The Ghost in the Swallow Tail Coat

The Ghost in the Swallow Tail Coat

by Tom Woodard

As I have mentioned in some of my previous stories, when I was fifteen my family moved from the old farm house in which I was raised into a fine new two story home my parents built on a wooded hill overlooking McShan Lake, directly across the highway from the old Melrose Plantation manor house. What I haven't told you is that this fine new house was built smack dab in the middle of the old slave cemetery of Melrose Plantation! Yes, it is true! Some of the old rocks and pieces of petrified wood that marked a few of the graves remain there to this day. Other markers, no doubt made of wood, had rotted away long, long ago.

What's more, the first floor of the house is built into the slope of the hill, so that many of the graves had to be excavated to make way for the portion of that floor which was underground. The result is that the house appears to be only one story from the front, but two stories in the rear, whereas in reality it is two stories throughout. In order to build where they wanted, my parents had to pay a man to walk, at all times, next to the blade of the bulldozer as it dug into the site of those old graves, looking for bones or any artifacts that may have been buried with the dead. They did as the State required, but the man never spotted a thing. It was a case of "dust to dust" having come to full fruition.

My bedroom and my brother's bedroom were on the first floor, within the cut of that bulldozer's blade. One night, not long after we moved into the house, just after cutting out the light in my room and as I was about to lay my head on my pillow, I caught a glimpse of a strange light, and looking toward it saw one of the most amazing sights I have ever seen. There, just across my small bedroom and near the South wall, lay an old black man, floating about twelve to sixteen inches off the floor in a horizontal position, face up, eyes closed, and with his hands folded across his chest as if he were lying in a coffin - but there was no coffin, only him.

He was dressed in a long formal top coat, like those one sees in pictures from the era prior to the War Between the States, and it appeared to me to be what they called a swallow tail coat, because its tails were like unto the tail of a Swallow. The strangest thing of all, however, is that there was a blue, luminous fire all about his features and clothing! It was at once somewhat frightening but strangely beautiful. I sat perfectly still in my bed, watching this marvelous apparition, when it suddenly just faded away!

The old man appeared before me perhaps two more times within the first year or so that I occupied that room, and thereafter appeared no more. It was crystal clear that what I saw was the body, lying in repose, of the man who had been laid to rest in that spot. And from his apparel, it seems to me that he must have been the head of the house servants at Melrose, as no field hand would have been dressed in such a fine way. Thus, he would have been seen among the slaves at Melrose as one in high station on the plantation, and likely respected and loved by the white occupants of the manor house as well. His name is lost to history, but from his appearance I would imagine he cut a fine figure in life, as he went about his duties in the "Big House", as the slaves usually called the home of the master and mistress of the plantation.

I regard it as a singular privilege, to this day, to have been able to see this amazing reincarnation from a long-ago past. And it was singular indeed!

NOTE: Melrose Plantation was owned by the Beard family, and they held on to it until almost the end of the Nineteenth Century. The last of the Beards, Drusie Beard, married my grandfather's brother, Glenn McShan. Unfortunately, they had no children and so the Beard line, of Melrose Plantation, died out with her passing. After they lost the Plantation, my grandfather's sister and her husband, Mary and Josh Sparkman, bought it and lived in it until they moved to Dade City, Florida, and went into the citrus growing business. My grandfather, John Tyler McShan, II, then bought it and it has been in the McShan lineage ever since. The old house still stands proud on its hill, as it has since the 1850s, and is the most beautiful surviving ante-bellum home in Pickens County, Alabama.

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