Stop me if you’ve heard this start to a story before. I grew up in a small town in the southern U.S.. A town small enough that everyone knew your business before you did. While some loved our town and swore it was the best place on Earth, I’ve always hated it. Not only because of the people that never seemed to mind their own business, but because of the town’s history, and the dark curse it birthed.
The founding of our little town is well known to everyone that’s grown up in it. Kids go through school having to write reports on it, and you’ll find several statues and murals dotted throughout the area, depicting the town’s founding.
Legend has it that a majority of the town’s land used to be one massive plantation owned by a well-off man and his family. After slavery was ended the patriarch of the family refused to allow his slaves to leave. He ordered the people he employed as guards to keep the former slaves on his land by any means necessary. This only went on for a couple weeks before even the armed men the family employed began to crumble under the guilt of all the violent acts they had perpetrated for decades. So, under the cover of night the armed men freed the slaves and supplied them with weapons. The now fully armed mob stormed into the mansion and drug the patriarch and his wife out of their bed and outside before dousing them both in oil and setting them on fire. With the now massive amount of land no longer being controlled by the cruel family, the families of the formerly employed men and newly freed slaves, transformed the area into a small settlement. That settlement grew and grew until it became what it is today.
The patriarch however, had 4 sons who traveled the country as a well-known music group. Missing home, they returned only to find their parents killed and their birthright stripped. Knowing they couldn’t take their families land back by force they instead came up with a plan to torment those that now inhabited it. It’s said that the sons of the patriarch had unprecedented music talent with voices and skills with instruments that could lure a man to his own death. And that’s exactly what they did. Under the cover of night, they’d entice curious individuals to wander into the woods, where they’d never be heard from again.
After a month of mysterious disappearances, the townsfolk ventured into the very woods the band had used as its killing grounds and dealt them the same fate their parents received. However, the mysterious disappearances never stopped. Neither did the reports of alluring music drifting from the dark of the woods. Generation after generation the reports of music went on. During my grandpa’s generation, the phantoms that lured the unsuspecting to their deaths were finally given the name of the Bluegrass Sirens. Apparently, the melodies that cursed the night sounded similar to ethereal bluegrass country music. I can confirm that’s true. It’s all too true.
Remember that part I told you about our town being so small that people know your business before you do? Well after being caught kissing our high school’s quarterback while we were both freshmen, I got the label of “The Town Gay Kid”. I have to admit I always found this unfair considering the guy I had gotten caught kissing just went on, unjudged as people made it seem like I’d tricked him into it. For the next couple years of High School, I was pretty much an outcast. If I wanted to walk down the halls with someone, I pretty much would have had to pay them to do so. That was until Thomas transferred to town.
He transferred to our town during the beginning of my senior year. Immediately using an excess of rainbow pins on his jean jacket to make it clear to everyone that he was gay and didn’t give a shit who cared. Considering he was also 6’2 and built like a brick, there wasn’t anyone in our school that dared to say something to him about it. Honestly when I first laid my eyes on him, I thought he was the most badass thing I’d ever seen, I also thought he was the most gorgeous thing I’d ever seen. I have to admit I begin crushing on him immediately and outright fell in love after he walked right over to my lone lunch table in the corner of the cafeteria and asked if there was room at the gay kid table for one more.
After that we became quick friends and even quicker, we discovered we had feelings for each other. We’d hang out before school until the bell rang and would sit and talk after school until our parents came to pick us up. We may have been two outcasts, but we didn’t care. Finally, I built up enough courage to ask him out on an actual date. To which he said yes. We met at a diner in the middle of town and sat, eating fries, drinking milkshakes and laughing for hours. Walking out of the diner Thomas asked if I knew any good spots to look at the moon for a bit before we headed home. I did of course, but by then it was almost 9 o’clock at night. I knew the dangers of the night, but I let my feelings cloud my judgment. Thomas was new to town and hadn’t yet learned of our curse, but I knew it well. I was young and dumb, and in love. I didn’t want the night to end, and this stupidity on my end is what got Thomas killed.
