To Search the GAWARE Archives: http://lists.rootsweb.com/index/usa/GA/ware.html ========================================== Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 16:52:41 EST From: <Wayxga@aol.com> Subject: [GAWARE] An Old Tale Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Growing up in the Village of Manor in Ware County, I was told this tale as a young boy. A man who lived on a farm out in the country on what is known as the Corbitt Road had done business in Waycross and had hitched a ride from there back to this road. It was nighttime and dark, and he began walking on this white sand road through the woods to his home. He had not gone far when he heard something scream, and it sounded like a woman. Suddenly, he was aware that some kind of large animal was behind him. He began to run and the animal followed. He knew he could not out run it, and he decided that he would take off articles of clothing and throw them down on the road as he ran. He hoped the animal would stop to sniff them, giving him a short distance between him and whatever it was. One by one he removed his clothes, and each time he would run further toward his home. This idea worked for he reached his front porch and beat on the locked front door, yelling for his wife to let him in. She was horrified to see him standing there completely nude. The next morning he retraced his steps and discovered each item of clothing along the road had been ripped to shreds. And around each of the torn clothes were huge catlike paw prints. This road is between Manor and Glenmore off Route 84. I always think of this story when I pass Corbitt Road. I don't remember who told me, possibly my Grandmother Sarah Ella White Boyd, but I do recall how scary I felt as a young lad when I first heard it. This is part of my heritage. Have any of you Listers ever heard this story or one similar to it before? Christopher ============================================== Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2000 10:12:56 EST From: <Wayxga@aol.com> Subject: [GAWARE] Another Old Tale This is another tale I heard as a young boy growing up in the village of Manor in Ware County, Georgia. There was a young man and woman who lived with their small son in a cabin on the edge of the swamp. One evening after supper the boy began to cry. Nothing the mother or father tried would cause the boy to stop. He cried incessantly in the cabin as the darkness and the quiet fell upon the family there alone in the woods. Finally, out of desperation, the mother threatened to take him outside and leave him on the front porch if he didn't stop his caterwauling. This only made him cry even more convulsively. Keeping her threat to their son, she opened the door and took the crying child by the hand and led him out to the porch. She told him to sit there in a chair until he stopped the racket. She went back inside the cabin, closing the door on the crying boy. She and her husband listened as he continued the noise out in the dark on the porch. Finally, his constant crying began to taper off and then there was complete silence. The mother went to the door and opened it; the chair where she had left her son was empty. He was not on the porch. She called to her husband, and they searched the front yard and the side yards and the back yard, all the time calling for their son. The next morning they looked everywhere around their cabin and their property, but their son was nowhere to be found. Did the boy's crying attract a wild animal in the swamp which took him away, or did some human being happen to pass by the lonely cabin that evening and come upon a crying boy sitting in a chair on the front porch, in the dark? What ever happened to him his parents never discovered. I was told this was a true story and that it happened on the edge of the Okefenokee Swamp. What is missing is of course the name of the family and the exact location of their cabin. Have any of you ever heard this story or a variation of it? Christopher ______________________________