Lew Wallace’s last major work was his autobiography. He spent years preparing his research and was actively writing it at the turn of the 20th century. As with his other major creative efforts, Wallace worked for years on the book. He approached the writing in chronological order but unfortunately died midway through the book. Susan Wallace and her friend Mary Hannah Krout took Lew’s assembled research and completed the autobiography. In keeping with the spirit of the season, the following are excerpts written by Lew Wallace in his autobiography. In this story, he related how a servant girl used Wallace’s creative mind to plant an early belief in ghosts which he overcame through his own curiosity and determination—a typical approach for Lew. To quote him from his Autobiography:
“A man had been convicted of murder in the Fountain Circuit Court, and hung, and when my father arrived at his new place of abode [Covington] the four posts of the platform of the scaffold were standing a little to the left of the road descending to the branch. They were pointed out to me, with a full account of the hanging and the crime. The narrator was an ignorant servant-girl who had been present at the scene. She omitted nothing likely to affect me as she had been affected by it. She led me to see the crowd in attendance. She described minutely the handling of the cord, and the tying it under the left ear by a certain cunning knot known only to officiating sheriffs. The cord, she carefully informed me, had been procured in Kentucky for the special purpose. For a long time the idea clung to me that the manufacture of such ropes was one of the chief industries of that state. She described the appearance of the murderer on the scaffold, and how the sheriff had smothered his protestation of innocence by dropping a black cap over his head, buckling it under the chin. She spoke of the awful silence of the multitude at that moment, broken at last by the crash of the trap in its dropping. She let me to imagine the convulsions and the twisting and swaying of the body, and the doctors pulsing the man, watches in hand, and solemnly announcing him dead. Then followed the rush of the crowd to secure pieces of the rope. These circumstances were all bad enough, but the master-stroke of the story-teller did the work on which she was intent. On moonlight nights, she said, particularly of moonlight nights in winter, the season of the hanging, the ghost of the murderer revisited the place of the taking-off, and perched itself on one or other of the posts of the platform, awaking the echoes of the hollow with groans. She said a number of respectable people had seen the spirit and heard the blood-curdling noises. To relieve me of doubt, had I been equal to one, she gave me the names of some of them, adding that they all believed the man innocent. So argumentative had the narrator been that it was impossible for me not to believe in ghosts. The faith continued with me so vividly that in passing graveyards alone even in daytime I took to my heels, and with such advantage that if I did not see any of the sheeted tenantry it was because I outflew the very sight of them.”
In the autobiography, Lew clearly points out the difference between him and his adored older brother, William saying: “My elder brother was in every point my opposite. Handsome, neat, polite, studious, obedient, respectful, he was a universal favorite.” William was, however, an older brother and behaved as most older brothers do. In his second encounter with spirits, Lew wrote: “My elder brother had long played on my fear of ghosts. He did not believe in them. At length I turned the tables on him. Upon my mother’s final departure, the house had been closed and left locked up and grewsomely silent, but with everything in place within. One day he [William] wanted something in the front room. Taking the youngest of the Hawkins boys with him, he pried up a back window, and the two crawled into the kitchen, leaving me outside waiting their return. Presently they came rushing back. Both were white with terror. Not standing on order, they swung themselves over the sill to the ground, where they stopped long enough for me to ask the matter. My brother answered: ‘We saw mother. She was sitting in the rocking-chair.’ ‘Did she speak to you?’ I asked. ‘No, she only looked at me. Come away.’ And they ran off, forgetting in their haste to let the sash down. Somehow I did not scare. A graveyard was too much for me, but not that ghost; so I swung myself into the window and ran through the whole house, looking everywhere. Nothing strange was to be seen. Thinking if she had, indeed, returned she might speak to me, I took seat in the rocking-chair, but without reward. Out of the stillness there was not even a word. By-and-by the boys called me to come out. They asked eagerly if I had seen her. Both of them lived to be men, always insisting upon their assertion. The curious part of the incident is that my dread of spirits and all horrors of night and darkness left me then.”
Lew Wallace was a grown man and successful author when his friend James Whitcomb Riley published his famous poem Little Orphant Annie. Perhaps as Wallace read the poor servant girl Annie’s famous line, “An’ the Gobble-uns will ‘at gits you eh if you don’t watch out!” he thought back to the servant girl in Covington who so frightened him with her stories of ghosts and goblins. Happy Halloween.
