Strange Things in the Flordia

Strange Things in the Florida Sun

By Shawnte



        Janie walked in the door of her grandparents six room house.  It was a small house that sat in the deep wooded area of Ocala Florida.  All her aunts and uncles had been born there, but refused to step foot back in the house.  “Strange things have happened there Janie, you sure you want to take on this responsibility?”  They said to her when they found out the house had been willed to her after Grandpa Joe passed.  When she asked them what kind of things happened they would utter things like “you see hags running in those woods,” or “we used to see people living in the trees that were no bigger than a humming bird.”  Janie thought they were all crazy, she had spent many nights in the house with her grandparents, and never saw or heard anything strange.

         Whatever happened back then in the olden days was none of Janie’s concern now, she was looking for a new life, away from the city, away from her ex-husband.  Since the divorce Mack had been calling and harassing her, trying to get back with her.  She had enough when he called her at 3:30am telling her he was outside the house and wanted to see the kids.  “Are you crazy?”  She asked him as she jumped out of bed to see his 1984 white Cadillac Seville parked outside of her house. 

         “They're my kids and I can see them whenever I want,” he said jumping out of the car.

         “I’m not opening the door for you,” she said walking into the hallway and peaking in on the kids. 

         “You don’t have to let me in, I still have my key,” he said jigging the key in the lock.  Janie ran downstairs to put the bolt lock on; she installed it a few days before but forgot to lock it before she went to bed. Just as she got to the door and was about to turn the lock, Mack pushed the door open, knocking Janie to the floor.  “You trying to keep me from my kids?”  He said grabbing her and pulling her off the floor with one hand.

         “Mack, it’s late,” her voice trembling.  “Why don’t you come back later after they get out of school?”

         “I want to see my kids,” he said throwing her towards the couch.  He was drunk, and when he got like this, he was a force to be reckoned with, but Janie had enough.  He started for the stairs but she grabbed the back of his coat and pulled him back as his foot hit the first step. 

         “Their sleep Mack, come back later,” she said firmly. That’s all Janie remembered before he knocked her out cold.  It hurt for her to remember, to think about what he could have done had he not passed out on top of her. 

         Janie walked into the small room her grandparents slept in and remembered all the times her grandmother would hand her a comb and tell her to grease and itch her scalp and braid her hair.  She sat her bags on the steel framed bed, and let the load she was carrying in her heart free.  This was a new beginning for Janie and there was no way she was going to let the baggage she was carrying from her past into her future. 

         “Mommy there’s no light in the bathroom,” Melina said startling Janie.

         “Well Lina get the light bulbs out of the Lowe’s bag in the car and ask Kwame to put them in.  Tell him to make sure he puts them in the lamps so we can see tonight cause there’s no street lights out here.”

         “No street lights?  I’m scared, I don’t want to stay here,” Melina said looking out the window of the bedroom. “It looks scary outside Mom.”

         “Nonsense Lina, I used to love staying here with my grandparents.  Now go do what I told you to do,” Janie said running her fingers through her new short hair cut. 

         Janie walked outside to make sure Melina was doing what she was told.  She turned around, feeling someone’s eyes burning her back, and noticed an old woman with braided silver hair that looked dry and brittle.  The old woman was sitting in a rocking chair slowly rocking back and forth on her porch.  When Janie waved the woman sat there rocking even slower, and more meticulously than before.  Janie stepped off her porch, sure the frail old woman couldn’t see her, and headed over to the old woman to introduce herself.  As Janie walked closer to the frail looking woman with a crocheted blanket sitting on her lap, she noticed the lady stopped rocking. 

“Hello ma’am,” Janie said as she approached the old gray wooden porch.

“You Janie Mae grandbaby ain’tcha?”  The old woman said reaching down beside her to grab an old rusty can that once held some type of fruit or vegetable. 

         “Yes ma’am I am.  My name is…”

         “Your name is Janie, after your gramama.  You moving in that house wit dem babies?”  The woman said spitting black juice from the tobacco she chewed into the can.  She looked at Janie with knowing eyes, disapproving and stern. 

         “Yes ma’am, what’s your name I don’t remember you?  I used to come here…”

         “You don’t remember me, but I remember you.  I remember your mama too, used to play with my great grandbaby Cora when she was little.”  The old lady said not taking her eyes off Janie. 

         “Your great granddaughter?  You don’t look a day over 50 ma’am.”  Janie laughed; the woman didn’t crack a smile. 

“Well you never told me your name Ma’am.”  Janie said looking to see if she saw anyone else.  “Do you live here all by yourself?”

