his way towards the wall, he heard a solitary old crow nearby, but instead of the normal cawing cry, he could swear the crow was screeching “no, no!”, and the calls seemed to grow more insistent as he moved in the direction of the old wall. “NO! NO!” This was upsetting, to say the least!

He stumbled on through the darkness in the rain, which was by now getting heavier, he tripped over something about knee-high, but it didn’t feel like a tree stump – it was harder, like a rock, and sure enough, as he looked down through the tall weeds, he saw that it was a slab of limestone. In the gloom, he could make out that it had been shaped by someone long ago and obviously placed there. As he reached down to feel of what appeared to be a flat side, his fingers traced crude chisel marks in the stone which, even though they were by now illegible, revealed that it was a very old grave marker – and another lightning flash revealed that there were more of them close by, some standing eerily and others leaning this way and that. Still others were lying in dark and lonely mounds, which he now suspected of being ancient burial sites, and to make matters even spookier, in places, the ground had been washed away over the years and in the brief lightning flashes, he could see what he thought might have been bones of long-dead inhabitants washed out of shallow graves, scattered and mingled among the mossy cold rocks.

The rain had grown into a torrent as he hurriedly pulled the poncho out and did his best to drape it over the vines in the corner of the old concrete wall and crawl under it, with lightning flashing all around, and then all he could do was wait until the storm abated. By now he’d decided to call off the hunt, as it would probably be too late to resume it after the rain stopped, and he was soaking wet and thoroughly tired of this spooky place. He kept hearing weird noises, almost like some kind of unhinged raspy laughter, but he tried to convince himself it was the thunder and wind playing on his imagination. The old graveyard was playing mightily on his thoughts too.

It was getting late in the evening, still a couple of hours before normal dark as the rain began to subside. The wind was still gusty, and Earl, somewhat shaken by the events of the day, looked out from under his crude shelter to see if he might be able to get out of there without drowning. It was still raining lightly, but had grown very cold, and he was wet. Just as he was about to gather himself together and leave, he noticed a movement out in the gloom. There was someone – or something – silently moving out there just a few yards away! He knew there was no way it could be a living person out there in those decrepit woods in the storm, but it didn’t look to be an animal either. It almost resembled some kind of greyish mist, sort of drifting through the dark brush, but with definite form and purposeful movement, and he ducked back under his shelter thinking that he’d glimpsed more than one!

A sudden chill came over him that wasn’t coming from the cold air as Earl was beginning to realize this place was inhabited by something he’d only heard about or watched in horror movies. Prior to this dark and eerie evening, Earl had never given much thought to the supernatural, but he now knew he was witnessing something horrifying. And he was afraid – afraid of something unknown – something old, dark, and unexplainable.

Flashes of lightning lingered after the storm had passed, showing he was in a mess of tangled vines and thickets interspersed with a few very old hardwood trees, some with late autumn leaves stubbornly clinging to thin branches and undulating in the strong breeze, they almost looked like spidery fingers clawing at the dark air. It was by now late evening, and Earl realized that if he was going to get out of that dreadful place before it got too dark to see, he’d have to get himself together and start moving, so as hard as it was to come to grips with crawling out of his makeshift shelter and moving through that horrifying cemetery again, he had to get going. The noise that sounded like laughter he had been hearing didn’t go away with the storm, in fact, it seemed louder, as if it was coming toward him.

While Earl sat there shivering, trying to get his nerve up to leave, his mind went back to the evening he stopped and asked for permission to hunt on that property. He was beginning to think he understood now why the old timer acted so surprised that someone would actually want to go out there into those foreboding woods. There probably had been others who had seen things here, maybe things as terrifying as what Earl was experiencing, but why didn’t he warn Earl? He did say something about not letting the sun go down on him in those woods, and now Earl knew why, and if it was going to get spookier after nightfall, Earl didn’t want to be there, so he crawled out and just left the poncho, grabbed his gun, and began to pry himself out into the deepening evening.

So far no more spooky apparitions were moving around, and as the storm moved away, it actually got a little lighter, and Earl was both thankful and apprehensive, because the waning daylight allowed him to get a better look at the old graveyard, and he really didn’t want to see any more of it. Yes, those were bones he had seen earlier, in fact there were a few skulls among the bones lying face up, staring with empty eyes that he almost felt like were watching him as he hurriedly moved through. In one especially dark corner of the area, Earl couldn’t help but feel and especially sinister presence lurking in the blackness. This seemed to be where the unsettling laughter was coming from, and Earl made haste to get away.

