Stone Mountain

On the sunrise face of Stone Mountain, the granite dome east of Atlanta, Georgia, a woman once saw a figure her husband never could. He was the only one who'd talk to the newspaper. She did the seeing.

The story ran in the Atlanta Constitution on March 30, 1946, written by a staff reporter named Bill Boring. The paper masked the husband's first name, calling him only N. Johnson. His wife, Johnson said, had been "born in a caul" — the birth membrane over her face, which Southern folk tradition holds lets a person see the dead. So she saw, and he didn't.

What she saw was a figure in a flowing white robe, "of a strange neutral color," neither white nor black. Where the eyes should have been there were no eyes at all — "burning embers set in a skull." Locals called it the ha'nt of the rock.

Johnson got close once. He felt like he was walking through steam, his hair stood straight up, and his hat lifted clean off his head. That was as near as he came. The animals knew it better than he did: horses, he said, will never go around that side of the mountain, and dogs stop short and back away with their tails tucked.

The same article passed along the cures, the way folk remedies always trail a haunting like this. To lay the ghost, you wore a dime on a string around your ankle, or set seven rocks on an eastern window sill, or slept with a knife or a Bible under the pillow. People kept seeing the figure anyway.

The mountain holds an older story too. The folk tale goes that a Carolina heir called Beau Stephens lost $10,000 on a single hand of cards, then vanished into a cave with a woman named Emily and was never seen again. Years later a stone-cutter lowered himself in on a rope, into a hole about a man's height and seven feet deep. Folded behind a splinter of rock, he found a note.

"You are not the first darn fool who has been here."