The Haunted South: Hayrides, Ghost Stories, and the Best Fun of the Fall

Nobody does the spooky season quite like the South, and here is the little secret of how we manage it. We do it for the fun of it.

October comes on cool and blue down here, the nights drawing in earlier, a soft shiver in the evening air, and the whole South leans happily into the one season of the year that is openly, cheerfully, just a little bit spooky. I want to tell you about it, because it turns out to be some of the most purely good fun we have all year, and it is the kind of fun you can bring the whole family along to.

At the heart of it is the oldest Southern entertainment there is, the ghost story. Not the kind that keeps you up at night worrying, but the kind told on a porch with a flashlight held under somebody’s chin, the kind that makes the little ones squeal and grab an arm and then beg, the second it is over, to hear it one more time. Down here a good scary story is something we hand down, grandparent to parent to child, the same way we hand down a biscuit recipe or the location of a favorite fishing hole. Every family has its teller, the aunt or the granddad who knows how to stretch a tale out until the porch goes dead quiet and somebody finally jumps and the whole crowd laughs. And every county has its own harmless legend, the old house everyone points at on the drive by, the light somebody’s cousin swears they saw in an upstairs window, the story that has grown a little taller and a little better with every retelling. Most of it is make-believe, and everybody knows it, and that is exactly the thing that makes it fun.

Some of our finest Southern ghosts are downright good company. Down on the Carolina coast at Pawleys Island, folks have told for generations about the Gray Man, a gentle spirit said to walk the beach and warn the islanders whenever a bad storm is bearing down. The story goes that those who meet him and heed him are spared the worst of it. A ghost whose whole purpose is to look out for his neighbors, which may be about the most Southern thing a ghost could possibly do. That is the kind of haunting we like best around here. The friendly kind. The one that is really just a story about people watching out for one another.

If you want to make a whole evening of it, the South has turned its spooky side into some of the best family outings going. The old coastal cities of Charleston and Savannah practically invented the lantern-lit ghost walk, and on a cool October night there is hardly a finer thing to do than trail along behind a storyteller in a long coat through the moss-hung streets, the children wide-eyed, the grown-ups pleasantly spooked, and ice cream waiting at the end to settle everybody’s nerves. These are tall tales told for the sheer joy of the telling, and those beautiful old cities wear them with a wink.

But you do not have to drive all the way to the coast to find it, because this is the season the whole South throws its gates wide open. The pumpkin patches and the corn mazes are running now, the hay wagons rumbling out to the back fields in the cool of the evening with everybody piled on top. Nearly every church in the region has fired up its fall festival and its trunk-or-treat, the parking lot strung with lights and lined with decorated car trunks, the little ones in their costumes going trunk to trunk for candy while the grown-ups stand around and visit. The haunted barn down the road is doing a brisk business in good clean screams. And the front porches have bloomed overnight into a cheerful gallery of jack-o-lanterns and cornstalks and comical cardboard ghosts, the whole neighborhood dressed up for the one night of the year that is really all about going door to door and actually knowing the people who answer.

And oh, the costumes. There is nothing in this world quite like a Southern porch light coming on at dusk on Halloween, and the first little cowboy or princess or pint-sized superhero coming up the walk, holding a parent’s hand, practicing the magic words under their breath. The candy bowls come out. The teenagers get one last year of it before they decide they are too cool. The dogs get dressed up whether they care for it or not. For one happy evening the whole street belongs to the children, and every grown-up on it is glad to play along.

Here is what I love most about the haunted season down here. For all the fun of the fright, it turns out to be one of the most togethering things we do all year. It gets the children out from behind their screens and up onto a hay wagon. It gets neighbors out onto porches handing candy to kids they might not lay eyes on any other night. It gets three generations of a family crowded onto one porch swing while somebody tells the old story one more time, and the youngest ones listen close enough to learn it, so they can be the ones telling it someday. The scare was never really the point. The gathering is. A good ghost story, when you get right down to it, is just one more clever way the South has found to pull its people in close.

So make the most of it this October. Take the children to the patch and lose them happily in the corn maze. Ride the wagon out under the first cold stars. Carve a pumpkin for the porch and leave the light in it burning. Go let a storyteller down in Savannah raise the hair on the back of your neck, just a little, and laugh about it over ice cream afterward. Tell the old family ghost story one more time and watch the little faces go wide and delighted. None of it is really about being afraid. It is about the delicious, harmless, happy shiver of being a little bit spooked together, with the people you love, on a cool Southern night. That is the Haunted South, the one I know. And it is about the most fun we have all year.

The South, shared.