The Life of Mawmaw Daisy

Mawmaw was a bit of a scaredy-cat. She was easily startled, and couldn't watch anything on TV that was too suspenseful or scary.

"It'll keep me up all night," she'd say. She got nightmares fairly easily. Part of her childhood memories centered around nightmares, horrible too-real scenarios that involved her mother who she dearly loved.

Once, she said she'd watched a werewolf movie - years ago when my grandfather was alive - and then she had a nightmare where it got after her. It caught her and she told it to let her go ("turn me a-loose," I think she said).

She ended up on the floor. My grandfather had been holding her through the nightmare and she apparently talked in her sleep. So, he let her go as commanded.

Despite getting frightened often, she'd talk to me about the scary stories she'd accumulated growing up. Mawmaw was born and raised in a very rural area and spent a good deal of her life working in fields and collecting harvests. Hills rose around the community, bobbing along into the tail-end of a mountain range. Pine forests are still predominant there even now. Breaks in these forests are for a few houses and pastures. I imagine it was a little different when Mawmaw was little, a bit more forested, fewer houses.

This quiet and almost isolated community composed the setting for her scary stories. One that most intrigued me was about a ghost woman in a bonnet, hoeing. I believe on the way home from one of the fields Mawmaw and her family worked, there was a hill. On it, a woman would be working the land, hoe in hand. She'd never look up and she made no sound. She only ever appeared on the hill. Mawmaw said you could see parts of the woman clearly, like her hoe, the apron she wore, and the bonnet.

Another one that has always creeped me out was about a baby's casket. I'm pretty sure she told me this story, but I asked her about it once many years after the first telling of it and she didn't seem to remember. But, my mom knows about it, too, and she finds it a creepy tale as well. On a certain road in the community Mawmaw grew up in, heavy rains would cause flood it. When the road was flooded, you could see a baby's casket float along it.

And while many of Mawmaw's stories involved seeing spooky things, there were others where she and her family didn't see anything but felt it instead. For example, once, her father was sitting on the porch of their house. I believe it was getting dark. He heard the rattle of chains and then something was yanking him off the porch. He never figured out what it was.

Mawmaw herself had her breath stolen by something when she was a schoolgirl. She and her family had been out late, watching her in a school play. They chose to walk through the woods to get home. Nothing had come near them, but they all suddenly couldn't breathe. The sensation lasted for a bit, and then it left them. An while they were rattled, they were able to get home safely. Her father had been home, and when they told them about what happened, he was frightened. Yet, he didn't know what could have caused such a thing either.

Despite growing up in a community that feared and seemed to experience supernatural happenings, Mawmaw got a huge kick out of scaring people.

She'd gotten me many times as I've grown up, making me jump after a delighted call of "Boo!"

But these little antics do not hold a candle on the prank she played on her sister-in-law, also named Daisy. One Halloween, when their children were trick-or-treating aged, Mawmaw was driving them around the community. For some reason, she took them down a road that led to a prominent family's personal cemetery.

She killed the engine. They were all in the dark, on a backroad not many traveled.

She told them the car had gone dead. She couldn't get it to start. (The car, of course, was fine.)

My mom's Aunt Daisy went almost hysterical, begging Mawmaw to get them out of there.

In the end, Mawmaw let up on the prank. She found it hilarious, and still got a good laugh about it whenever she retold it. My mom said she didn't think Aunt Daisy ever went trick-or-treating with them again.

Scared or scaring, Mawmaw had a knack for recounting her stories. I'm just happy she didn't mind telling me as many as she did.