The Lantern in the Branches

My grandmother, Elsie, told me this story when I was a girl, in the summer of 1952, sitting on the porch of our farmhouse in the uplands of Vermont. She was a stern woman, not given to fancies, and she spoke of it as plainly as if she were recounting a trip to the mill. It happened in the autumn of 1934, when she was a young wife, just twenty-three, and the world was still reeling from the dust and the Depression. They lived in a hollow called Sorrow’s Rest, a name that had stuck since the logging days, and their nearest neighbor was a mile up the road.

Elsie had taken to her bed that fall, stricken with a wasting fever that the doctor called ‘the grippe’ but that she knew was something else—a chill that had settled deep in her bones, a heaviness that made even breathing a chore. Her husband, Tom, and their two boys, ages five and seven, slept in the next room, and the house was quiet as the grave. On the third night, as the moon hung low and orange over the ridge, the dogs—two old coonhounds named Grief and Sorrow (yes, that was their names, for Tom had a dark humor)—started up a furious barking. They were not barking at the deer or the foxes that usually passed; they were barking at the gap in the trees where the old Pettigrew cemetery lay, half-overgrown with brambles and leaning stones.

Elsie lay in the dark, the quilts pulled to her chin, listening to the dogs’ frantic yips. She knew the cemetery well; her own mother-in-law, Sarah, had been buried there just a year ago, after a sudden stroke. Sarah had been a brisk, practical woman, always in a faded calico apron, and she had never approved of Elsie—said she was too dreamy, too soft. But death had come to Sarah, and now she rested under the old sugar maple that split its trunk in two, the one the locals said was a sign of a troubled spirit. The dogs’ barking grew more frantic, then stopped abruptly, as if commanded.

And in that sudden silence, Elsie felt a change in the air—a slight pressure, a coolness that seeped through the quilts. She turned her head toward the wall that faced the cemetery, and she saw a glow, faint as a will-o’-the-wisp, at the foot of the bed. It grew, and from the glow stepped a figure—her mother-in-law, Sarah, but not as she had been in life. She wore the same calico apron, the same worn shoes, but her face was obscured, hidden in a shadow that seemed to swallow the light. Elsie tried to speak, but her throat was dry as ash. Sarah approached the bed, not walking so much as gliding, and she knelt beside it, her hands folded as if in prayer.

Elsie could not see Sarah’s face—no matter how she strained, it was as if a veil of darkness hung over it, a deliberate concealment. But she could see the hands, the veins and calluses, the same hands that had kneaded dough and snapped beans. Sarah’s lips moved, but no sound came out; yet Elsie heard words, not through her ears but inside her head, like a memory. ‘The lantern is still burning,’ the voice said, ‘and the door is ajar. You must not open the door. You must not let it in.’ Sarah stayed there for a long minute, her form trembling slightly, as if she were holding something back. Then she rose, turned, and walked through the wall, the glow fading with her.

As the glow vanished, the dogs began to bark again, this time in earnest, running toward the cemetery, their barks fading into the distance as if they pursued something. Elsie lay trembling, her nightgown drenched in sweat, the fever suddenly broken. She did not sleep that night. When Tom came in at dawn, she told him what she had seen. He grew pale and crossed himself (though he was not a Catholic), and he went to the window to look at the cemetery. The sky was gray, and a thin mist hung over the graves. ‘Mother used to keep a lantern by the back door,’ he said, ‘for those who came late from the fields. She said it guided the lost home. But she always said, ‘Never light it after dark, or something might follow the light in.”

Elsie never forgot that night. She lived to be ninety-one, and she told the story only twice: once to my mother, and once to me. She always ended with the same warning: ‘There are some doors that never close, and some lights that never go out. When you see a lantern in the branches, do not walk toward it. And if one of the dead comes to kneel by your bed, listen, but do not look into its face. For some things are better left unseen.’ And to this day, I cannot look at a lantern without a shiver, and I never walk past a cemetery after dark.