Annie's Song: The Corn Crib

Following are excerpts from stories written by my Great-Grandmother, Annie Biggs Adcock as they were written to her daughter Clara.  They were compiled in a book entitled No More The Wild Country by my cousin John R. Coles.   He graciously gave me permission to use these in hopes that future generations of our family will know a little bit of our history. 

"Shortly after my husband and I moved into our new home with our two girls, my husband's father moved in with us.   He had a little red mule he called Mike.  He rode this mule everywhere he went.  Part of the time he had our oldest daughter Myrtle with him in his arms.  While we lived there Ruby and Ernest were born.  Myrtle and Clara followed their daddy and his father to feed the hogs and mules every night.   One evening, Clara laid down by her father while he was shucking corn to feed the stock.  He didn't see her and threw shucks all over her while she slept.   When he got through feeding the animals he thought Clara had already gone to the house.   I looked coming.   My husband was coming with his father, who had Myrtle, but, I didn't see Clara.  When I asked where she was, they said they thought she was at the house.   We looked everywhere.  We thought she might have fallen in the creek or that the hogs got her.   Finally, my husband looked in the corn crib.   When he opened the door, Clara woke up and raised up out of the corn shucks.   Her daddy wanted to whip her, but, I was so glad to find her I picked her up and ran to the house.  

Grandpa Adcock would get up and go back to the old house every day and work in his blacksmith shop.   He told me one time, he heard the ghost of his wife in the old house, which was up on a hill from the blacksmith shop.  He said she would walk from the table to the stove.   He would listen at eleven o'clock every day for she would come on the porch and call him for dinner.   He said he would sometimes walk up under a big apple tree which wasn't far from the house.   There he said, he couldn't hear her anymore."