The Ghost of Southerby Plantation

Author: Elizabeth McKinnis

*CW: Mentions of sexual assault (no graphic depictions), depictions of slavery and racism, sexism, pregnancy, blood, death, and cannibalism. 

Elsie Jones did not belong here. Despite the soft sunlight that filtered in through her large windows, the lush pillows surrounding her, the gorgeous silk scarf holding her dark curls aloft as she slept, and the inviting platter of tea sitting on the table beside her door, the entirety of Southerby Plantation seemed to constantly ooze a sense of foreboding. It was as if the very structure itself whispered obscenities to her through the walls each night, hiding evil deeds behind the facade of antebellum charm. 

Elsie slowly got out of bed, rolling carefully yet clumsily with the awkward added weight of her stomach which after eight months still seemed like a foreign object to her. She made it as far as the foot of the bed before the door creaked open and Clara bustled into the room. 

“Good morning, Missus Southerby,” Clara said, sweetly. Her voice had a deep and rough quality that Elsie associated with grandmothers and wisdom and home. It made her feel safe, even if the name she used struck dread through every inch of her body. 

“Good morning, Clara,” she replied, not unkindly. “Just Elsie is fine.” Elsie had said this every day for the past eight months.

“Yes ma’am,” Clara replied, bowing her head, “but the master has insisted –”

Elsie’s loud sigh broke through her explanation,“Yes, yes. I am very aware of his insistence.”

“Miss,” Clara said, avoiding names altogether now, “can I make you some tea? Maybe prepare a biscuit for you?” By the time she finished the questions, she already had the pot in her hand and was pouring strong black tea into a delicate pink and white teacup. 

“Thank you, Clara.” Elsie made her way to the table and sat down. Then, gesturing to the other cup, she said, “won’t you join me?”

Clara smiled and shook her head, as Elsie knew she would. Her deep brown eyes looked sad, despite the crows feet marking many times of laughter. “I am afraid I cannot, ma’am.” Elsie hated that Clara, a woman at least forty years her senior, called her “ma’am.” She hated that Clara served her tea and stood waiting for her to need something most of the day. Of all the things she hated at Southerby Plantation, seeing a woman she would have revered back home in the role of a house slave was high on the list.

Elsie nodded before fixing herself her tea, shooing away Clara’s hand as she tried to help her. As Elsie drank, Clara untied her scarf and began to set her hair for the day, deftly twisting each curl into a small elegant bun at the base of her neck. 

This, at least, felt almost like home. It felt like her mama braiding the hair on her scalp before allowing the tresses to flow freely down her back. It felt like her sisters’ absentminded fiddling in the evening as their mother sewed and they all shared stories they’d collected or made up. 

Eight months felt like a lifetime ago. It was a lifetime ago. Because she was no longer Elsie Jones, one of eight wild girls in Western Carolina, spending her days making tinctures and healing ointments and helping her mama deliver babies. Now, she was Elsabeth Southerby, Mistress of Southerby Plantation, wife of Roger Southerby, and – soon – mother of his only heir. 

If Southerby had been cold in the winter, it was no less so now that spring had arrived. Though the wind of eastern North Carolina told tales of warmer days ahead, the inside of the main house was frigid. Everyone felt it. Everyone except Roger Southerby. 

The master of Southerby Plantation did, however, feel many other things. Anger. Frustration. Desire. Impotence. Hunger. Each of these coursed through him as he sat across from his silent wife, sipping tea that morning. 

He felt the tension in his clenched jaw, the yearning in his entire body as he looked at her, wrapped up nicely before him yet refusing to say a word. In fact, she had not said a word to him since their wedding day. It was driving him mad. 

“You look beautiful, today, Elsabeth,” he said, and she did. Most women lost their beauty while pregnant — it was a fact of nature, Roger supposed — but Elsabeth looked as radiant as ever. Just as he remembered her all those years ago. 