He drove us to the parking lot that sat next to our school’s football field, and we walked down the field until we got to a spot of grass that ended right in front of the woods. The trees in front of us were low enough that the moon shone over us like God’s eye. We lay on our backs in the grass, watching the stars as they watched us back. We talked, laughed, and after one of us finally built up enough courage, we kissed. It was my first kiss, but under the night sky it felt like you couldn’t ask for better.
We sat there for a while afterwards, every cell in my body felt as if it were smiling. A faint nighttime breeze gliding across us both. It was that same breeze that carried the notes. It was so faint I thought it was my brain, popping out random tunes based on how much euphoria I was feeling. But then I begin to hear it over and over. The faint strumming of a banjo, fading in and out like the breaths of a person. Slowly the strumming got loud enough that I sat up, being as still as I could, trying to listen.
“What is it?” I heard Thomas say. But I shushed him and just told him to listen. The tune had changed. It was now continuous, and I could now hear it, although it was distant. The rhythmic strumming of the banjo was joined by other instruments, a violin perhaps and some other kind of guitar. Deep in me something screamed for me to run, but it faded as the music slowly grew louder. The song was beautiful and before we knew it Thomas and I were both on our feet. That’s when the vocals started. I couldn’t hear what was being sung but the pain and sadness of the voice perfectly folded into the flow of the instruments.
“What the hell is that?” I heard Thomas asking me his question, but my body just refused to process anything except the music it was hearing. In front of us, just behind the first couple rows of tree a large pillar of flame appeared. It certainly hadn’t been there seconds ago, but suddenly it just was. It felt like I blinked and suddenly I was 10 feet away from the tower of flame. I didn’t remember moving and honestly at the time I couldn’t remember anything. The now clear sound of Bluegrass music swirled around me and threw me like it was threads sewn into my flesh.
Step after step I walked closer to the blaze. Each step the music would get louder and louder. No thoughts survived in my mind as any that would arise would swiftly be swept away by the ethereal Bluegrass tunes that filled the air around me. Just out the corner of my eye I could make out 4 figures dancing and rocking along with the rhythm of the song. A few steps in front of me I noticed Thomas, moving swiftly towards the towering inferno. As he got only inches away from it, he paused, before he took one big step and disappeared into the mass of golden and orange flames.
Immediately the song was torn from my mind by the sound of Thomas’s blood curling screams. I fell backwards as Thomas’s screams grew more desperate. Begging for someone to help him. I couldn’t see him inside the flames but images of him slowly burning to death filled my mind. I watch as 4 figures calmy walked past me, stopping just before the wall of flame. Each was nearly 7 feet tall but dressed in aged and charred white suits so dirty that they looked like they had naturally come brown. I couldn’t see their faces, as thick volumous black smoke obscured everything but a visible skeletal smile of bone and seared flesh. One by one the figures stepped into the column of fire, the still swirling music fading as each figure disappeared. After the last one stepped into the flame, the column of flame vanished without a trace. No smoke, no ash, no Thomas. I sat there for hours, crying and staring through the pitch-black woods. Until finally I was able to pick myself up and walk home.
It was hard the next couple weeks. Walking past all of the missing posters with Thomas’s face of them. Everyone helped Thomas’s parents look for him although everyone already knew it was far too late.
I used to want to leave this small town and its nosey inhabitants. I wanted to travel to the city, meet some guy in a bar after my stressful 9-5 and fall in love to live happily ever after. But now, i don’t know. Leaving feels like I’d be running. Like I’d be letting Thomas truly die. I’ve recently started heavily studying the paranormal. Reading books on demons and violent hauntings. About how to clense spirits from places they aren’t wanted. I’ve tried researching if it’s possible to harm paranormal entities. I want to one day see the Bluegrass Sirens again and the next time I do, I want to learn if a ghost can scream.