Musings The Haunting of Rastus Johnson:  The H’aint of Leaf River and the Booger that Made Tin Roofs Sing

Monsters have long inhabited these shores.  In Colonial New England, It was a headless horseman who rode the countryside and the ghost of long-dead Dutchmen who induced a deep and decades-long sleep on poor old Rip Van Winkle.

At sea, the ghost ship “Flying Dutchman” has, for centuries tried – and failed – to round the Horn.

In the North, it was ghosts and goblins, but the South had “boogers and h’aints.”  Rainey Community in the 1920’s had its own:  The Leaf River H’aint that scared the britches off an unwary fisherman, and the Booger of Shelton Creek that made tin roofs sing.

And Rastus Johnson was singled out for their afflictions.

Rastus, his wife, Belle and their eight young’uns had a hard time eking out a living, but they made it with the help of the good white folks of Rainey Community. They share-cropped for Cook Anderson, did odd jobs like cutting firewood and helped Cook get his crops in.  He paid a half-cent a pound for picking cotton, and fifty cents a day to load sweet potatoes for sale to the starch factory in Laurel or for pulling and washing turnips, which Cook grew, under contract, for the Laurel canning plant.

When an elderly prominent man of the community died and left behind some good clothes, his widow donated some to Rastus, since he was a about her late husband’s size.  Rastus was glad to get them, for his old “over-hauls” were getting mighty thread bare, so he wore his new duds proudly. 

Meat was a rare item at the Johnson dinner table.  Sometimes, the white folks would invite Rastus to help with a hog or cow killing, and give a piece of meat for payment.  He always requested his favorite part – the goozle.  And sometimes the people who ran the fish trap on the Leaf River would give him a spoon-bill catfish or some other trash fish. But much of the Johnson’s meat was what Rastus or one of the older boys could kill in the woods or catch in the River.

One Saturday afternoon, after splitting a box of kindling for Miz Appie, Rastus dug a can of worms, got his cane pole and walked down to the river by the Emmons place to see if he could catch a fish. Reese Emmons saw Rastus pass by, fishing gear in hand, and recognized the britches he was wearing. Reese was a prankster, and just could not resist the temptation. 

He let Rastus get comfortable and catch a fish or two, and then he eased into the river upstream from the unsuspecting fellow and swam underwater until he found Rastus’s fishing line.  He grabbed it, gave a couple of twitches, like a fish nibbling at the bait, then gave a mighty tug that nearly yanked the pole from Rastus’s grip.  Rastus, who had slipped into a comfortable doze in the warm spring sun, was instantly alert, jumped to his feet, and exclaimed loudly, though no one was there to hear, “Good Lawd Almighty, I donnin’ hanged the biggest ol’ yellow cat in this here river!” He could just smell the fish sizzling in Belle’s skillet.

He gave a mighty tug, and Reese allowed himself to be pulled to the surface.  He wrapped the fishing line around his hand and held it under his chin.  As he broke water, he said, in his best ghostly voice, “Rastus, give me back my britches.”  And he did -- then and there. He left his pole and bait bucket on the river bank and ran home in his union suit, screaming all the way!

It was a cold January night when the ghostly sound filled the air. It began as a low moan then morphed into a quivering crescendo, like Old Man Ted Odom playing the “G” string on his fiddle and shaking his finger that chorded the string to give it that wavering sound. It stopped. Then, after a few minutes of suspense-filled silence, it started again.  At first, just a barley discernable moan, then it grew into a deep-throated quivering roar. People all over the Rainey Community dropped their forks into their supper plates and said, “What on Earth is that?”

Rustus, Belle and the eight young’uns – Clara Belle, the twins Church Belle and School Belle, Pharaoh, Cicero, Cotton Row, Boudreaux, and Fenton -- were just sitting down to eat. Rastus was really looking forward to the meal.  Belle had baked the possum he had caught the week before and had penned and fattened on corn and table scraps.  It sat on a platter in the middle of the table surrounded by baked sweet potatoes, oozing syrup through their skins.  There was a big pot of frost-sweetened collards cooked with a big chunk of salt meat; a skillet of hot cornbread with bits of hog cracklins’ Mr. Cook had given him, along with the goozle, for helping with a hog killing; a pitcher of cold buttermilk that remained from the butter Belle had churned just that morning; and the fire that blazed in the fireplace filled the room with warmth, for he had just papered the room with newspaper, so no wind could make its way through the cracks between the boards.

Then It happened – that low moaning sound that got louder and louder and begin to quiver. Like his neighbors, Rastus dropped his fork and said “Belle, listen, wut dat soun’?” Of course she did not know, so the whole family just sat in stunned silence for a suspenseful minute until it started again, this time much louder than before. The loose piece of roofing tin that always creaked in the wind began a sympathetic vibration, and took up the unearthly moaning.  The entire family jumped up, kicked the benches out of the way and ran into the yard, the young’us crying, Belle screaming and Rastus yelling at the top of his lungs, “They’s a  booger in the roof.  They’s a booger in the roof.”

Since, in their haste, they failed to close the front door, the dogs that slept under the porch saw their opportunity.  They rushed into the house, jumped onto the table and ate the roast possum, collards and cornbread and drank all the buttermilk.  They did not care for sweet potatoes.

There was all kind of speculation as to the source of the ghostly sound.  Some said it was the ghost of ol’ Capt’n Newt Knight a-blowing on his black horn, rounding up his dead crew, and soon all the graves of the hanged deserters in Crackers Neck Cemetery would burst open and their former residents would join their dead leader and march on the courthouse in Ellisville and, again, declare Jones County a free state.

The preacher at Fairfield Baptist Church said that is was the moaning of God’s saints, who were about to come forth to rapture the church.

The Methodist preacher at Soule’s Chapel agreed.  He said that all the prophesies were about to be fulfilled: the sound was the trump of God and, any day now, the Eastern Sky would split and Jesus would come fourth, riding on a white stallion to take his children home.

The preachers in all the little Holiness churches agreed – after a fashion.  The sound surly portended the end of the age, but it was a demonic sound, not a heavenly one.  It was the voice of satin rounding up all his demons, readying them to charge from hell and round up all the sinners and take them to eternal punishment.

The quivering roar continued, night after night, and revival broke out in the land.  Churches were filled to overflowing, coins spilled out of the collection plates, and people begin to get right with God. Six people were saved at Fairfield in one night and demanded that they be baptized in Fairfield Branch the very next day, even though the weather was freezing cold.

The altar of Soule’s Chapel was filled to overflowing as members came forward to rededicate their lives.

Three people at the Holiness church came to the front and confessed to sins that would make a carnival barker blush. Unfortunately, they involved other members’ wives.

But still the roaring continued – until old Jess Byrum, looking for a stray cow, came upon a well-used path in Sheldon Creek Swamp.  Thinking that was the course the cow had taken, he followed it into a cane brake -- and found the monster.  There sat a hollow log, it sides shaved down paper-thin with a draw-knife.  On one end was a goat skin, obviously tacked on when green and, now dry and shrunken, was as tight as a drum head.  Dangling from the skin was a grass string, coated with resin. Jess slid it through his thumb and forefinger. The vibration produced in the skin resonated in the thinned wood of the hollow log, and the eerie moaning began.

Then Jess remembered:  Cook had killed a goat a few weeks ago, and Harlis and Johnnie had taken a passion for possum hunting, but seldom brought any home.  He spread the word through the community.  Cook heard it and confronted Harlis and Johnnie.  Of course they denied it, but Cook knew better and wore their butts out with his razor strop.

At any rate, the moaning stopped and life, more or less, returned to normal – except among the Holiness, where a feud developed that split the church.