A Family Ghost Story

Here’s another story of Uncle Dan’s about his father’s sister and her husband. He told it to his daughter Moselle and she typed it.

Aunt Keel [Kathryn Cordelia, one of the twins] and husband, Uncle Matt Richardson [uncle of Sid Richardson of Fort Worth fame], lived in the New York and Black Jack communities ["A," on the map at right] east of Athens, Texas. Uncle Matt had a big general store—the largest for miles around. Every few months he had to make a trip to Jefferson, Texas ["B" on the map at right"], which was the nearest market town, to trade the cash he had received for goods.

In the early 1880s, Uncle Matt died and left his young wife, Keel, and their young children, plus eleven children by his first wife, who were in the late teens and twenties. He had been unable to take his large amount of cash (in coins) to market for quite some time. Everyone thought he surely had a large amount of cash somewhere. No one could find it. It has not been found to this day.

After his death, his widow, Keel, was in need of money. Legend says—and this was believed by people in those days—that a light would appear and go all up and down the hill and along the creek. It would even go in the house where his family lived when no one was home, but never when someone was in the house. Once they saw it in the house while they were visiting across the road, but when they got home it was not there. Once it was sitting on the gate post. People would come for miles to see the light, and some say they saw it.

Polk Stewart said it finally came close enough that he asked it, "Uncle Matt, what do you want?" He says it got between his feet. If you had been Polk Stewart, what would you have done?

Uncle Dan was a pretty good story teller, wasn't he? I remember his telling this story when I was a child. He could really make it spooky!!