Kentucky Hauntings(3)

“Uncle Josh, can you talk to bees?” Tina asked. “Do you tell them not to sting us?”

“Sure, I talk to them,” he said, “but not exactly the way I talk to people. I guess they can tell what I'm feeling. They don't sting us because I let them know that we are not going to hurt them.”

Tina just smiled. She didn't know if what her uncle said was the truth or just something he made up to tease her.

One day at school, her class read Whittier's poem “Telling the Bees.” Tina was fascinated by it, and as soon as she saw her uncle again, she told him about it.

“Uncle Josh,” she asked, “do you know that you are supposed to tell the bees if anyone in the family dies?”

“I've heard that,” he answered, “and I've read the poem.”

“Do you know any beekeepers who told the bees when someone in the family died?” Tina continued.

“Yes,” he said. “I had a neighbor once who kept bees. When he died, the family told the bees and draped the hives with strips of black cloth. The bees didn't swarm and leave.”

“Do you think they would really swarm and leave if they weren't told?” she said. “Maybe they would have stayed anyway.”

He stood looking at his beehives for a minute before he answered.

“I think there is some truth to the custom,” he said finally. “I think they would leave if they weren't told. In fact, I saw it happen once when I was a young man, and I'll never forget it. Old man Leach's bees swarmed after he died because nobody told them he was dead.”

“How do you know that was why they swarmed?” she asked. “Did you see them leave the hives?”

“No, but I saw where they went. It was really strange, “he said.

“Where did they go?” Tina asked him.

“The Leach family thought the custom of telling the bees about a death was just silly superstition,” he told her. “They ignored it and made arrangements for the old man's burial several miles from his home. Most of us in the neighborhood went to the funeral. After the service was finished inside the church, he was carried to the graveyard next to the church, where he was to be buried. A few of us stayed behind after the coffin was lowered into the ground and covered with dirt. People left enough fresh flowers to completely cover the grave, so we placed them over the top.

“Then we heard an odd sound, like a buzzing or humming of some kind. As it got closer and louder, we looked up and saw a dark mass of something approaching from the sky. We were surprised to see that it was a swarm of bees. They landed right on top of Mr. Leach's grave! We stood there and stared in shock for a few seconds, and then we all scattered in every direction.”

“Maybe the bees were attracted to the fresh flowers on the grave,” Tina suggested.

“Some people thought that,” he said. “You know, the unbelievers. But the flowers hadn't been on the grave long enough to attract the bees. The bees had to have started flying before we put the flowers on the grave because the hives were several miles away. Some of us left immediately and went to Mr. Leach's house. We checked the hives, but they were deserted. The bees that came to the graveyard and landed on his grave were his bees. I'll never understand it, but they knew by some unknown means where to find him.”

“Would you tell your bees if someone in our family died?” Tina asked.

“Yes, Tina,” he answered. “I would definitely tell them.”

A few months after this conversation with Tina, Josh learned he had cancer. When he died over a year after that, nobody in the immediate family thought to tell the bees. Tina thought of it during the funeral, and when it was over, she hurried to the hives to check on the bees. They were all gone already. Like their keeper, they had gone to a new home.





The Pie Supper


We were not in our teens yet when pie suppers were popular, so although we never baked any pies for these events, we did share in the pie eating. Miss Mildred, the teacher at the local one-room school, shared a particularly heartbreaking story of one pie supper long ago.

In early times, local churches and schools would hold pie suppers to raise money for the things they needed that did not come under regular budget funds or taxes. In fact, pie suppers provided a major source of funding for many of Kentucky's one-room schools in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

At the pie supper, women and girls would provide their homemade pies to be auctioned off to the highest bidder. The person who bought the pie not only got the pie, but also got to eat it with the pie maker. Pie suppers thus had romantic elements, with young men often competing for a pie.

No names were on the boxes containing the pies, but each box had distinctive decorations. The bidder did not know the identity of the pie maker unless he had some inside information from the girl or her family. Sometimes a girl who liked a certain young man would give him a hint about which box to bid on by secretly revealing some detail about the decorations of her box.