Ghosts

When I was a child, the scariest thing in the world to me was the 1963 movie, "The Haunting," based on Shirley Jackson's novella The Haunting of Hill House. One detail of the film is that the lead psychic investigator is a professor of parapsychology at Duke University. I failed to note this fine point until watching the film as a young adult living in Raleigh, and only some time after that did I learn that Duke once had such a person in reality: Joseph Banks Rhine. I eventually saw his Rhine Research Center where it now stands on Campus Walk, at a discreet distance from the university, and having heard that Rhine parted company with Duke in the early 60s, I assumed his relationship was a brief, early countercultural misstep by this prestigious school. Only very recently did I learn that this was far from the case - that, in fact, Rhine's psychic research is deeply entwined with Duke history, down to its very roots.

Preston Few, the president of Trinity College who became first president of Duke University, "staunchly backed" faculty member William McDougall when he brought Rhine to Duke and established the parapsychology program, according to Jean Anderson in her history of Durham. This was in 1927, when Duke was but two years old and West Campus still a twinkle in a stone mason's eye. Ten years later, Duke University Press began publishing The Journal of Parapsychology. The fact is that, from 1927 until some point shortly before its move to a building near Duke on North Buchanan in 1965, Rhine's parapsychology lab was based at the West Duke building on East Campus, which I now bike within sight of as part of my twice daily commute.

Rhine was led to his search for psychic abilities by his fascination with the prospect of an afterlife. Can the dead speak? Can anyone hear them? Oddly, for a lifelong secularist, I grew up with a terrible fear of ghosts. I was scared as that kid in "The Six Sense" to get out of bed to pee in the middle of the night, whether at my 50s vintage suburban residence near Cleveland or my maternal grandparents distinctly creepier turn-of-the-last-century home on Martha's Vineyard, though by all indications, no one had ever died in either place.

Today I live in a home where I know at least one person died: former Esquire editor and Durham Herald columnist Bob Sherrill, who retired from an evening of sitting on his (our) front lawn on the night of July 4th, 2007, and was found in his (our) bedroom several days later. However, though I now sleep each night in the room where he died, I awake and pee fearlessly. I catch a glimpse of myself in the darkened bathroom mirror and think how once this would have terrified me. But now, despite this known death and possible others in a house 80 years old, despite my daughter and her friends recently scaring themselves silly with a Ouija Board in the family room, despite the strange way the neighborhood fox barks at our house most every night, despite having an empty old mansion called Hill House just down the street, despite all this, I no longer feel at risk of visitation. Perhaps it's the dim view Sherrill took of death's approach, but I think it's more that I'm older and I've seen death, particularly my mother's piecemeal departure over twenty-some years, and I am no longer capable of belief.

It's sad, I suppose, but at least I get a good night's sleep.

The Road That Goes to My House

Tonight, as I was sitting in the parlor of my home, reading Jean Anderson’s history of Durham, I heard that familiar hoarse bark I hear so often around the neighborhood, and which I have come to think of as the local fox’s bark. This time, though, it was right outside my western window, and as I looked out, I saw that it was indeed the fox barking. He saw me and moved away, coming to a stop in the middle of Cobb Street, looking back toward my home. I grabbed my camera and headed outside to take his picture, but he trotted away down the driveway of the abandoned modernist house across the street, where he appears to have a den.

So I didn’t get a picture, but I was motivated to write, for the first time in a while. I took a spill on my bike last week, after hitting one of the many potholes along South Buchanan, though now I think an accessory on my bike may have contributed to the accident: a red blinker electro-magnetically powered by the turn of my back wheel. That’s what it’s supposed to be, at least – it worked for only the first few weeks after I bought it, many years ago, and now, because of its need to hover near my wheel, it’s prone to being jostled between the spokes and bringing my bicycle to an abrupt halt, as happened last week. Or so I have reconstructed, seeing it nearly happen again this morning. I really must remove that broken bit of failed green technology from my vehicle. You’d think, given the several road-rash scabs I now sport, and the pain in my right wrist reminiscent of when I fractured it in another bike accident years ago (though not as bad, and getting better), you’d think I’d’ve removed the offending device as soon as I realized its likely culpability, but I’m a procrastinator when it comes to such practicalities.

The mechanics of bicycle commuting do intrude, even for a veteran. This morning, for the first time since I started my new commute in June, I had to bike in real rain: not a slight drizzle, nor a downpour I could simply out-wait, but a steady rainfall that left me soaked by the time I reached Brodie gym. With my wounded limbs emerging from wet clothes, I was not an advertisement for bicycle commuting.

But it gets better. It’s surely good to be so close to things. Last weekend Jenna and I walked from home to Durham’s new brewpub, Fullsteam. Sadly, they were out of their beer I really like, the Rocket Science IPA, but we stopped by Tyler’s at American Tobacco on the way back, and they had it on tap. Such are the consolations of the Urban B/Hiker lifestyle.

Pin Hook Part 2: What Is Lost

A “pinhooker” is someone who buys something cheap for purposes of repackaging and reselling at a higher price. Look the word up online and most of references you’ll find relate to thoroughbred horses, but the term was also used historically for those who bought tobacco that went unsold at auction, repackaged it, and managed to turn a small profit reselling it. There’s a lot of speculation about the origin of the word, and suggestions that it might have been derived from a place name.

