Telephone

Red hair, red dress, cemetery.

Those were the three commonalities in most depictions of her. This particular drawing had her hovering over the headstones like a wraith, the tattered red dress exposing parts of her bare ribcage.

Halloween was big at Madonsonville Middle School and Madonsonville Elementary School. The two were right next to each other, separated by a road. As soon as September hit we were into the spirit of it. In fact, our whole small community of Madonsonville, not a town but an unincorporated CDP, always had a lot going on in the way of Halloween. There was a fall parade which, though not officially a Halloween event, was closer to Halloween than Thanksgiving and thus more associated with the former.

Particular to the season at Madonsonville Elementary and Middle was a certain character named Emily Lewis. I guess you could call her a highly local urban legend. Usually portrayed as a ghost, but sometimes as a zombie, vampire, or other entity type, she was supposedly the daughter of the wealthy Lewis family, whose estate had been subdivided into the parcels surrounding the two schools and for whom their main thoroughfare, Lewis Road, was named.

Her story had a number of versions but the central theme was that she had died, and now haunted the Lewis family cemetery. The most common version was that she had fallen down a well, but some tellings were more sinister, involving murder or suicide.

The drawing in front of me artfully included all these elements. Behind Emily and the graveyard was an intricately sketched wood, witha farmhouse on a hill.