Pioneer history of Ingham County, compiled and arranged by Mrs. Franc L. Adams, secretary of the Ingham County pioneer and historical society.

INGHAIM COUNTY HISTORY

141

I came to where the road branches, one branch going over the
hogsback and the other around it. On our way over with three
in the buggy we had taken the lower road, even though it took
considerable longer to go that way, but now I chose the upper and
shorter way.
"The horse crept at a snail's pace up the first rise and down
into a little hollow, past the one house on this lonely section of
the road, then up again into a track barely wide enough for the
buggy, the hubs scraping the bushes on either side. This, and
the soft swish of the wheels in deep sand, were the only sounds
to be heard. I might have been in the upper wilds of the Yukon
for all of any hints of civilization that presented itself. All this
time that feeling of impending danger kept growing.
"I sat straight in the buggy, clinching the lines in one hand and
the whip in the other, then to cap all previous nervousness my
thoughts ran onto the story of the negro who was lynched in town
fifty years before.
"I had heard it in detail recently from one who had a hand in
the transaction, and every scene was stamped indelibly on my
mind. I saw him swinging on a large tree at my right, then came
men who cut his body down and dragged it away. I could distinctly hear their footsteps among the bushes, and my blood froze
within me. Now I was exactly where they first buried him.
They were forced to exhume the body and take it farther in the
woods, as the children were afraid to go by that grave by the
roadside as they went to school.
"When they exhumed the body the head and one hand were
missing, and I remembered with a shudder that all the old inhabitants believed that on the anniversary of the deed, one hour
after midnight, the headless body, accompanied by the head and
hand, appeared and traversed three times the course which the
men took when they carried his body from its first to its las
resting place.
"Just as this was running through my mind my horse stopped,
snorted, then jumped sidewise with a celerity I had never credited
him with.
"I looked in the direction of the disturbance and my tongue
clove to the roof of my mouth from sheer fright. I lost all power
of speech, and even the control of my muscles; the lines dropped