He finally got through the old cemetery and back to the game trail he’d come in on, but as the evening darkness grew, he realized he still had to go back by that awful old house. He wished he knew those woods better so he could figure out a different route back out of there, but as it was, he had no other choice. It was icy cold now, and he was able to see the gloomy dark old house with the black windows glaring down at him from some dark upstairs bedroom that hadn’t been slept in, at least by a living soul, in scores of years. He hoped it was his imagination, but there seemed to be a dark grey mist drifting out of those windows, long without panes or sills. There were vines growing up the walls, over the doors, and dead limbs fallen from surrounding trees embedded through the roof in places. There was no way to get through the tangled vegetation and get into the old house, even if someone wanted to. Yet there seemed to be a strange glow emanating from one of the downstairs window openings, almost as if there was an old lamp burning inside! Earl could have sworn he heard that same evil laughter he’s heard down at the old graveyard.

Earl could see his breath in the gathering darkness, and he found himself panting as he tried to avert his gaze from the window with the impossible light inside and he wanted to throw down his rifle and cover his ears to block out the insane laughing – by now he was actually running and on the verge of panic. The sun was going down and he was still a long way from his truck! He looked behind him on the trail and to his horror, he saw what appeared to be a vivid apparition of an old woman standing there leaning on an ancient garden hoe, silently motioning for him to come back, and her hands and arms were soaked with blood! As horrifying as the sight was, Earl felt an overwhelming sadness at her visage, but he did not stop to try and figure out what it was about.

Soaked to the bone and exhausted beyond belief, Earl reached his truck and shivering and shaking, he finally fumbled his key into the door and climbed in. The wheels were deep in mud which had washed down the old road in the storm, and he wondered if he was going to be stuck there. The creepy laughter had subsided, but he could still hear it far away now. He couldn’t remember a more relieved moment in his life than seeing the interior light of his truck and hearing the engine start. After rocking back and forth in forward and reverse, he was able to get the vehicle moving and turned around. After much slipping, spinning, and sliding, he found himself approaching the old cabin where he’d stopped, it now seemed like ages ago, to talk to the old man, and to his amazement, the cabin was gone! Completely and utterly not there! In fact, there were giant oak trees growing in the very spot where the cabin had been! Earl had been set up for this whole thing, by someone, or something, returned for an encounter with the living from long ago!

Earl spent a lot of time in the ensuing years wondering just what those ancient oak trees out there had witnessed long ago. He found out bits and pieces of information about the old mill and settlement where he’d chanced to have his adventure, and after some time was able to piece together just what he had happened upon. As for me, well, I’m amazed at the things a person can overhear listening to idle conversations during a rained-out golf outing.

I told this story in a post on my old website, but alas, it went the way of the dodo when I did the big site revamp. I will attempt to tell it again here – for those who remember the earlier version, please understand that some of the details may be a bit different.

It was beautiful day in the summer, so I decided to check out the local golf course for a few rounds. Was playing the seventh, and not doing remarkably well, when a sudden thunderstorm came up and the few of us out on the course hurried off to the clubhouse and tried to wait it out, but as it seemed to be setting in, some of the guys started talking and even though I wasn’t exactly eavesdropping, I overheard a strange conversation. One of the fellows was talking about a local legend of a long-gone sawmill in a remote area out several miles northeast of town. As a relatively new resident of this neck of the woods, I didn’t know of any mill that had been up there, but as he related the tale, I became fascinated and eventually stopped pretending to ignore what he was saying and listened overtly and intently.

There was a fellow, I’ll call him Earl, who lived just outside of town, who spent a lot of time riding the back roads in the county. He went all over, mostly looking for tracts of land with timber that might be available, as he worked with logging contractors who operated in the area. In his travels he met lots of folks, one widow in particular from whom he had once bought timber, caught his attention, and he made trips out to her place once in a while for coffee and company and to help her with firewood and such. He had to go through some remote back country to and from her house, and there were places on the dirt roads where the woods were thick, dark, and foreboding, but as an outdoorsman with considerable experience in the woods, he didn’t really pay attention to the general spookiness of the countryside. So it was that one evening in late summer as he was going home from her place, he saw a magnificent buck cross the dirt road ahead of him, and it sported an incredible set of antlers. Such was that rack that he could hardly believe his eyes, and from that point on, he was hooked.

He drove around the area looking for a property owner’s residence so he might try and get permission to hunt in those woods, and about dusky dark, he came across a rusty mailbox beside what might pass for a driveway, mostly overgrown with weeds and brush, going back into the woods, probably to an unseen house. Since he had caught an instant case of acute buck fever, he decided to give it a shot. Even making an uninvited visit to some reclusive hillbilly’s house in the darkening evening didn’t seem to be an unreasonable risk, as long as he might end up with a chance of trying to bag that big buck.

