Our Bewitched World

by Clare Casey

This essay appears in Issue 5 of the Mars Review of Books. Visit the MRB store here.

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Skull-Cults & Corpse Brides: Essays Vol II

Stone Age Herbalist, independently published, 334 pp, $16.99

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When I was 10 years old, my second cousin once removed, who had recently become my uncle by marriage, told me a ghost story. Through his marriage to my mother’s sister, two large tracts of land in eastern Pennsylvania were reunited, consolidating a family inheritance of real property dating back to the 1700s. Two sides of the family descending from two brothers had fought and would continue fighting over property boundaries, title, and buyouts. This sort of conflict has a technical name: subinfeudation.

This first story was a test run for the stories to come. My uncle told it in the mode that would become customary: head hung down, chin glued to chest in a pose of self-doubt, anticipating skepticism by poking holes in his own account. 

In the 1970s, on a dairy farm where he had fled his prominent and intimidating East Coast family, my uncle was carrying out a farmhand’s standard chore, bringing cattle into the barn at night—a task he completed regularly without incident. But on this night, the cattle stopped in their tracks just before the entrance to the barn and refused to go any further. He coaxed them with feed and pushed against their rumps, but the cattle wouldn’t budge. At some point he noticed that all the cattle were looking up. He followed their line of sight into the barn where he saw a figure: dark, flat, and floating in the rafters. In his telling, when he saw the figure and the cattle saw that he saw, they moved into the barn en masse without prompting.