Poking Out of the Pluff Mud

Written By: Donna Rhodes | Issue: 2015/04 - April

Recently I spent a week with my pal, Helen, at a beachhouse near Charleston. The Low Country is a rolling boil of historical accounts and spicy tales. The shoreline is an open-air museum of artifacts as random as mastodon fossils, pirate plunder, and Civil War cannon balls.

We found a phenomenal beach on last year’s vacation that yielded all kinds of relics including what we laughingly called Aunt Bertha. Yep, people bones right there on the beach. Whose bones were they? Pirates? Slaves? Civil War soldiers? No way of knowing. But there they were, poking out of the infamous pluff mud.

I was caught up in the moment, so Aunt Bertha was snagged, bagged and tossed in the basket with the pottery shards and turtle scutes.

It never occurred to me that bagging Bertha was wrong. Heck, I’d be honored if someone sculpted my raggedy bones into a piece of art, which was my intention all along.

Once I got home I was creeped-out by what I’d done. I abandoned the art project. Instead I gave Aunt B. a proper burial in a hand-painted box, ornamented with beads and finely-penned prayers. “Rest in peace, Aunt Bertha,” I said, marking the site with a pyramid of stones.

But this classic Southern ghost story was far from ending, for it was here Logic and Superstition collided in my head. “They are just bones,” my practical side told me. “You buried them. That’s that.”

Superstition countered, “A spirit cannot rest if its bones are disturbed, worse yet, transported across state lines.”

“Ridiculous!” said Logic.

“Maybe not,” Superstition sang, his voice rising and falling ominously.

Still, short of driving down to Charleston on a bone-home mission, there was little to do but move on.

It was then things went to hell in a bone basket.

Shortly after Aunt Bertha’s funeral I was diagnosed with the Big “C”. I hired an apartment manager to find a tenant for me while I convalesced. It took him six months to find someone. That’s six months without vital income. He finally picked a woman who turned out to be a felon. She’s now serving time. The list of disasters goes on, but you see where this is headed … it and the bones were going right back to Charleston.

Aunt Bertha, in a short, guiltridden ceremony, was laid to rest in her familiar island pluff. “You’re home, Bertha, “ I said, not knowing what tone to take. Superstition thought Bertha might have one last lightning bolt to hurl, though I prayed Ol’ Bertie was now content. Logic thought everything was simply nothing… no spirits, no hauntings, no connection whatsoever to my bad year. Didn’t matter. I was done with Bertha, and I hoped she was done with me.

All I can say is it’s a good thing mastodons can’t haunt you. But rest assured … at the first hint of a Pleistocene apparition, I’m packing up Ol’ Mastie and heading for Low Country.