Coal Creek
Sara leaned forward as I parked the car, peering out
the window at the wide expanse of pines and cedars off
the beaten Georgia path. The man we were following,
a local named Tony, was already out of his truck and
bounding off into the ditch separating the road from
the woods.
“You think there’s anything to this place?” she asked,
turning to look at me before popping her door open.
I shrugged and got out of the driver’s side, still looking
at her over the top of the car. “No clue,” I said, closing my own door. “I doubt we’ll find anything real out
there, but we’ll at least get a few pictures for the book.”
We were based out of Atlanta, a couple of down-ontheir-luck alumni who turned fortune around by investigating local lore and legends. For the most part, we
talked about crime and arson. Some bank got robbed
in the 1920s, a paper mill burned to the ground in the
1940s, things like that. When we interviewed the peo-
INSIGHT
by Brad Sewell
ple who lived in the town when the paper mill burned, I
thought they might start gagging at the memory.
But this was October, and our Facebook fans wanted
shots of the creepiest things we could find. The South
always catches ghost fever in the fall, and we needed
to appease our followers until we got the next book
out. Of the two of us, Sara was the photographer, and I
handled captions, blurbs, and status updates.
Tony was already at the tree line, looking back at us
like he was ready to get on with it. It was a little after
midday, and we gathered a little information about local lore at a greasy spoon on Main Street. Tony chimed
in and said he knew where we could find something
good, so we paid his tab and followed him out to…
Well, wherever we were.
“Y’all comin’?” he asked.
“Yessir,” I called back. “On my way.” I shouldered my
October 2013
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