Earl drove down the winding rutted roadway through woods that were so thick and dark, he began to wonder if anyone actually lived out there and even if this was a good idea. Just about the time he decided to start looking for a place to turn around to get out of this creepy place, he saw a dim light through the brush ahead. He slowly drove up and as he got closer, he could make out an ancient cabin back in the gloom; the light was coming from a kerosene lamp inside a mold-crusted window on the front side of the house. Tendrils of smoke wound from a homemade chimney. A very old dog, maybe part lab, began to sound off as Earl shut off his engine, and the front door opened, revealing a silhouetted old man with an ancient shotgun stepping out to meet the intruder. Earl could make out that the dim road kept winding through the woods past the homestead, but he couldn’t tell what might be down there in the almost unnatural darkness.

Earl was taken somewhat aback, he’d heard tales of anti-social fellows in these parts who didn’t like being bothered. Sometimes they were moonshiners or poachers, and it wasn’t the best idea to intrude on them. Earl stepped from his truck and approached the old man who must have been closing in on ninety, or maybe even older, but he seemed to still be able to get around okay. Earl quickly introduced himself and told the old fellow of his business, as the owner slowly lowered his gun. He explained seeing the big buck out on the road, and asked if the ancient resident owned the property, and if so, would he allow someone to hunt on it. Earl was prepared to offer him a decent tip if he’d consider giving him permission.

Until now the old timer hadn’t said anything, but Earl noticed an odd look on the old man’s face when he spoke of wanting to hunt in those woods. The old grandpa fellow asked Earl if he knew anything of the history of that part of the country, something Earl hadn’t given any thought at all, and furthermore, he wasn’t the slightest bit curious about prior goings-on there, he just wanted to try for that buck. The old fellow sort of shook his head, as if in disbelief, but curiously told Earl that if it was anybody’s property, it was his, and if he was sure he wanted to hunt there, he would allow it and there would be no charge. As Earl climbed back into his truck to start the engine, the old man mumbled something Earl couldn’t make out, but he did catch something about being careful not to allow the sun to go down on him in those woods! The old man seemed adamant about that part of what he said. Even the intrepid Earl, hunter and outdoorsman extraordinaire, was a bit rattled at the behavior of the old timer when they spoke of the woods. What could it mean?

A long time ago, in the late 1800’s and early 1900s, people were settling in this part of the Ozarks. Most folks built cabins, but some more affluent people opted to build regular houses using sawed lumber from the plentiful old-growth hardwood, but lumber required sawmills, and sure enough, sawmills started cropping up all around the country. Some of the early mills grew into sizeable operations, one in particular was the Duff Mill.

After the civil war, there was one Major Duff, retired and settled with his family on a large tract of property in Southern Missouri. He bequeathed land to his big family to build on, and even leased a few acres to a sawmill operator from Springfield who set up a mill there, and as time went by, the mill grew to a big operation, so big in fact, that a small mill town was established with a few hundred folks living there. Of course, a “company store” was established for the townsfolk. Several cabins sprang up on hillsides and in ravines and the townsfolk located springs in the nearby woods.

Flower beds and small vegetable gardens were planted and tended by family members of the mill workers to supplement the wild game and store provender for their survival. A company doctor came out from the city once a week to attend to the various ailments of the townspeople and such injuries sustained at the mill that didn’t require a trip to the hospital in Saint Louis; or burial in the small cemetery behind the mill. Like most early manufacturing facilities in those days, industrial safety wasn’t a thing, and that meant lots of people got hurt; many injuries were serious, and fatalities were more or less normal occurrences. In this regard, Duff Mill was notorious. The grisly accidents started early – one of the first wagon loads of logs to arrive at the mill somehow came unchained and logs fell off and landed on an unfortunate mill hand and crushed him. Some of the other employees retrieved his body and unceremoniously carried/dragged him to the area behind the mill and buried him in a shallow trench and covered him with the damp earth and pieces of the plentiful limestone from a nearby ravine. This was the first “grave” in the new cemetery.

As time passed, and the operation grew, the company brought in a foreman, a lanky, cantankerous middle aged fellow from somewhere in Eastern Europe . He spoke with a thick accent, he was abrasive, rude, and no one on the site liked him. The only thing of any interest to him whatsoever was the board footage the mill turned out, and he treated all of the workers like slaves. No one knew what his real name was, everybody referred to him as Jackson. He walked around with a piece of hickory limb about the size of an axe handle, and was known to fly into a rage and hammer guys with that club. At first some of the mill workers would stand up to him, and as was his wont, he’d weasel out of a confrontation, but the company would invariably send down some goons, who would accompany Jackson to terminate that unfortunate fellow, and as times were very hard back then, those guys got to where they would put up with almost anything to keep their jobs.