He had first seen Elsabeth Jones when he passed through the little town of Meyers, North Carolina. She had been only eleven at the time, and Roger only thirteen, but he had known at the sight of her in her family’s garden, meticulously picking leaves off various herbs and visibly deciding which ones she needed with an impossibly beautiful scrunch of her face, that she was the one he was meant to marry.

His family had only spent one night in the town, but Roger Southerby returned to Meyers eight years after that first day with nothing but the thought of Elsabeth Jones and the goal of fulfilling his role as new patriarch of Southerby Plantation. 

Though he had many options as a young bachelor awaiting a large inheritance, his appetite could not be satisfied with any of the girls in his vicinity. Neither the more genteel women in his visits to the city nor the women of the local brothel with their eagerness to satisfy could quench that hunger young Roger felt. He knew that only one girl, even one with improper breeding and a wild Appalachian family, could give him what he craved.

Now, he stared at his wife hungrily, remembering vividly what she had looked like the night he made her his own. The memory must have been plain on his face because Elsabeth lowered her eyes and seemed to grit her teeth. Her face paled, and Roger felt his hunger replaced with hot anger. 

He could have her any time he wanted. Did she not realize that? Did she not understand how gentlemanly he had been towards her since their wedding day? How kind and doting and loving, waiting until he won her over, until she too fell as madly in love with him as he was with her?

Roger’s face warmed. He clenched his hands into fists on his lap and bit out, “You are dismissed, wife,” as if it were as hateful for him to say as it was for her to hear. 

She did not need to be told twice. Elsabeth rose quickly, politely bowing her head, before hurrying off to her room.

Once she was out of earshot, Roger slammed his fist hard onto the table, ignoring the shattering of porcelain as a delicate teacup fell to the floor. The line between his deep love for his wife and his overwhelming hatred for her was blurring more and more as each day passed. But the hunger, that desire to own her, possess her fully, and willingly this time, would not dissipate. No. It only seemed to grow stronger. 

He sighed, and rose from his chair, the picture of poise despite the fire he felt burning him from within. Then, Roger donned his coat and sought out a temporary, if insufficient, solution to his cravings.

Elsie sobbed into her pillow that night, as she did every night, when the nightmares would not stop. Some of it was expected. She had flashbacks to waking up in a bed that was not hers, with a strange man beside her, not knowing and somehow knowing far too much what had happened. She dreamt of her forced wedding ceremony when even her mama had not been able to talk down her daddy and their local parson, especially when the man she had so recklessly seduced was one of the status of Roger Southerby. Sometimes she dreamt of meeting Roger, of the week the strange man had spent asking for her hand in marriage, each day seeming more angry and lonely and desperate. Other nights, she dreamt of the girls either in brothels or, worse, in the slave quarters that she might be condemning to her fate through her own stubborn refusal to allow that monster into her bed. 

But that night, what kept her up, what she knew must be another nightmare, was the sound of someone crying accompanied by a sickening squishing sound and the slow drip-drop of liquid onto the floor. She did not think it was a memory, but it haunted her nonetheless, leaving her frozen with fear under her soft down comforter.

She awoke clutching her sheets. Her pillow was soaked with tears and sweat, and she felt as though she had not slept at all. If Clara had been more reserved that morning while making her tea and fixing her hair, Elsie hadn’t noticed. If the house had seemed even chillier on the walk to the parlor for her regular afternoon tea with her husband, it had been brushed off. Elsie felt as though she was walking in a dream. 

It was when Elsie entered the parlor that she woke up. 

Roger was sitting, as he always was, at the far end of the audacious room, in a grand green armchair, embroidered with English ivy. He stood, as he always did, when she entered, his “good morning, Elsabeth,” disappearing into the books lining the walls. And he smiled, as always, with that glint of bright white. 

But it was his eyes that startled her. They seemed…brighter. Yet, they were darker too. Hadn’t they been a light blue when they had met? She could not remember now. Today they were a deep indigo color. And they glinted like she had not seen since the day she woke beside him. That morning, his eyes had been much the same, if not quite so dark. It was as if a deep primal hunger had been…satiated. 

