William Gay - Little Sister Death

The most persistent of these innuendoes made reference to a scandal involving an itinerant traveling preacher and his young sister. This preacher was a worshiper of the serpents he used in his services and his sister, possessing an affinity for the snakes, tended them. In the fall of 1837 the preacher came to Halifax County and, for a sum of money, was allowed to set up his tent on the Beale land.

Within the week the nude body of the young girl was found in the woods near the Beale holdings, strangled and assaulted in a manner whose description would appeal only to the prurient. Probably for reasons of blackmail, the preacher accused Jacob Beale, claiming that he had seen his little sister strolling into the woods with Beale a day or two before the body was discovered. He went so far as to swear out warrants and cause them to be served, but before the matter could be brought before a grand jury the preacher himself disappeared, most everyone supposing that he had grown afraid of the consequences when his ruse was discovered, others assuming that he might have committed the atrocious act himself.

However base and unfounded these stories might have been, they could be part of the reason he departed Virginia. For whatever reason, in 1838 he came to Tennessee and purchased a 1,600-acre tract of land in the Sinking Creek area of Limestone County, an area recently moved to by some of Mr. Beale’s friends. The house on the place was one of the best in the state at that time, being a large log dwelling two stories high and weatherboarded with cedar.

Immediately the Beales began to improve their new holdings, planting a large orchard between the road and the house and clearing the thick timber away for new grounds, the logs serving as building material for slavequarters and for other outbuildings, as well as a great barn that remains standing today, though the original house has been torn down and a larger one built some distance away.

In those days neighbors helped one another with their tasks, there being log rollings and barn raisings and cornhuskings. These communal endeavors, as well as attendance at church, which neared one hundred percent, served to engender a closeness among these people.

Jacob Beale almost immediately caused a schoolhouse to be built and hired a schoolteacher, paying the first year’s salary out of his own pocket. This alone should serve to refute the lies about Mr. Beale’s stinginess. Though he was sometimes harsh in his dealings and forthright in his needs, he was never less than honest, and during years when his neighbors failed to prosper, through bad luck or ill weather, he was not averse to loaning them money until their own conditions improved. Such improvement was not always the case, however, and over the years the Beale holdings increased due to defaulted notes and mortgages.

In these first years in Tennessee, before being afflicted by the Haunt, Mr. Beale entered into the spirit of the community, though he was of a stern and religious nature and not given to frivolities such as dancing and strong drink, which he thought of as sinful.

On the eve of the haunting, Virginia was fourteen and Elizabeth and Jacob Jr. were married, having become betrothed to members of the community and built their homes on one-hundred-acre tracts their father granted them. Life seemed to have fallen into a pattern of content, and Jacob Beale must have contemplated happily the tapestry that the loom of life was weaving for him; he would have been less than human had he not. He had a large, healthy family that had never hungered for food or shelter, sons and daughters who were marrying well, Elizabeth marrying a young sawmill owner named Zadok Kirk and Jacob Jr. taking as his bride Julia Primm, the daughter of the Baptist preacher Joseph Primm, who will recur in the narrative at a later time.

Drewry was at an impressionable age when the Haunting began, and he was so afflicted by the things he saw the Haunt do to his father and sister that he never married, living his entire life in the fear of the monster’s predicted return and never allowing during his lifetime the publications of any of his journals, though huge sums of money were offered by various national periodicals. Virginia Beale became known in the national press as the Queen of the Haunted Dell, and received worldwide attention in the press, as clippings from newspapers in London, England, attest.

As to the nature of the haunting, the phenomenon in question was referred to as the Haunt, for want of a better term. The Haunt was invariably called “she” owing to her feminine voice, notwithstanding the obscenities it spoke.

Life passed uneventfully for the first two or three years in Tennessee. Jacob Beale and his family were by all accounts well thought of and admired by their neighbors, and Jacob became an important factor in the local elections. Possessing a fine speaking voice and being a large, handsome man with a fine head of curly grey hair, he cut an impressive figure in his splittail coat and beaver hat when his many business dealings drew him to Memphis or Nashville.

At fourteen, pretty blueeyed Virginia Beale, or Ginny, was already sought after by local swain, one of her suitors being Thomas Campbell, the schoolteacher her father had hired. Another was Eulis Varner, a likable local boy of great promise. At the time their family trouble began (Drewry referring to it thusly in his journals), she was gay and carefree, nothing ahead of her but the unbroken serenity of her future, playing with her brothers and sister in the surrounding woods and learning by heart all the names of the birds and wildflowers, making pets of the rabbits and young deer with which the forest abounded, and secure in the love of a doting father.

One day Jacob walked over his fields to see how his crops were faring, as harvest time was nigh and the weather critical. He was walking across the field toward his overseer, Vestal, when he stopped to stare at an unusual black animal watching him from a corn middle. The animal looked like a dog, but of a breed Mr. Beale was not familiar with; it was high in the shoulders and had a long, snoutlike mouth.

He had his gun with him, the slaves having reported snakes about the place, and the peculiar fixity of the beast’s eyes so perturbed Mr. Beale that he aimed and fired. The dog appeared to fall but then vanished and left no trace.

Ginny claimed to have seen a woman strolling in the orchard, wringing her hands and crying, who beckoned to her and called her by name. Having no reason to suspect that the figure was other than flesh and blood, and possessed of a concern for the woman’s apparent grief, Ginny approached, only to see her vanish in the summer twilight.

Drewry shot at a great brown bird, a bird such as none of them had ever seen. It alighted one dusk in an enormous cedar with a great flapping of its wings, and it was of such a malevolent appearance that his first thought was to destroy it. Drewry was one of the finest marksmen in the county, being generally the winner of all the turkey shoots and bird hunts, but though the bird seemed to drop from the cedar he could find not so much as a feather to attest the trueness of his shot, and was wont to blame his poor aim on the failing light of dusk.

There was much work to do that fall, and Jacob Beale, with many slaves to supervise and all the crops to gather, with the attendant sorghum-making and woodcutting for winter, putting up of food and also of grain for the animals, gave all these events short shrift.

As has been said, he was by nature a most stern and pragmatic man, and even severely reprimanded Ginny, by all accounts his favorite. According to Drewry’s journal, he told them, relenting a little his severity, that in Tennessee there were many fowl and animals strange to them, that they were seeing normal animals and attaching the trappings of superstition.