Teenage Fantasies and Small Town Ghosts - part 1

While attending college in Monroe, my friend Larry and I decided to hitchhike to the small Webster Parish town of Cotton Valley, Louisiana. Larry’s grandparents lived in the former oil and gas boomtown and had invited us down for the weekend. The trip there was non-eventful, the trip home a story in itself. I’ll save that account for another time and tell you instead about our encounter with a ghost in the Cotton Valley cemetery.

Larry had a twin sister named Leeann that was also visiting her grandparents for the weekend. Her girlfriend Cindy had a car and don’t ask me why we hitchhiked to Cotton Valley instead of riding with them but it had something to do with sibling rivalry.

Larry’s grandparents, I’ll call them the Bloomers, had a large wood-framed house with many rooms that they had once rented to itinerant oil field workers. By the sixties Cotton Valley had a population less than two thousand. Still an oil town it was no longer a boomtown. All of the Bloomer’s extra rooms were empty and Larry and I had our pick of the lot.

Like her brother Larry, Leeann was tall and dark. That’s where their appearances diverged. Leeann had the looks of a young starlet along with a Jayne Mansfield body. Tiny Cindy was as pretty as Leeann but was blonde, svelte and had a deep and lusty voice that belied her size.

I was in my teens and the girls could have both been homely as sin and I would still have had visions of a potential weekend liaison. Leeann and Larry, as I mentioned, had unresolved family differences and my daydreams were squelched shortly after the girls arrived. I got my first clue when she and Cindy took rooms as far away as they could get from us on the other side of the large house.

Friday night and most of Saturday passed without Larry and me seeing much of Cindy and Leeann as they were off in the car and we were on foot. Cotton Valley had neither a movie house nor any other form of recreation at the time and Larry and I soon grew bored. I managed to stem my own boredom somewhat by keeping a running journal written in ink on a sheet of paper that I kept in my shirt pocket

The seclusion Larry and I felt had apparently also worked on Leeann and Cindy because shortly after a sit-down dinner with the grandparents they asked us to go for a spin with them in the car. We quickly agreed.

We drove away from the grandparent’s house after dinner, Larry and I in the back seat of Cindy’s Fairlane. As I glanced over the bench at the half-hidden riches beneath Leeann’s plunging blouse and Cindy’s short skirt hiked high on her tanned thighs my daydreams quickly re-emerged. They needn’t have.

We soon stopped at a house on the far edge of town and picked up Jim. Cindy and Jim, it seemed, had met the prior semester at Northeast Louisiana. After flunking out, he had moved back to Cotton Valley to work in the oil patch.

Cindy’s beau was a tall handsome fellow with a Cancun lifeguard’s tan. When Leeann climbed into the backseat with Larry and me and told me to push over to the middle of the bench seat, all my sexual fantasies flew out the car’s open window and I could tell by her frown that I should keep my hands to myself. I thought so when she crossed her legs and pointed them away from me toward the door and knew for sure when she wrapped her arms tightly around her ample bosom

It was just beginning to grow dark as we drove away from Jim’s house – a good thing as I had trouble keeping my gaze away from Leeann’s ample body. Miniskirts were the vogue at the time and the short garment barely qualified her as fully clothed. Feeling Larry’s cold stare over my shoulder I somehow wrested my gaze from her gorgeous legs and luscious breasts – except for an occasional stolen glance.

There isn’t, as mentioned, much to do in Cotton Valley and we were soon headed out of town on a stretch of lonely blacktop. By now it was pitch dark, except for the stars and light of a full yellow moon. Jim and Cindy apparently had a bit of a tiff earlier in the day. We didn’t know it at the time but their relationship was near an end. Luckily for the rest of us, they remained cordial the remainder of the evening and Jim covered up their quarrel skillfully by becoming our local tour guide.

“Slow down and I’ll show you the hanging tree.” Cindy touched the brakes and pulled over as Jim pointed at a large oak tree on the side of the blacktop. A single large branch stretched across the road. Jim told us the tragic story of the rape of a white girl by a local black boy and the resultant retribution performed by an element of the town’s white population. ‘They buried his body in the cemetery up the road and he supposedly still haunts it, especially on a full moon like tonight.”

Fiction South