The Woman In Black

There are so many people in this world who do whatever they feel like doing and face no consequences. No one ever knows, or if they do, these people can charm, lie, pay, or intimidate them into keeping their mouths shut. They can hurt, they can cheat, steal, fight, seduce, smuggle, and even kill to their heart's delight. They aren't like the rest of us. The rest of us have to follow the rules, stay within the lines, do as we're told, and if we ever cross those lines, we get punished severely. We get fines, tickets, community service, jail time. We lose what little good social standing we had to begin with. We get society turning its back on us, leaving us in our shame. Most of us don't get the things we want, or even half of it.

For some of us, there's no way we'll let those bastards get away with it.

Most of us fear death. It's unknown. It takes us away from the ones we love. We no longer walk the earth, no longer laugh or sing, no longer taste food or wine. But what if, instead, death was a way for us to transcend social norms? Those awful rules that keep us from pursuing our heart's desire no longer keep us at bay. Those consequences to our actions no longer apply. 

There's one woman who shares a hometown with me who may have spent her afterlife dragging the powerful back down to earth.

Roanoke, Virginia, is at the bottom of a green valley deep in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Its nickname is the Star City of the South. But before the giant neon star that gave it that name was erected at the top of Mill Mountain, there was something else watching over its inhabitants.

Let's look backward through time at the turn of the century.  Roanoke is a railroad town, and the coal that was torn out of the belly of the Appalachians and shipped off to power the rest of the country passed through Roanoke by train. Even though it's still quite small, Roanoke's the largest city in the region by far, so every wealthy coal merchant and politician in the region found themselves in Roanoke.

They were living the high life! I imagine they spent their time in clubs, smoking cigars, drinking absinthe, having their way with women of the night. Why would they care about their wives and children at home alone?  What did anything matter, if it didn't immediately gratify them? These men had everything they wanted, and they weren't going to start treating the people around them better out of the goodness of their hearts any time soon.

In early 1902, their immovable hedonism met a supernatural force. 

One by one, as these wealthy pillars of society drunkenly stumbled home in the wee hours of the morning, they would hear another step of footsteps behind them. Unlike their shambling shuffles, these footsteps were steady and confident. The men would turn around and their bleary, glassy eyes would find a woman close behind them. 

She was dressed all in black, with a black turban hiding most of her face, except for her eyes. They were hypnotic, magnetic, dark, and they stared right through their quarry. She was short in stature, but her presence was enormous. The man in question would have never seen someone quite like her. She was mysterious and intense, yes, but there was something about her that wasn't quite right. There was something about her that was downright unnatural.

Suddenly, they would feel fear. Who was this woman? Why was she following them? What was wrong with her? They would try to move faster, stumbling and unsteady after a long night spent with bottles and opium. She would continue to follow, relentless, silent but for her steady footsteps. No matter what anyone tried, they couldn't shake her.

Quietly, she would follow these men to their homes at a time both in the day and in history in which the strict social bounds of the day demanded that a woman should never be outside so late, and certainly not unaccompanied. But that did not stop this woman. No matter how late the hour, or how long the walk, she escorted these men straight home. When they eventually made their way to the gate of their home, they would open it, step inside, and then look back. Invariably, the woman would be long gone, vanished into thin air, her work complete.

This didn't just happen once, or even a few times. Even though she only followed married men, the entire town was in terror, and the hauntings were documented in the local newspaper, the Roanoke Times. 

I imagine the biggest shock wasn't her unearthly presence, her unnatural behavior, the impossible way that she would appear and disappear. It wasn't even her brazen violation of social norms that struck fear into people's hearts. It was her ability to do what nothing else at the time could. It was the way that she made these untouchable men feel fear. She was not someone who could be bought, charmed, or even killed. She was judgment. She was the manifestation of the guilt they should have felt but didn't. She was the conscience they'd left years behind. 

She did what no one else could. She made sure that they wouldn't get away with it.