The Moss Man
Growing up the south there were always tall tales, wives’ tales and ghost stories aplenty. They were all true stories too, and could be easily verified! That is, of course, if you were willing to track down my friend’s cousin Barney who heard it from his neighbor’s sister’s boyfriend who got it from his best friend.
One of the best stories I didn’t have to track down because I was the first-hand witness to it. That’s right! Honest to goodness first-hand horror story! It was the story of the infamous Moss Man!
Now I had heard the story of the Moss Man most of my life and knew it to be true. The way the story goes is there was once this old farmer who had a son who was exceptionally dimwitted, so much so, in fact, that the boy was ten years old before he learned to take his shoes off before taking a bath. Course, part of the problem was his daddy didn’t make him bathe all that often and just plain forgot how to do it.
Anyway, the boy, whose name was Billy, Bobby or Harvey or something like that, grew up years ago near my neighborhood. They say when he was sixteen, he dropped out of the sixth grade and got himself a job shaking pecans out of pecan trees. Yep, that was a real job back then. The “shaker” would climb up the pecan tree as far as he could and shake the branches to get the pecans down. Believe it or not, they’ve actually got a machine that does that now!
The boy made a good living at tree shaking and would have done really well, too, if he had not been so dimwitted. The story goes that after he made his first fortune of $50, he decided he would spend it like any sensible young man would, on a woman.
The first Saturday night after the first $50, he went to the dance and found himself the prettiest girl in the crowd. Being the successful young man that he was, Harvey walked straight up to her with his hat in his hand and asked her if she wanted to, “daince.”
Well, Marylou, being a popular girl and all, turned and saw this pecan shaker with his hat in his and said, “Daince? What is a daince?” Well everybody laughed, of course. But Harvey, not put off by her, proceeded to show what he meant by doing something akin to the twist. This caused the whole room to erupt in laughter. Then, to put the icing on the cake, Marylou looked at him with spiteful eyes and said, “You ain’t nothin’ but a dumb pecan shaker! You need to go back to your moss-covered trees and hide yo’ ugly self!”
Hurt by her words, Harvey did just that. Ever since that night, they say that Harvey hides himself up in the pecan trees that line the old dirt road to town, and when he sees a car coming down the road with a boy and girl all up against each other in the car, he jumps down on the hood of the car and screams out his lost love’s name, “Marrryloooo.”
Now, I have to admit I didn’t know Harvey or Marylou, but I had heard the story countless times growing up, as did all my friends. Nor has any of us actually seen the Moss Man – that is until that one fateful night.
It was late October, and me and the boys were taking one of our last campouts before it got too cold for the year. It was almost dark, and we had already told every dirty joke we knew and eaten most everything we had brought, when my best friend, Woodrow, came up with an idea.
He said, “Y’all know it’s Saturday night, right?”
“Course we do, Woodrow,” I answered. “We can tell time, ya know.”
“Well, I have an idea that will be some fun. Why don’t we go down to the pecan road and one of us put moss all over us and scare some people?”
It was a ridiculously dumb idea and we were all for it! So, we headed down to the pecan road and Woodrow, who was the best climber, was picked to be the Moss Man. We covered him with moss and sent him up a tree closest to the road. Wasn’t long before we spotted some car headlights and the plan was in action. Now here’s where it got strange.
Woodrow saw the headlights and inched out on a limb to get himself in position. The plan was he was to jump down in the middle of the road close enough to the car that they could see him in the headlights. He would then run off the road and hide in the bushes, and we’d all get a good laugh.
Well, Woodrow misjudged the tree limb and it broke under his weight, sending him to the ground with the tree limb. Fearing he would be hit by the car, Woodrow jumped to his feet and tried to run, only to find his feet tangled in the tree limb. Seeing the moss-covered man fighting to get free of the tree limb, well, it looked like a monster having a fit of some sort to those in the car. To make matters worse, it was rutting season, and to the big buck deer that happened up, it looked like a fully-antlered big buck trying to encroach on his territory!
The big buck snorted and pawed at the dirt and then charged after poor Woodrow. Woodrow, upon seeing the buck, let out a blood-curdling scream and started running toward the car with the buck in pursuit. I don’t know how that boy in the car did it, but I do believe he made that car do sixty in reverse and kept it between the ditches!
By the time we got back to school on Monday, the Moss-Man story had been debunked by two eyewitnesses. Seems the boy in the car was a senior out with his girlfriend, and they set the record straight once and for all. As he tells it, there isn’t a Moss Man that haunts the Pecan Tree Road; there be two!
