The Swamp Road Chronicles®
"Shutters"
Dear
Swamp Road Chronicles,
I live on Swamp Road. I have seen Swamp
Road Sally so many times, I couldn't begin to count. She has never behaved in a
threatening way or seemed to bring us any bad luck or been an omen predicting
something unfortunate happening to us. I keep saying 'us' because I live with
my wife Rosemary. We have lived together in the same house on Swamp Road for 40
years.
My wife has a low opinion of Sally; and
it's just because Sally has often appeared outside of one of our windows in the
middle of the night and startled my wife to the point where she thought she
might have a stroke. It's not that she is afraid of Sally, it's just that when
you suddenly see someone standing outside your bedroom window at 3 in the
morning it can take you by surprise.
The back wall of our home faces to the
east toward the middle of Pigeon Swamp. We see spooky things out there every
once in a while. We see strange lights that flicker and move rapidly from one
end of the Swamp to the other, we see groups of what appear to be women in long
dresses filing across the marsh land behind our house, on the way somewhere to
do something; who knows what? Every fall we see the scarecrow, the one people
call 'Jugbutt'. For 2 or 3 nights around the full
moon of October, what is called "The Harvest Moon", we see Jugbutt planted out in the fields behind our house. Every
night he is in a different location; he's always gone again by sunrise. I'm
very curious, but I won't go out there to investigate. My mamma didn't raise no
fools.
Well, after one night when my wife's
nerves were on edge already, Sally was standing about 20 feet away from our
house staring directly into our bedroom window. When my wife saw someone
standing out there, her instant reaction was to nearly faint. She put down her
foot and said that I must do something before I became a widower. So, I built
some nice, sturdy shutters and installed them over the back window. My wife is
careful to close them before dark. She hasn't been startled by Sally since.
Anyway, the point of this email is to
let people know that Sally is indeed very much real; just ask my wife.
As submitted by
Ross Meribee 10-16-22
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