Is 'La Fantome' at the door?

By Todd C. Elliott todd.elliott@eunicetoday.com

Kids trick-or-treating is a relatively new custom in Eunice. Halloween and the concept of Oct. 31 “trick-or-treating” is one that has become more mainstream in the last 70 years, while the Roman Catholic “Feast of All Saints” dates back to the 7th Century in Europe. November the first is also celebrated in Spanish-speaking countries like Mexico which holds the tradition of “La Dia de Muerte”– which is “the day of the dead”.

Irene Reed of Eunice recalls Halloween in 1935 – when she was five years old – very different than the modern observation.

“On Halloween, you stayed very quiet because, supposedly, they told you that the angels would come out to visit the graveyards at Halloween,” said Reed, who works at the Cajun Music Hall of Fame. “Because, you see, the next day is All Saints Day. So, you made sure that everybody in the graveyard had flowers on their grave by Halloween.”

Reed said that her mother actually “made” roses out of crepe-paper and paraffin wax for all the graves. She said that the paraffin wax and the green and red paper was then fashioned in a ring for the grave sites. Sometimes the rings would last until the next October. “Back then, when momma would make her flowers she would do them for the whole neighborhood because she knew how,” said Reed. “And then she’d send us out in the yard and told us to ‘be sure to pick up the prettiest feather that would fall off of the chicken’. And then that’s what we would use as a brush to wax the flowers. The paraffin wax would seal that paper and it lasted the whole year.”

She said that during the 1930s, country cemetery grave markers consisted of either homemade wooden crosses or iron crosses from a local blacksmith. She said that there were no slabs of concrete or marble headstones in place at the time. Many of the wooden crosses would often deteriorate due to weather conditions over the years. She said that some grave diggers in the 1930s would dig to a depth of six feet only to many times find a casket already in place.

Reed said that her father – a homesteader to the Eunice area in the 19th century – started the Richard Cemetery in his own cotton field by burying his first wife and child on the grounds.

“Back in those days, there was no funeral home, nothing,” said Reed. “My grandfather’s first wife died of Yellow Fever and back then, the law says that if they died of a contagious disease, you couldn’t pass that person in the road. Because, if you met somebody on the road, they could catch it. They didn’t embalm or anything. So, he had to bury that wife in his field.”

Over the years, other family members were buried there.

As recently as last week, Reed was visiting to leave flowers on some of her family members’ graves. The grass was so overgrown in the graveyard that she said that she was prompted to call the Evangeline Parish Policy Jury to cut it.

According to her own lore, Reed can be seen as preparing for Halloween and the visitation of angels to the old graveyard.

And it is folklore, Reed said, that often leads some to imagine fantastic tales of haunted graveyards and spooky ghost stories around this time of year.

Reed has one of her own.

During WWII, Reed and her husband lived out in the country near the old Richard Cemetery. She said that there was no electricity, no running water and an outside bathroom that would surely horrify modern teenagers and adults alike. Reed said that her late husband Elward was in the Army during WWII and then in 1946, he attended “GI school”– which yielded enough money to do their crops and get him an education. It was around Halloween and Reed was home alone, waiting for her husband to return that evening for the first time in a long time since he had been away at school.

“I was alone and I started hearing someone knock on the front door,” she said. “And I remember being so scared that I held my breath.”

Reed said that she was lying in bed alone, in the vast pitch-black country-home-without-electricity, 1946 darkness.

She said that after another knock on her front door, she caught her breath again and did her best to not breathe for fear of the unknown, terrible visitor at her doorstep. Certainly, whoever or whatever was knocking on her door could hear her breathing and then she would be doomed.

The knocking came and then stopped.

Then it came again.

And again, the rapping continued until finally the sound of an automobile pulling up in front of the house.

Her husband had arrived.

She thought he would never come and that if he did, he would be too late.

“I thought he would never come in,” said Reed. “And finally he come in. And I said, ‘somebody’s been knocking’.”

“Well,” he said. “Are you sure?”

She told him that she was certain and that she was afraid.

As they slept later, Reed must have felt a great sense of relief that her husband was there to protect her from the darkness knocking upon her door and everything was right with the world.

Then they both heard the knocking. It had returned.

They whispered to each other in the dark.

“He said that he didn’t see anything or anyone when he came in his vehicle,” said Reed. “So, then he got up because he was convinced that there was something or someone at the front door.”

Reed said her husband made his way to the front door as she feared now for her life as well as his.

He would confront the darkness, the wandering hobo, “La Fantome” or even the dreaded “Loups-Garou”.

She said that her husband opened the front door and there it was. In Reed’s anticipation of her husband’s arrival, she had mopped the floors in the house earlier that day. She said that she had hung the mop out to dry on a nail on the front porch near the door before the wind had shifted that night to a north wind – which rattled the mop and the mop handle against a post on her front porch.

It was the night of the living mop. And one that Reed said that she will never forget.

“I’m sure a lot of old tales are kind of like that,” said Reed. “And people are too scared to know the end of it, or what really happened. It’s interesting what you think a lot of times and how your mind will play tricks.”