Shooting Ghosts

The Tangipahoa Swamp holds too many mysteries to count—and probably as many bodies.

Tangipahoa means cornstalk people to the Choctaws. Their corncob bodies were the first to be laid to rest here, thousands of years ago. Their existence is documented only by a few hidden middens, those heaps of shells and domestic waste that infer but don’t confirm stories of past habitations. Yet the ancient denizens themselves left no trace.

Neither did the countless fur trappers and traders, who scrambled for a hundred years through Manchac Pass. Loaded with gold and silver from their transactions in New Orleans, they disappeared into the swamp at the murderous hands of marauding highwaymen.

Nor did generations of sinker-cypress lumberjacks. Their search for a commodity rarer than gold plunged them deeper into the river’s bed than the logged trees that never made it to nineteenth-century sawmills. Modern axe men harvest them still. Sunken cypress logs are among the most rot- and insect-resistant woods found on Earth. They cherished for their rich hues and complex burls. But the sunken bodies are not.

And then there’s all those souls who disappeared while running contraband or away from the law, the weather, and angry wives. The evidence is gone, but the tales remain. Tales that echo like the swoop of a predatory bird or the whack of an unseen critter escaping into caliginous waters.

Zelda, the Alligator Hunter of the Tangipahoa River, might tell you that the great white herons that soundlessly beat beat beat their way downriver are the souls of the dead, throbbing like a broken heart.

Her man Duke might whisper that the screech owls you hear at night aren’t owls at all but the terrifying screams of hurricane victims shredded like branches and swirled like wood pulp into this murky river. Having survived poisonous snakes, multiple wrecks, and a stint in Vietnam, he knew what death looked like, sounded like. He faced it proudly. His ashes—minus the steel rods that held him together—were scattered on the Tangipahoa one cold morning.

Shelby’s head, like Duke’s body, is held together with a metal plate. He swears there is a one-eyed monkey secreted in the canopy of slash pines and the underpinnings of cypress knees. A fortuneteller in New Orleans admonished him that his demon wasn’t a monkey at all. But that demon didn’t keep him from mining sinker cypress. He found gold, for sure, in those trees. Still does.

And I will tell you that George, a raconteur and scholar, runs to—and not away from—the Tangipahoa because of its reputation. He keeps a rifle handy to defend his encampment from interlopers—human, monkey, or specter.  I know this to be true; I’ve seen his fortress firsthand.

So has Bébé. We headed downriver one weekend before Halloween to a camp that can only be reached by boat. We knew we had arrived when we saw a gossamer ghost hanging amidst the Spanish moss—a plant George prefers to call ponchatoula—the Choctaw word meaning singing hair. “It’s so much more descriptive than the beards of the invaders,” he observed. “Don’t you agree?” You can’t disagree when it wafts ubiquitously, unmoved by time.

To call his cabin a fortress is a stretch. Hand-hewn by his father and uncles, it’s a fishing camp, but it doesn’t boast a campy name like “Watergate” or “Wotta Life.” No, it anonymously blends into the jungle that lies beyond the banks’ dense rushes and gnarled thickets. If you are invited inside, you can revel in the conveniences of running water, air conditioning, and weird music.

Of course, we were invited inside. There we drank iced tea and picked blue crabs that George’s cousin had caught earlier in the day. Other river dwellers might have served freshly caught catfish, alligator piquant sauce, or nutria gumbo. But George stuck with simple.

He laughed off the ghost, saying it was merely a Halloween prop. Samhein, he called the holiday, the night when the veil between this world and the other is at its thinnest, allowing souls to pass over for both gentle visits and nefarious retributions. It’s the later one must guard against, he suggested with a grin, the ones that silently thump like heron wings or painfully shriek like killer owls.

Bébé, a city girl, eyed the rifle in the corner that George had propped within easy reach after an earlier episode. When she saw a two-inch cockroach in the bathroom, her visceral scream rivaled the loudest screech owl. So he came to her rescue with an unloaded lever-action rifle and aimed it at the bug.

 “I’ll save you,” he had joked. Now he turned serious. “Want to learn to use it?”

“Yes,” she replied, swallowing hard. Donning an Israeli army hat, she posed for my camera with bullets trussed between her teeth.

We stepped out on the dock where the professor demonstrated the basics. We took turns shooting at flotsam and jetsam that inched lazily down the caramel river flecked with sky. Flotsam and jetsam. Today’s debris has grown from the remnants of all those Choctaws, traders, and hurricane wailers. The Ghosts of Tangipahoa.

As if to safeguard the ancient specters from us modern interlopers, George’s ghost floated in the sluggish air. I took pictures of our hunting expedition. In one, a barefooted Bébé appears to be shooting not debris, but that ghost, her petite body jack-knifed in recoil.

Shooting flotsam and jetsam, you see, is the same as shooting ghosts. Unlike herons, screech owls, or monkeys, unlike paper targets or aluminum cans, unlike Choctaws and human prey, there were no remains, no imprints of our hunt.

But if there had been, if we had to destroy the evidence, the swamp would be the ideal place to do it. Earth is scarce in this morass of liquid land. For millennia, bullets and bodies have simply dissolved in the ever-coursing river. Flotsam and jetsam. Ghosts. And when you shoot ghosts, there is no evidence to destroy. Just karma.