“I’m the only one left.”  The old woman said taking the quilt off her lap and standing up.  “Looky here Janie Mae grandbaby,” the old woman said in a stern voice. “You best mind your business round here.  Tell them youngin’s not to be runnin round unattended you hear?  Especially in my yard.”  The old lady said spitting more black juice into the can she was holding before opening her screen door.

“I didn’t mean to offend you ma’am really, and don’t worry about the kids I’ll keep an eye on them,” Janie said backing away.

“I’m not worried at all.” The old lady said walking into her house slamming her screen door.  Janie stood there for a minute, trying to figure out what the lady meant when she felt an ice chilling breeze on the side of her face.  That chilling breeze snapped out of the daze she was in.  She rubbed her hand across her face and realized that in the hot Florida sun, there was not a single tree leaf blowing, and Janie couldn’t understand why she felt such a cold breeze.  When she looked in the direction the wind came from, the old woman was peeping at her through the window.  Janie couldn’t make it home fast enough, but when she got there she didn’t feel any better. “What a strange woman,” she thought to herself. 



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         Janie and the kids lived in the house happy and stress free for six months before Mack called.  Since he said he wanted to see the kids for the summer Janie packed them up and sent them to Baltimore.  Janie didn’t have a problem sending the kids by themselves, no matter what troubles her and Mack had, he never hurt the children.  It was a relief for Janie to be able to spend some time by herself.  Since moving into her grandparents’ home she hadn’t had a minute to herself, and she needed the peace. 

         After seeing the kids off, Janie went to Wal-mart to buy as many candles as she could carry, and then she drove the 20 minutes back to her child-free home.  She couldn’t wait to take a nice long hot bath and catch up on her reading.  When she pulled into the wooded area leading to her house she felt strange, like she was going in a trance.  She turned the air condition on and rolled the windows up; sure it was the hot air was making her feel light headed.  When she made the left turn down the road her house sat on, her eyes gravitated to what looked like a man running up a tree.  “What the hell,” she said.  “I must really need to relax cause I am bugging out right now.” 

         Janie walked in the house, set the half dozen bags of candles down and began taking them out the bag.  She had all kinds, tea light candles, huge pillar candles, sage candles, and huge round candles that needed three wicks.  She put candles all around the small sleepy house and went to run her bath water.  She smiled to herself as she laid her satin night gown down on the bed along with her favorite bikini brief panties, and Bath and Body Works lotion.  She went to the bathroom, opened her brand new champagne bubble bath, and poured some into the filling bathtub.  She stuck her hand in the water and turned the cold water off; she wanted to relax and the only way she could do that was with a hot bath.

         Janie sank her body into the steaming hot claw foot bathtub, and let her body relax. The iridescent light from the candles filled the room with a serene energy. She closed her eyes, and took her mind to a peaceful place.  She opened her eyes after awhile and noticed every flame on the candles had been blown out.  Since there was very little light shining in the bathroom she washed her body in a hurry, got out the tub and flicked the light to the on position.  “That’s strange,” she said.  “The light was working before I got in here.” She wrapped herself in her terrycloth towel and went into her bedroom to see whether the light was working, when the light didn’t come on she went to every room in her house to discover that no lights in her house worked.  She called the power company but they said they had no outages in the area, but they assured her they would come to the house to check it out first thing in the morning.           

         Janie lit all the candles around the house and went to lotion herself and slip into her night gown.  When she went back into her living room she discovered the candles were out.  “Okay grandma or grandpa I know it’s you so please stop, I know you’re here.”  She said, but a cacophony laughter coming from nowhere in particular told her it was not her grandparents and that it was time to get some sleep, she was obviously hallucinating.  She went to her room pulled the sheet back and eased into bed, and went into a somber sleep.  She was awakened out of her sleep suddenly to find her bed shaking.  She found she couldn’t move or scream, and it felt like someone was pressing on her chest. 

         “Our Father, which art in Heaven, hollow be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done…”  She said straining to even breathe the inaudible words.  Before she could finish saying the Lord’s Prayer, she saw a dark shadow in the shape of a woman run through her room.  She jerked her body out the bed, felt her way to the night stand sitting beside her bed, and grabbed the flashlight.  She took her cell phone out, hit the button to automatically dial her mother’s number, and walked over to her bedroom door to shut it. 



         Before Janie’s mother could answer the phone she looked out her bedroom window to find the old lady standing on her porch with a handful of cut hair in her hands that looked like it belonged to her.  Janie ran her fingers through her head and remembered that Mack chopped all but a few inches off her hair, before he climbed on top of her and passed out. 