When a fatal accident happened in the mill, Jackson would send a worker to fill water buckets and wash the blood away, and immediately get everyone back to work. He seemed to relish going to the poor worker’s cabin to inform his wife and children of the tragedy and give them notice that they had to move out so the cabin would be available for the next employee. He would give a couple of hands a few minutes to bury the fatality and get back to work. No matter the severity of the situation, no matter how many coworkers needed a few minutes to deal with their grief, Jackson was only concerned with board feet. If they wanted to have a memorial service, they could do it after hours in the dark.

One accident in particular was especially tragic for the townspeople. One of the older guys was impaled by a long piece of wood that flew out of a big saw when the blade shattered. His wife was near the area where it happened, and when she learned of it, she ran to the scene of the accident where her husband of several years lay dead. Despondent at her loss and knowing Jackson would soon evict her from the cabin and having nowhere to go, she took a piece of the saw blade and sliced deep into her wrist and quickly bled to death. Several of the workers and their families wept over losing them, but mostly for her, for she’d helped a lot of families in their gardens and shared her own produce with those in need.

In spite of the low morale, the mill prospered, and word of its success spread around the countryside, even up to White River, where several unemployed guys heard there was a place to work a few miles away. A half dozen of them packed a few belongings and bedrolls and hiked through the log roads and open woods to Duff Mill, where they were immediately hired. Three of them were brothers, the Broomfield boys. Chad, George, and Ronnie. They all three took an instant dislike of Jackson, and he would find them somewhat different than most of the hands he intimidated.

Before the brothers had been on site very long, the older ones, Chad and George, were soon known to be excellent hunters, and they were often called on to provide wild game for the mill workers. Sometimes they’d be out in the woods for a few days, hunting and netting fish for camp meat. Of course, Jackson always took the choicest cuts of tenderloin and backstrap from the deer.

One rainy day, Ronnie, the youngest of the Broomfields, a lean and lanky young fellow not quite full grown, was carrying an arm load of firewood to feed the boiler when he slipped on the muddy hillside. Jackson was nearby and when he saw Ronnie fall down, he walked over and savagely kicked him in the ribs and screamed at him. The poor kid was helpless and in severe pain, so there was little he could do at the time, his older brothers were out hunting game, and by the time they got back a few days later and heard about it, they knew there would be a reckoning; the right time hadn’t come yet, but it was etched in stone.

Sawmills in those days were limited in the amount of business they could do. The limit was shipping. Some mills in or near towns where there were railroads did better than mills like Duff, out in the middle of nowhere with nothing but wagons to haul in logs and haul out lumber. As the mills in the towns grew, they could produce and ship lumber cheaper than Duff, and most of the nearby woods had been harvested requiring longer trips for the wagons, so eventually business started declining. This decrease in profits seemed to aggravate their living conditions and of course, going out of business made Jackson crazier and meaner than ever. The man was evil, and to the few hands who were still working there, he had become intolerable.

One day the expected notice came from the owners in the city. The mill would cease operations. Most of the workers and families had already packed their belongings as by now the impending shutdown was no surprise to anyone. As everyone was leaving, George Broomfield decided it was finally time to square up with Jackson, so he walked over to the foreman’s house – a fairly decent home apart from the hovels of the workers, it was the only two-story house in the town, and Jackson lived there by himself – the extra room was for company big shots on the infrequent occasions when they came to see the operation.

When George arrived at the foreman’s lodgings, he thought it odd that the door was partly open, so he didn’t bother to knock and walked in. Good manners were the furthest thing from his mind. The first thing he noticed was blood – spattered all over the living area and trailing up the stairs. When he mounted the staircase, he was surprised to see his younger brother, no longer a skinny kid, Ronnie had grown by now into a big muscular man. Holding a familiar hickory club the size of an axe handle, itself smeared with blood. He looked down the staircase and shook his head as he told his brother he wouldn’t have to bother with his errand – the bloodied club was evidence that Ronnie had already taken care of it.

Before the mill town completely emptied, a few of the hands drug Jackson’s carcass out to the cemetery and buried it under large pieces of limestone, which they were none too gentle about putting over it. As far as anyone was concerned, his fate was a result of the last mill “accident”.

Years passed, and all of the buildings slowly rotted away. The only things left of the former bustling town were the dilapidated foreman’s house and a few concrete walls, mostly from the drying kiln. Vines, briars, trees, and nature in general reclaimed the place until a person wouldn’t even know a mill had existed there. Except for the dark and foreboding shell of the foreman’s house. It would be on this very acreage that Earl, who had no idea of the days of the old mill and its history, would come to hunt his trophy buck.

(To be continued)