“Good morning,” Elsie said, so lost in her thoughts that she had forgotten to whom she was speaking. She had forgotten that the last words she had said in front of him had been a strained “I do” as her sisters wept behind her. 

Roger, of course, was elated at the misstep. He stepped towards her to pull out her chair, and she felt her body retreat without her consent. Her husband frowned and paused. He stepped back, considering her for a moment. 

Then, suddenly, he smiled again, grabbed his coat, and began speaking rapidly to her while taking her arm. She was too stunned or confused or scared to resist.

It was, perhaps, a silly thing to do, Roger realized, taking Elsabeth out for a walk with him when she had only just begun to let down her guard. But Roger could not help it. He felt elated since she had spoken to him. And with his more primal urges satiated for the moment, he wanted nothing more than to make the most of this newfound good will, however brief it might be. 

So, Roger held Elsabeth’s arm in his and led her down towards the garden. There were some beautiful dogwood trees at the edge of the property that he was certain would thaw his wife even more. 

As they walked, Elsabeth a half step behind him and tiresomely slow at eight months pregnant, Roger considered how lovely it would be to have her won over to him. She could actually manage the house instead of hiding off on her own all day with no one but that silly old woman to keep her company. She could make herself useful aside from the obvious task of bearing him an heir. She could even learn about tobacco, maybe even smoke some. It’s not as if she had been particularly ladylike before meeting him. He had even heard a rumor that her house was secretly run by witches, but he knew that was probably just because the girls never brushed those unruly curls and seemed to rarely wear shoes.

Now, with his help, Elsabeth was neat and tidy, the perfect picture of a Southern lady. And if her skin was a half shade darker than some of the other wives or her hair a little more coily than was acceptable, Roger was certain that would not matter once everyone had seen her beauty, her smile, her wild ferocity. Though, now that he considered it, he did not see the latter two often. They only lived on in his memories of her as a child and then in the week leading up to their engagement. Roger wondered, suddenly, if he could change that. 

He was high in his hopes when Elsabeth halted abruptly behind him. 

“What–” he began, looking back to see her face paler than usual in spite of the walk and the afternoon sun. He followed her gaze to see what had stunned her, only to find her looking at the fields stretched out before them with dark figures moving about like an efficient colony of bees. 

“Oh, yes,” Roger said, quickly, excited that she was taking an interest in his work, “Isn’t it quite impressive? My grandfather and his father and his father before him took pains to create a piece of land that was more than just a simple ‘farm,’ but a real legacy, as it will be for our son. And if you are wondering how I know it will be a son, I feel unshakeably confident that my lineage –” 

“There are so many of them,” Elsabeth said, quite rudely cutting off Roger’s chain of thought. 

“Fields? Why yes, I suppose,” Roger said, “but I do not believe they count as multiple –”

“People.” 

Roger paused. He stared out over the swaths of black men and women tilling and planting seedlings. He rarely considered the people on his plantation. They existed more in the background. Certainly, when he had returned with Elsabeth eight months ago, the sheer amount of people and land and animals had been overwhelming to her. And, of course, he took his liberties with the young women on the plantation, as was his God-given right as their owner. But he rarely considered them beyond that.  

“Well,” he began, hesitantly, “yes. How else would we produce so much? The tobacco does not grow itself.” He chuckled softly at her naivety. 

“Are,” she was speaking so quietly he could hardly hear her, “are they all enslaved?”

Roger looked at her with a crease in his brow. “Of course. That is what they’re for.”

It was then that he noticed Elsabeth looked faint. 

“Should we sit down?” He asked her, suddenly worried about both her and their unborn child. “Should we go inside?”

She did not answer, so Roger made the decision for her.

Roger took Elsie on a walk every day that week, each time venturing further onto the property, and each time forcing Elsie to acknowledge the overwhelming horror of her new role. The first few times, she tried to smile when she made eye contact with the men and women around her, but the fear with which they turned down their eyes – or worse the hatred with which they held her gaze – had stopped her fairly quickly. Now, she passed the fields with her eyes down, waiting for the bench she had discovered yesterday hidden within a swath of dogwoods. 

