A Hillbilly Halloween

Well, y'all, My Hillbilly is here to give you his opinion on superstitions and hauntings and such. I'll see you at the other end.


Since Halloween or All Hallow’s Eve is arriving, I decided to talk about some superstitions and other similar things this hillbilly has run into, heard, and questioned.

Let’s begin with some that I heard growing up.  Someone has a chill or suddenly shivers, and they say, “I feel like someone just walked on my grave”.  Hmm!  What if they are cremated instead?

If a black cat crosses your path, it is bad luck.  Does that mean that when a white cat crosses your path, it is good luck?  How about if a calico cat crosses your path?  Does that mean luck just gets very confused?

How about other things that are supposed to be good luck, such as see a penny – pick it up—all day you’ll have good luck!  What if you throw out your back while you are bending over to pick it up?  Of course that is very good possibility as you begin reaching my age.  How lucky are you then?  Huh?  How about finding a four leaf clover?  Same problem as with the penny and depending where you are, you might be beaten by some plant lover!

How about the lucky rabbits foot, are you supposedly getting the good luck of the rabbit?  If so ---- I don’t want it!  He had four feet and look what good it did him!

How about the lucky horse shoe that is to be hung with legs up so the good luck doesn’t fall out of it?  Duh!  It has no sides.  It is not like a cup.  Everything is going to fall out of it anyway – except maybe dust!

How about on New Year’s Eve, eating black eyed peas for good luck?  Yuck!  They taste kind of like bad beans that have been cooked in dishwater!  Why would they bring you good luck?  They will bring you gas!

How about Friday the thirteenth being bad luck?  Duh!  Everyone knows Friday is good, good, good because the weekend follows it!  I don’t care what the date is!

 How about breaking a mirror bringing seven years bad luck?  Wellllll, if it was Momma’s good mirror, it might bring some immediate bad luck.  I don’t know about seven years worth!

How about walking under a ladder being bad luck?  Truthfully, I feel that there could be some bad luck there.  For instance, if the ladder is six foot high, it would be bad luck for me if I had to walk under it because I am over six feet tall and would not fit well.  However if the ladder is a sixteen foot, I could and would walk under it.  I guess it would be bad luck in the case that someone might drop something on me.  Other than that, I say it is hooey.  And we could go on!

Leaving that, for you who are afraid of ghosts, witches, goblins, zombies, werewolves, and vampires, I will tell you of a friend of mine back in Missouri.  Up front, she and her husband are just as hillbilly as I.  I was a real estate agent at the time, and she called me and asked me to show her and her husband a house.  Now to set this all up, it was winter, about twenty degrees outside, and the house was vacant, and had no power or heat.  While we are going through it, my friend says, “This house is neat, but there's something cold about it”.  I said, “Of course it feels cold; it is about thirty degrees in here." And she says “No, I don’t mean that kind of cold!  I think someone has died in this house”.  Okay, I laughed at her (quite a lot) and rolled my eyes like a teenager!  But she decided to check it out. Sure enough, someone had died there and she would not buy it.

Photo by frédéric dupont

 Later, I showed her another house that I thought was cool and cheap for what it was.  It backed up to a well kept grave yard.  She said, “I could never live there”.  I applied my well-honed sales pitch and said, “Those dead people will be the quietest neighbors that you will ever have!"  Of course that would be unless some strange asteroid passes by and they all rise as brain-eating zombies.  At any rate, my sales pitch didn't work.

Brain-eating zombies

I guess that I am not a sensitive hillbilly!  If the price was right, the property had been cleaned up, repainted, etc., I would buy a house where a mass murder was committed and be quite happy.  Just think of the stories that you could tell dinner guests  ---- particularly at Halloween with sound effects in the background!  Yup, I tell you --- they said her head was lying right over there by the door and  the rest of her that they could find --- well she was torn to pieces you know --- just like the rest of them.  And there was them big bloody tracks  --- looked like huge wolf tracks ---- werewolf I tell you!  Oh!  You want another helpin of them ribs?  Sure good---- ain’t they?

From the Hillbilly’s corner!
   

Thanks, I'll pass on the ribs right now. What superstitions do you "believe" in even though you know they're silly? I always think about my mama whenever I step on a crack.