Member-only story
Black Folklore: Haints and Hoodoo
Ghosts, religion, and the color Haint blue.
One dark and eerie evening in St. Louis, Missouri, a young Black woman was driving home after working a long double shift.
Let’s call her Ari for story purposes.
While stuck at a red light, Ari saw in the corner of her eye a very tall, slender figure dressed in a black 1800s-style suit and a top hat standing a stone-throw away from her car. His face had no recognizable features except for a long beard that dropped below his chest. When she turned around to look at the shadowy man directly, he had vanished.
Ari spent the rest of her drive home in bewilderment at what she had seen, or not seen. Convincing herself that she was just exhausted and her mind was playing tricks on her, Ari finally reached her neighborhood and pulled into her driveway. Before she entered the house, she decided to take one last peak down her street.
There he was again.
The mysterious, faceless figure stood like a silhouette watching her from a distance. Now, Ari got slightly alarmed. She quickly shut the door behind her, locked it, and sprinted to the bathroom to let out her sudden urge to puke. But when she came back out, the faceless man was standing at the end of the hallway.
Terrified out of her mind, Ari let out a frightened scream for help before slamming herself inside the bathroom again.
After that horrific night, she was never the same. Ari lived the rest of her life in a constant state of paranoia and engaged in every superstition known to man. She switched her porch light on and off seven times, sprinkled salt at her doorways, hung a haint blue-stained glass wind chime on the porch, and prayed several times a day.
But her haunting experience wasn’t over.
In Ari’s dreams, the faceless man would frequently appear in a never-ending cycle of pulling her into the darkness of his cloak and wrapping her up until she jolted awake from feeling suffocated.
One morning, she came across a news report on TV of a fatal accident on the same highway where she first saw the faceless man. This reinforced her suspicions. She knew she wasn’t crazy, but who would believe her?
