By Joe Pike
Young’uns won’t remember, but back in the day, Nashville’s newspaper was printed right here in downtown in a big, old newspaper building. That was before the fire.
I was just a kid and had a newspaper route, picking up the papers after midnight and riding my bicycle all over Nashville and tossing the papers on porches. Sure, I was young and impressionable, but I’ll never forget a story the old press guys told about the newspaper being built on top of an old cemetery from the 1700s. They said that no one knew it was there or else it would’ve never got built. They said years later, some historical group came along with plats and deeds and surveys and such and showed proof of the cemetery’s existence. Sure enough, the massive press was located smack dab in the middle.
It made all those creaks and groans an old building makes even more ominous.
The lights weren’t controlled by a switch. All the power to the press room, a dusty dark place that smelled of paper dust and ink, were in a metal box that had a massive handle beside it. The press guys would throw that big switch to turn the power on. The sound was a little like Frankenstein’s lab coming to life. There was a whirr here and a grinding there and an electrical cackle that seemed to go from one end of the long room to the other.
In short, that meant when us kids came by to pick up our papers, we didn’t turn on any lights.
Did I mention it was spooky? The worst part though was a story that the head pressman used to tell. He would wait until he had a good bunch of us kids there and then he’d start in about the “scariest thing I ever done did see.” He had a rasp in his voice and his fingers were permanently stained with ink and nicotine. He said that when he first started working, there was a fatality that he’d never forget – and then he’d ask if we knew about it.
Of course we had not. So we’d beg him to go on.
It was late at night, he explained, and one of the newsroom folks had wandered back into the press room. They had no reason to be back there. Reporters are just natural snoops, he guessed. He said that inexplicably, a low-lying fog seeped up from the floor and covered the bottom level of the big iron press. The reporter didn’t know what to make of it, but rightfully decided it might be a good time to exit stage right.
Before the reporter could though, a coffin rose out of the fog and began to head toward the reporter. Scared beyond words, the reporter turned and ran. The coffin went faster. The reporter screamed. The coffin didn’t slow down. It might’ve been the fog, or it might’ve been the panic, but the reporter lost his way and fell into a corner – crying and begging for the coffin to stop.
But the coffin kept coming.
The young reporter’s chest was heaving and it wasn’t clear which would get him first, the coffin or a heart attack. And just as the coffin was almost on top of him, the young reporter grabbed the only thing he could find – a bottle of cough syrup . . . and the coffin stopped.
Happy Halloween, Brown County!
About the contest: The Brown County Democrat asked readers for their scariest, spookiest Halloween stories, and you scared up some real winners! Links to all the winning entries are below and at the end of each of this year’s winning stories.
Read other winning entries
First place: “Halloween Wildflowers”
Third place: “Mr. Scare-No-Crows”
Honorable mention
