Excerpt from An Hour Before Daylight by Jimmy Carter, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

We had one problem with the location of our home: there were a cemetery and a haunted house between Plains and Archery. Neither my parents nor my sisters ever had to walk down this road, so they were not concerned, but there were many times, especially during the winter, when I returned home after dark from work in town or from a late school activity. None of my black friends would dream of passing this way at night, and their fear had a great effect on me. The graveyard was bad enough, but the haunted house was much worse. There were frequent reports of a woman who could be seen through the attic windows, wearing a long white flowing dress and carrying a candle, apparently looking for something or someone she had lost. The local newspapers ran a number of articles about this house, quoting people who had lived there in the past. One temporary occupant, Sonny Faircloth, claimed to be familiar with a large black dog, which could be seen in the yard among his several coonhounds. I heard Sonny tell many times how he finally got up the nerve to go close to the animal and tried to touch it, but the hair stood up on his head when his hand penetrated the dog's body without feeling anything.

I really tried to discount these kinds of tales, but I sometimes thought I had glimpses of the searching woman, which may have been a reflection of the setting sun or Venus in the western window. In the end, I was able to add my own horror tale to the others. When I was in high school, Dr. Thad Wise bought the house and lived in it with Mrs. Gussie Abrams Howell, who was the supervising nurse at Wise Sanitarium, a m

Copyright © 2001 by Jimmy Carter