Along Thirty Mile River

Book excerpt: HELEN CALDWELL CUSHMAN (1905-1986) was many people - wife and muse to the young Erskine Caldwell of the novel Tobacco Road, devoted mother of Erskine Jr., Dabney and Janet, and an entertaining personality in her own right to local radio and newspaper audiences. But most of all, to the many alive today who still remember her, she was a great storyteller. She found her stories, as most storytellers do, in the people and places she loved. For her, that was the two hundred square miles of forests, lakes and ponds called Thirty Mile River. She had come to Thirty Mile River as a child, daughter of legendary University of Virginia basketball coach "Pop" Lannigan, to a former inn called Greentrees, on Parker Pond in Mt. Vernon. While her father ran a summer training camp for his Virginia basketball players, she canoed in nearby Parker Pond and explored the surrounding countryside. She believed the spirits of the Indians, who once call the land theirs alone, inhabited these places; she felt and even saw them. Collected here are her own stories of the strange and supernatural, along with ghostly folk tales she gathered from towns around.