WHAT DOES ONE BELIEVE?

WHAT DOES ONE BELIEVE?

Years after the fatal accident, a lonely figure in a hooded cape arrives at the scene of the tragedy and lays a wreath at the site. As oddly as the figure arrives, it disappears just as mysteriously. Local residents never visit the site.

It turns out that this hooded form is the mother of the dead girl. Sara. She goes to this place, although there is no evidence as to where her missing daughter is or, for that matter, if she is really dead.

Sara’s mother, Samantha is eighty years old, bent and gnarly from years of abuse by Sara’s father, Henley, who toiled his whole life in the coal mines of West Virginia. He had just died from black lung disease at the age of seventy-five. To live that long was a rarity in this coal-mining region. He spent the majority of his working life in physical pain from the back-breaking work in the mines. A chronic cough tortured him for most of his adult life. The pain moved him to take out his frustrations on his wife and daughter. Both suffered frequent beatings and verbal abuse. Sara, as a result, left home at an early age.

Henley’s death was the path to freedom for Samantha, her in relative comfort for the first time in her life, but her daughter’s disappearance haunted her until she too died. She asked to be interred at the accident site, but legal requirements prevented her request.

Yet, on the exact date of the accident each year, this spectral figure appears at the accident site! Scientists poo-poo this as pure fantasy, probably caused by fog or other weather phenomena.

But, local citizens do not venture out on this date and they keep their children in their homes as well!