Elsie was exceptionally tired, more tired than she had ever been in her life. Her body ached from the weight of her child and the nightmares that had only been getting worse, adding to the fatigue that filled her. 

Every night that week had held the same dripping, tearing, wet sounds that pierced through every dream, ripping through her flashbacks and drawing her up. She was worried they might be real. And the crying. Though she did not wish to admit it, she had heard sounds like that before, both at home and here, and she now knew that type of terror intimately. She did not know if these renditions were real or just a figment of her own demons lurking. She was not sure if she wanted to know. 

As she sat, Elsie felt herself relax just a fraction, at peace with the world around her. She could feel the roots of the earth pushing up to meet her, and she longed to remove her shoes and press her bare soles down into the mud. She remembered her mama telling her the words to speak to the trees to draw them out, to commune with nature as her mama had and her mama before her. None of what she did was magic, her mama had assured her when they warded the house against many things that go bump in the night. No, she would say, it was as natural as the mountains, older than the trees. 

The ache in Elsie’s bones felt older than the trees these days. 

Roger’s leg brushed against hers as he joined her on the bench, and every muscle in Elsie’s body tightened with adrenaline, banishing any thoughts of trees and home and forcing her focus here and now. 

Roger had been in exceptionally good moods this week. And, now, she could feel him looking at her expectantly. She forced herself to meet his gaze. 

Not for the first time, she wondered if her eyes were playing tricks on her. He seemed much more gaunt than she remembered. Maybe he also was not sleeping. What nightmares could this man of privilege possibly have? His eyes were still that bright, deep indigo, almost black, but blazing with something like hunger or fear. 

He held her gaze for a moment, before reaching out a tentative hand towards her stomach. 

“May I?” he asked her, so gently that she could almost forget his blatant disregard for her, or many other women’s, answers to that question. Almost. 

Though she was not sure why, Elsie nodded.

When his hand touched her stomach, their child kicked against it. Panic fluttered in her chest, and she could feel the icy cold of his fingers making spindly webs across her body, through the fabric of her dress. She gasped. 

When Roger looked up at her, his face was flushed. His eyes had deepened, pupils expanding, and she saw that raw want in his eyes that she had seen so many times. And he was touching her. And they were hidden away. And, after all, she was legally his. 

Yet, despite all that, when he leaned towards her, blood red lips seeking her own, cold hands firmly on her waist, she felt herself lean away, falling into the mud. He tried to move his body towards hers but she lifted her legs and kicked him as hard as she could. Roger doubled over, catching his breath. As she rose, Elsie began to move away from the bench and the trees and her husband’s icy touch. His eyes were black with rage as he caught his breath. 

She turned and ran.

Elsabeth did not come to meet her husband for tea the next afternoon. Or the afternoon after that. Or the one after that. And Roger was losing his patience. 

His usual, or perhaps unusual, pursuits of pleasure had left him wanting after touching his wife so intimately that day. He could still feel the beat of life within her, almost smell the extra pumping blood, see the flush in her cheeks when she fell. God, he needed her. 

And she would not leave her room. 

But Roger had an idea to fix that. True, it may be cruel, but what was a husband’s job if not to provide loving discipline? And, if he were being honest, he might even love the discipline itself. 

He summoned Clara.

Elsie’s nightmares got worse. It seemed like she was trying to piece together something just out of reach, a thought she could not quite catch. It was as though she was coming up against her mother’s own wards and unable to reach around them into the house. She could see something outside the old Meyer’s Inn, the one she had woken up in on that fateful day. The thing was dark, silhouetted against the wrought iron gate of the yard, cast in shadow by porch lights. And past it, she could see Roger. And then… nothing else. 

Screams and crying kept breaking into her dreams. Tonight, it sounded worse. Louder. Familiar. And the sound, the wet, sticky ripping, turned her stomach. 

She woke up to vomit, her heart and mind racing. She placed her hand on her stomach, trying to press peace through her palm into that little life within her own. She was not sure it was working. 

