In January of 2017, I had finished my 7th story, "Anger", a rather long piece. I had also dedicated myself to writing 12 stories for this year. I was at a complete loss as to what to do and I had not yet developed habits for keeping myself engaged. I was rudderless and without direction beyond knowing this was something that I needed to do. I did not know what to do though.
I had absolutely zero clue insofar as how to even go about looking for a place to put these Tales so that others can glimpse into what I've been seeing. I mean, share the scare, right? Well, I am unsure how I came upon the call, but there it was before me... an anthology based solely on stories containing witches which was awesome but I did not have any stories about witches either done, ready or conceptualized. I knew there would be witches in Baird's Holler and the surrounding environs, but I didn't know much beyond vague hints, I mean really vague to the point that it is more a hint of something else that reminds me of a whiff of something brewing. I knew there was a coven there and I knew sorta maybe who led the coven, but that was it.
Ghost towns in old Arizona do not resemble what the impressions one would have of a ghost town at least portrayed through media that imagines for you. Where is pictured in popular perception is a small collection of buildings lining a main road with tumbleweeds slowly rolling their merry way through, true ghost towns are vastly different. For example, McCabe on the other side of the ridge and down a way from where I am has, for its remains, a cemetery with a dozen of so graves, some still getting flowers last I saw, and a pipe sticking up from the ground where the town proper was. There is nothing else there. It is all gone.
Tiptop, McCabe's mirror on the southern end of the range is likewise but high-scrub desert floor where the astute eye might see the outlines of a couple foundations where there once was a booming little city. Bradshaw City, not far from the still barely holding on Crown King, at its peak boasted 5,000 residents supported by the Tiger Mine. Now there aren't even foundations. Walker, a mile up the road from where I am, had as much as 3,500 and what remains are flat spots where the hotels and dance halls once were, the tailings pile from the Sheldon Mine and basically remnants of that industry but nothing of the town, and those industrial remnants are nigh gone themselves.
On the other hand, there are towns like Crown King which pretty much died a few years before the Depression and but a small community yet remains. Then there is Jerome, Arizona, possibly the best example of a town remaining to be found, one died to extinction but risen in its ghosts. In 1903, a New York paper labeled the city as the most "wicked town in the west". On the side of Cleopatra Hill, this town clung with a population ranging to 10,000. This is a pretty steep hill, so much so that the old jail is no longer on the same side of the same road even, but slowly traveling down the hill as jails are wont to do. The current population of less than 500 makes their living selling wine and ghosts... usually enough wine to see the ghosts.
Poland is a little town directly on the other side of the ridge, roughly about a mile and a half following that undeviating crow, It was a mining town and a rail juncture contemporary with Walker and Howells. The towns on my side of the ridge are fed by a now paved road but that was once a notoriously steep and winding road. I remember the upgraded version of this dirt road, abandoned in 1969 when the new road was built. I remember my mother pointing out the construction equipment as the new road was being worked on above us once heading out to the property. I pass that spot every day and can see where I was on the fading remains of that old road looking up. I was 2 years old in 1969. I actually have a few memories being on that old road which is weird 'cause, damn, I was 2.
Around 1911, a project was completed, a tunnel carved a mile and a half through the mountain from Walker to Poland so as to get the ore from the Sheldon Mine down to civilization a little easier. That tunnel is closed now on the Walker side, the road snaking through the canyon running over where that opening was. On the Poland side, it is half filled with silt so that only the upper half of the entrance is open. The rest is a slow, icy stream and the silt built up after the tunnel began to flood and was abandoned.
The first time I found the Poland entrance, my buddy and I had been rolling around the mountain on the quad and after a night camping and a day target shooting at an old abandoned ranch my grandmother used to play at as a child, we figured we'd go looking for it. Thus, with my pal's Nagant pistol with us, a WWII Soviet revolver, we headed into Poland from one end and discovered, the further we went, the absolute dominance of German names on mailboxes. Yeah, uh, two history geeks had a laugh that day...
The reason I mention all this is, well, the same was attempted by a gentleman named August Pitts on the other side of the ridge from Baird's Holler. It was his aim to establish a junction and get rich on the transport of ore from the Mortenson Mine. There was some initial success, but his little town of Pitts Junction was completely overrun one night in the mid-1880s by a religious sect, zealots really, traveling through the tunnel with intent to settle. Within three years, the small population had been driven off or converted and that tunnel guarded against any ore shipped through.
I know all this because it revealed to me that February as I typed furiously every moment I could. Why? Because I discovered that one of the residents of Pitts Junction was an old woman 20 years now free from bondage, making her living as a healer and quite respected among the population that was driven out. She was the last to go and she really did not want to. She had even, I found out, cured one of the sons of leader of this church, one of the Sultans, the owners of the Mortenson Mine, who had renounced his ownership and found God in a very Old Testament sort of way.
I'd already gotten to know this chap, one Jonathon Kearns, from his mention in "I'll Always be With You, Boys". This was his first fleshing out but it was not his flesh I was interested in. He stayed in the background, his presence and his voice shouted being all that was needed. Kearns is, well, he's a powerful character, one whom I know has undergone extreme changes in his character from an aggressive drunk satiating his every lust, financed by his wealth beyond wealth, to the leader of a religious group loosely patterned on, or at least justified by the existence of such groups as Warren Jeff's Reformed Church of Jesus Christ. In other words, exactly as bad as you are starting to imagine and just a little worse (actually, only worse 'cause of supernatural stuff... nothing could be worse than what men like that do).
This story was a rush to write. I finished on time, within February, at 6,007 words. The story is damn good in my opinion. I learned an awful lot about voodoo on this project, specifically researching everything I could find on one particularly nasty loa. I peppered this information throughout, never naming that loa nor stating anything directly. I added to this, as the story sprung from my mind, elements directly referencing "Pigeons From Hell" by Robert E. Howard insofar as the concept of his zuvembie. The end tricked me in a way which many endings have since as the direction of the writing took me down a slightly different path than I had intended. I was left with a pretty powerful ending, one which I would describe some months later in an email in a way I probably shouldn't have. The whole "describe your job badly" should not be used to summarize a story's end.
"The Witch of Pitt's Junction" has for me become yet another foundation upon which a lot has been made. The woman within, known as Mama "D" in Pitt's Junction due to the very French name she was given as a child in Haiti being nigh unpronounceable by the denizens of that town, has become one of my most powerful figures. Mama Death has now appeared in 10 stories, either in reference or directly. She features in over a dozen ideas yet written and her potential is even greater than that which has ultimately become Jonathon Kearns. In that month of frantic research and writing, I created one of my most indelible creatures, with eternal thanks always given to Two-Gun Bob as is rightly deserved.
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