Ghost walk through Lexington stirs up spirits
Rest assured, or rest uneasy, that the living aren’t the only ones who’ll be walking our city come Halloween night.
My personal ghost walk begins at Grimes Park where I stop for a chat with Louie Cox, lifelong resident of the neighborhood and a sometimes teller of tall tales. As long as I’ve lived in Lexington, I’ve heard the rumor of a slave graveyard behind his house in the grassy lot off the walking path at the old Grimes School.
“Oh, yes, it’s haunted back there.” He doesn’t hesitate. “Sometimes the spirits are so strong I can feel them. Gives me chills.”
No headstones have ever marked the site, but Louie remembers as a boy when a prominent Lexington citizen visited this field at the edge of the school yard with a metal detector to probe for hinges and handles on underground coffins. Several were found, dug up, and reburied in the city cemetery off Raleigh Road.
“But did he get them all?” Louie asks. “Maybe he did and maybe he didn’t.” He smiles. Souls might still be seeking eternal rest. I walk on, across Salem Street down Fourth Avenue and into the expansive city cemetery. Usually I walk it alone, without my dog, since years ago dogs were discouraged from browsing the cemetery for fear they would pee on the graves and eat the decorative, plastic flowers. My dog can’t read the sign, though, so sometimes he joins me. Dogs know when there’s a haunting.
The cemetery spans 20 acres now, but at one time it was just a scrap of land at the edge of a community not yet formed. A monument by the main entrance off State Street marks the center of the cemetery as it was years ago. Burials date to 1740, a good 35 years before there was even a Lexington. After its original founding, the site grew into a messy plot of sage brush, scrub trees, and thorns until it was cleaned up and became the well-maintained resting place it is today.
At one time, the town gallows were located just past the cemetery’s gate. What more ghastly way to die, guilty or falsely accused, than to look out over the stone-pocked sea of gravestones as the black bag is slipped over your head. Stand beneath the scarlet oak as old as the city. Gather around those gallows, as our ancestors did, and hear the screams from beneath those hoods. No stone or foundation marks the location of the gallows, but if you listen, you can hear ghosts seeking justice, or forgiveness.
A few paces in lead me to perhaps the most acknowledged marker in the cemetery: the large gravestone of Dr. R. L. Payne upon which, beneath his name and dates, is carved the word, ASSASSINATED.
The Payne story—how in 1895 he was gunned down on Main Street by Baxter Shemwell, proprietor of Lexington Drug and a known hothead—is well documented. Shemwell, who was shot and killed in almost the same spot 35 years later, was acquitted in 1896, but Payne’s inscription has the last word.
Across from the Payne site and surrounded by two-inch thick flat stone markers of dead Confederate soldiers, an open grassy area holds unnamed bodies of slaves who won’t rest—nor should they—until their names are known. Listen and you can hear voices singing, “Amazing Grace” and “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.”
I was taught never to walk on a grave, because I’d disturb the dead, so I stick close to the paths and tiptoe around headstones. In the Christian tradition, bodies are buried facing east, because, according to Revelation, the Messiah will appear in the Second Coming from that direction.
Old timers and librarians know that a body buried facing west belongs to a person considered a witch. Witches are also buried upside down, presumably so they can’t get up and walk. In this front part of the cemetery, bodies have been planted facing in all directions, which makes this writer wonder who exactly is under ground there.
Just a few markers down the path at the cemetery, a stone angel with half an arm lifts her head heavenward. The name on the stone is Etta Shemwell McCrary. Yep, sister to Baxter. She married into the prominent McCrary family but died at age 31, just after her infant son Theodore’s death. Son Theodore is buried to her left, husband Theodore on her left.
The companion on Theodore’s right side is his second wife. No other children are buried nearby. Baby ghosts, some named and some not named, can be found throughout the cemetery, infants who lived a few hours or a year or two years, back in a time with such deaths were common. Their little spirits haunt me.
Out of the city cemetery, across town, and close behind the Lexington Cinema on Talbert Boulevard, is the small Nokomis Cemetery. In 1903, the A. R. Williams family of Lexington was hit hard with smallpox, but the City of Lexington would not allow the bodies to be buried in the city cemetery. Nokomis Mill gave permission for a gated plot within its cemetery off Talbert Boulevard for the bodies. Imagine those bodies forever shunned, their ghosts uneasy.
“The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past,” wrote William Faulkner. The South is always haunted, says my Louisiana friend Penelope. We coexist with the living and the dead. We are who we have loved and lost.
We are also who we have oppressed, mistreated, executed, and assassinated.
Yes, the South is always haunted, but, especially in late October, those spirits come back to live among us. Just ask Louie Cox. “I would not kid you about something like that,” he says, dead serious this time.