In the morning, Clara did not come to her door. 

Instead, a young girl, no more than fifteen, with deep dark skin and hair much like Elsie’s own, knocked before entering with a “Good Morning, Missus Southerby,” and a tray of tea. 

Elsie was instantly up before the stars in her vision sent her back down. The girl rushed over to help, setting the tea down with a clatter. 

“Missus Southerby, are you alright?” she asked, fear behind the gaze of her big brown eyes. 

Elsie’s head felt hollow, and a low pain burned in her abdomen. 

“Where is Clara?” Elsie asked.

The girl’s eyes filled with tears, and she shook her head. 

Elsie sat back. “What happened? Is she okay?” 

The girl just shook her head again. Elsie’s heart broke. 

“What is your name?” she asked the girl, trying to be gentle. 

“Mary,” she said softly.

“Mary,” Elsie repeated, “do you know what happened to Clara?”

Mary did not respond. 

“Mary,” she said “please. She was the only person here I actually cared about or who might have cared about me…” she trailed off. “Please,” Elsie whispered. 

Mary hesitated, then said, “I don’t… I don’t know what happened…”

“What do you think happened?” Elsie asked, dread and hope mixing for a moment as she caught Mary’s meaning.

Mary seemed like she was struggling to get the words out. “I think she’s gone.” 

Elsie felt tears run down her cheek. 

“Gone how?” she asked, but she already knew.

“I think she’s dead.” Mary breathed out the words like a confession. “I think they’re all dead.”

Elsie was crying in earnest now, but she paused her own grief as she saw tears falling from Mary’s eyes as well. 

“What do you mean ‘all?’” Elsie thought she might be sick again.

“All the girls he takes back,” Mary was speaking quickly now, as if rushing to get the words out and scared they wouldn’t come and scared they would, “when Mister Southerby gets the hungry eyes, he takes another girl up here, to the main house, he used to just take them anywhere and they usually would come back, but they wouldn't talk or nothing for a few days but now…” she stopped

“Now what, Mary?”

“Now,” Mary continued, “Now none of them come back. And people have…heard things.”

Elsie did not need to ask what things they had heard. She sat for a moment. Her pulse pounded in her ears like a drum, but she did not move a muscle. 

“How many?” she said, finally, “How many haven’t come back?”

Elsie met Mary’s eyes, certain she was not prepared for the answer, but stunned nevertheless when Mary said, “twenty-four.”

Roger Southerby was not aware how his wife had located his gun, though he expected that one of Clara’s good-for-nothing sons had something to do with it. Nevertheless, he was not particularly surprised when the door burst open to his study and there stood his beautiful Elsabeth, holding his new revolver slightly propped against her protruding belly. She was honestly adorable. 

Then, she shot him in the chest.

It did hurt. Roger could admit that. It burned. But all he could think about in that moment was the wild fiery girl he had seen that week in Meyers and eight years before that. Her hair was still loose, hanging in a halo of frizzy curls around her head, she was barefoot, and still in her nightgown, which seemed to show him every inch of her. 

He needed her. He felt it in his every bone. So he stepped towards her, to remind her that she was already his. 

She shot him again. And again.

And then, Elsabeth screamed.

Roger Southerby had changed, though she realized he must have been changing for quite a while. When Elsie met him, he was a tall, broad shouldered boy with tanned skin, thick black hair, and light blue eyes. Now, he was sickly pale, almost grey, his hair hung long in thin dregs over his eyes which were now entirely black. Not as they had been that day by the dogwood trees. No. They were black from corner to corner. 

When she shot him the third time, Roger – or the thing that once was Roger – brought his hand to his chest to find his wound. His fingers had grown longer, sharper, bonier, and the blood coating them was a dark, thick, blackish red. He looked up at her with those empty eyes, and smiled with yellowed, elongated, sharp teeth, and Elsie screamed. 

Then, her water broke. 