Pinhookers were the rag-and-bone men of the tobacco industry, so naturally it was a profession that drew the most marginal elements of society, as Pin Hook, the place in Old West Durham, reportedly exemplified, with its population of alcoholics, gamblers, and prostitutes. So, did the place take its name from the profession, or vice versa? I’m confident it was the vice versa, actually, since the first tobacco auction in Durham took place in 1873, and I’ve seen a reference to Pin Hook, by name, in print, with a date in 1871, and that was in a newspaper article looking back nostalgically on Pin Hook. Specifically, the Hillsborough Recorder was fondly recalling a race between a man and a woman, both naked, for the prize of a quart of liquor.

“Pin Hook,” the place, probably took its name from the bend in the railroad that marks the spot. The folks who inhabited this demimonde, making some money repackaging low-grade tobacco leaf, then gave their place name to the profession, which would suggest that the horse traders of today, still known as pinhookers, owe their occupational appellation to the bend in the tracks near what is now Erwin Square.

After work yesterday, I left my bike parked at Erwin Square and hiked across the street to explore the narrow greensward between the tracks and the Durham Freeway. I found little sign of past habitation, but I have posted a few pictures below:


Here’s a piece of wood from some past structure. As with every old artifact I saw here, I could imagine it dated from Pin Hook, but more likely it’s left from the later mill village that sprang up across from Erwin Mill in the early 20th century.


A length of iron pipe emerges from the ground, just outside the Durham Freeway fence.


Mysterious iron.


This was the most evocative find: an old, brick-lined well, since Pin Hook famously had a well, frequented by travelers on the old Raleigh-Hillsborough Road.


Unlike most narrow stands of woods in the midst of development, this one was dominated by mature hardwoods, not scrawny pines. There was plenty of poison ivy, however, and I had to bathe in Tecnu when I got home.


Looking across to Erwin Square, where I work. 150 years ago, this view would have been the heart of Pin Hook.


On a final note, last weekend Jen and I walked from home to The Pin Hook, the latterday downtown Durham bar, to see John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats and opening act Midtown Dickens. In between was a band we’d never heard of, Mount Moriah, which is fronted by the woman who runs the bar (and also co-owns the record label whose benefit the event was). Now, I’m enough of a (nascent) Durham history geek to be bothered by the fact that The Pin Hook is located not in Old West Durham, where it should be, but downtown, and that it has a pointless “The” in its name. That said, I don’t want to romanticize what was no doubt a very unromantic past, and I’m sure I had a much finer time listening to John Darnielle pour out his heart with the articulate passion of a poet, and all the added power of his fine singing voice and acoustic guitar, then I would have had drinking grog with antebellum Old Southerners in some ramshackle roadhouse.

Still, I wish I could see that old place, and I keep trying to imagine it better than information allows.

Pin Hook Part 1: What Remains

As I’ve made clear by now, I live in Morehead Hill, in the house that was the long-time home of the “Urban Hiker” himself, Herald Sun columnist and former Esquire editor Bob Sherrill. More about that later. I’ve said less about where I work, and where I work is – or was – Pin Hook. At least, the parking lot of my building, Erwin Square, was part of it, while most was across the tracks in what is now a narrow woods between the railroad tracks and the Durham Freeway.

Pin Hook is part of Durham’s salacious reputation, perhaps the most important part for Durham history geeks (a surprisingly large group). It is like the pepper used in some Thai cooking, the one you’re not supposed to eat, but that adds so much to the spicy flavor. Before the railroad track, it was there, on maps, under that name: Pin Hook. A stop along the Raleigh-Hillsborough road where you could tie up your horse, get a slice of watermelon, some gin, and a hooker. I mean to go exploring this site soon, in those woods across the tracks from my office, but today I went to look for what remains, also across the tracks, but further west: Cedar Hill Cemetery, aka Erwin Mills Cemetery. You see, Erwin Mills, the cotton factory, was what came along to replace Pin Hook, and Cedar Hill was the cemetery the mill owners established for their workers, in the best spirit of corporate paternalism. (Those owners, by the way, were Benjamin Duke and William Erwin.)

So, today I went exploring down a largely forgotten stretch of Pettigrew St., which re-emerges in West Durham as a gravel path through the woods along the railroad track, and I found this old cemetery. Below are some pictures I took:

Back in 2000, a group of descendents and Old West Durhamites came and fixed up a part of this cemetery. You’ll find a cleared section that still reflects their work, but there’s much more to be found still hidden in the woods.

The Conways had several infant graves here.

Early death was apparently commonplace in Erwin Mills.

There were two graves like this, with rough white marble and brass plates. I want to come back and do some rubbings.

Other graves were more readable, such as this one for Ida Regan.

A number of the stones had fallen.

Pettigrew St. as old dirt road, with the tracks and lumberyard beyond. This is the view to the north of the cemetery.

I wish this sign was obeyed by all visitors. In any case, it’s a nicer message than the one in the well-tended New Bethel Memorial Gardens just across a fence to the east: “No Trespassing.”

P.S. Fellow geocachers, though I shouldn't need to say it: Dibs.