         “Janie, what’s wrong with you?”  Her mother screamed in her ear.  “You call my house at two-thirty in the morning and not say anything, you must be going crazy.”

         “Mom, I…,” she tried to speak, but couldn’t let the words leave her lips.

         “You don’t have to tell me, it’s the witching hour.  Go to the bathroom right now, you’ve got to hurry. They like to tap into your weaknesses, play tricks on your mind.”

         “I can’t move mom, the old lady next door….”

         “Did you talk to her?”  Janie’s mother asked her in a calm tone.

         “Yeah, when I first moved in.”  Janie replied.

         “You’ve got to move now, go to the bathroom, on the side of the wall near the toilette there’s a board that has an oval hole in, it’s small so you have to look hard, hurry up Janie, get yourself together, this is serious.”  Janie grabbed the flashlight, ran to the bathroom and searched for the oval hole her mother wanted her to find.  She felt that same chilling eerie wind blow on her face again, making all the hairs on her body stick up.  Just as she found the oval whole she started hearing lots of voices whispering, telling her she’d die if she opened it.  “It’s a quarter to three Janie, you found that hole yet, you’ve got to hurry.”

         “I got it mom, now what do you want me to do?”  Janie said frantically.

         “Hit it three times saying ‘Rohoyah minah’, but I want you to hit it really hard on the last time Janie.”  Janie did as she was told, and when she opened it, she found a picture of an old woman in a casket, a white rag, a red candle, and a box of matches.  She told her mother what she found, and her mother gave her instructions to perform a ritual. 

         “After you light the candle, look in the matchbox and there’s a needle in there, you need to prick your finger, drop your blood on that rag, and wrap the rag around the picture.  After you do that say ‘Ethel Lee Deans you don’t belong here, you are dead, you are not welcome here, go back to where you belong.’  You’ve got to say it with conviction Janie.”  Janie followed her mother’s instructions, and as soon as she told the ghost to go back to where she came from, all the lights came back on in her house.

         “You want to tell me what the hell is going on mom!” Janie screamed.  Her mother told her how Ethel Lee Deans was an old hag back in her day, but every so often she’d come back.  She told Janie how the old woman lived to be 120 years old, and some said she was older than that.  She told Janie how the old woman didn’t like Janie’s grandmother because she stopped letting her play with the old hags granddaughter Cora. 

         “I remember my mother coming into my room telling me Cora was dead, I went to her funeral, and then about a week later Cora came back.  I was outside playing with her in the yard, and my mother told me to come in the house.  She asked me who I was playing with and when I told her it was Cora she told me not to play with her again.  My mother told me Old Hag Ethel done turned her grandbaby into a zombie.”

         “A zombie mom?  I don’t believe that.”  Janie said.

         “You don’t believe it, or you don’t want to believe it.  We all told you strange things happened in that house and you didn’t want to believe it, we grew up there.  If you’re going to stay in there you must not talk to anybody, stick to yourself, and tell the babies what I told you too.  Once you start talking to them, you give them permission to talk to you and then they mess wit’cha.”



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         By the time the kids came back everything was back to normal.  No more chilling winds in the hot muggy heat of Ocala, Florida.  Everything was going great, so great that Janie almost forgot about the night when a real witch rode her back.  Janie woke up at 6:30am on a breezy Sunday morning, she had plans to do some yard work before it got too hot outside.  She was sitting down at the kitchen table when a little girl knocked on the door.  She thought it strange for a child to be up and dressed that early in the morning, but she took it for granted that the little girl was up, ready to go to Sunday school. 

“Can yo lil girl come out to play ma’am?”  The little girl said in a sweet deep southern accent. 

“She’s sleeping sweetie, she can come out to play when gets up.”  Janie said smiling at the child.  When the little girl left she looked outside to see the little girl jumping rope, her two long pigtails decorated with pink and white ribbons that bounced up and down each time her shiny black Mary Jane’s hit the dusty ground.  Janie noticed the little girl had on a dress with layers of lace underneath the white cotton, one you see nowadays if you watched one of those Shirley Temple movies that came on the Turner Classic Movie channel.  “How strange,” she thought to herself.  She went to Melina’s room and shook her lightly.

“Yeah mom?”  Melina said squinting her eyes to keep the sunlight out.

“A little girl just came here for you, where do you know her from?  I’ve never seen her around here before.”  Janie said sitting on Melina’s bed.

“She’s visiting her great-grandmother, I just met her yesterday.”

“Where does her great grandmother live?”  Janie asked.

“Not too far mom, I think in one of those houses over there.”  Melina said pointing near Janie’s room.

“Well what’s her name?’’  Janie asked.

“Cora.”  Melina said turning over.