A pain like none she had ever felt before rushed through her abdomen, and she sank to the ground as she felt fluid soak her leg and then her gown. She screamed again from the pain, which was so bad she was certain she was going to vomit. Then, she looked up and screamed in fear. 

The monster that was once Roger Southerby – or maybe had always been Roger Southerby – approached her. 

Roger’s lust and hunger seemed to falter. For a moment, he felt almost himself again as he watched his wife go into labor. Something snapped in him. As he stared at Elsabeth, broken and crying before him on the floor, he felt the deep desire to help her, to do anything to keep her here with him. 

“Help!” He screamed to anyone who would listen. “Mary! Anyone! Help!” But no one dared come to his aid. 

The child came quickly. Lying on the ground in the gorgeously adorned study, Elsabeth shook with fear and pain as she allowed Roger to deliver her child. But he did it. The child came out of his mother and into the world of his father, resting in Roger Southerby’s monstrous hands. 

“It’s a boy!” Roger told her with glee and for a moment, just a single moment, he felt that all this would be in the past. 

Then, he smelled the blood. The blood pooled beneath his wife as she strained, pushing out the afterbirth. The blood coated his child, who wailed in his arms. This little life. This little heartbeat. 

And his hunger returned with a vengeance.

Elsie saw the moment Roger disappeared for good. She saw his teeth elongate, watched with horror, as if in slow motion, as he haltingly brought their screaming infant towards his mouth and –

No.

Elsie Jones screamed a scream unlike one that had ever been heard or ever would be heard again. Every window in the study shattered. Every piece of her broke as she considered the loss of that baby boy, the loss of everything that this monster had already taken. So in her scream, she summoned every inch of the earth, the soil, the trees, the old and the new that might come to her aid. She felt that magic that her mama swore was not magic welling up beneath her bare legs, her bare hands, pulling roots from the ground beneath this whitewashed hellhole. 

She tore the child from his arms, still screaming, allowing her son’s strength to be her own and hers to be his. Then Elsie Jones destroyed Southerby Plantation.

At some point, Elsabeth stopped screaming. At some point, the trees stopped their greedy groaning over Roger’s aching body that simply refused to die. At some point, he would remember the moment he sold his soul to possess Elsabeth. He would remember that spirit, light as a whisper, luring him beyond the Inn’s doors, out past the wrought iron gate, and promising him the answer to his unquenchable desire. At some point, Roger Southerby would curse that day and that town and that spirit and that lust. 

But now, Roger Southerby wanted nothing more than to devour the still screaming bodies of his wife and child. He felt the hunger deeper than he had ever felt anything before. And as the roots of trees reclaimed his flesh and his home, burying his cruelly still-alive body beneath their vengeful weight, Roger joined his family in a chorus of screams. 

What was left of Roger Southerby did not move from that spot on the floor of his study. His wife screamed for an eternity. The vines and trees continued to grow at a rapid rate, filling the room, covering the walls, entangling the furniture and chairs until even Roger was finally, mercifully, angrily consumed. 

Eventually, Mary and some of the other enslaved people of the now-destroyed plantation found the young witch nursing her son in the ruins of the crumbling mansion amidst a puddle of blood. Elsie would later release and provide for all who had been prisoners on this stolen land, though the process of getting there without a husband would prove daunting. Eventually, she would go back home, and would never again think of the destroyed manor or the monster who would rot beneath its broken walls. Her son would grow up in the mountains, with a gaggle of aunts doting on him and making sure he turned out nothing like his father.

But now, Elsie sat, peaceful, surrounded by the trees that had once held this hallowed ground, nursing her son as he fell asleep in her tired arms, and listening without a trace of remorse to the lonely cries of the ghost of Southerby Plantation.

Elizabeth McKinnis is a Christian writer from Sanford, North Carolina, where she lives with her husband, son, and two dogs. She is a graduate student at Denver Seminary and enjoys writing work that explores human nature, faith, motherhood and sexism. Her theology, poetry, and fiction can be found on her substack @elizabethmckinnis or on Instagram @elizabeth.mckinnis.