Telling Our Own Stories: Telltale Lilac Bush

Photo by Adam Bixby on Unsplash

Autumn of the mid ‘90s. I gathered my younger siblings, preparing for Halloween -  a beautiful, crackling, secretive season, the house sweet-scented with wood smoke, and crisp Goosebumps books lined up on the library shelves.

I craved that season – the best one, the deepest one.
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Our rituals were small. We planned our costumes months in advance, then changed our minds last-minute. We walked like lords among the changing trees and asked this or that maple to try a little harder – still too much green, still too cheerful. We ducked in and out of the tented corn husks, listening to them sigh, their summer lost.  

Abandoned Church near Princeton, WV

A need, real and hungry as love, spoke loud in me, and I knew what food it liked. Everywhere, I looked for graveyards, old barns, dark houses. I reveled in the mournful smell of brittle leaves, the velvet startle of ravens from headstones. I longed to share in their history, their unflinching nearness to the dark.

I wanted a scary story. A real one. My own.

The trouble was, none of the stories I found felt real. In the books and movies made for children, the monsters guffawed and stumbled, reminding us it was a game, only a game. I wanted to touch the thrumming string I felt below it all – not just something scary, but something true. It seemed like everyone had conspired to say, “See, the world’s nothing special, underneath.” 

But the land itself, all around, felt haunted. The hills and woods whispered with stories. There was something out there, waiting. There had to be. 

I got close to it with the smudged, inky horrors populating Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, and the funerary playfulness of In a Dark, Dark Room – both full of evil little rhymes to recite, and music to learn them by. But the scariest and best stories of all, I found, were the homegrown kind; the kind born and bred in the hills and hollers I knew. 

Photo by freestocks on Unsplash

 The story of Horrible Hannah – a witch buried alive, who claws through her coffin and scoops up children with her long, bloody nails (and in whose honor I still shudder while passing certain trees).

The way my grandmother warned me to beware of walking by the woods at night, where the panthers lurked, their cries like the screams of women.

The night my little brother saw something skim the treetops on large, mothlike wings, and we dreamed of Mothman’s red eyes.

Or the story my father invented: headless Quilly, crawling up the cliff to steal a pumpkin for his shoulders - or, if no pumpkin could be found, the nearest child's head. 

From this tradition, The Telltale Lilac Bush draws all its power. The places mentioned are familiar – haven’t I seen Rose Run? Didn’t I pass the Burnt House, and hear the rattle of a chain? - as are the horrors. The echoes of slavery, mine wars, murdered peddlers and desperate wives reenact themselves all around us.
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It’s an honor to carry on that tradition for the stage. I have tried, in that old instinctive way, to shake the graves and stir the season, hoping it brings a harvest of other stories down from the attics where they’ve hidden so long. If you know such a story, tell it – preferably outside, in the blue chill of  an October evening. Then listen, as the wind passes it tree to tree, and the story – like the dead – carries on.