Haint Country

Short Fiction / Supernatural Horror / Southern Gothic

May 10, 2025

Last night, I caught the haint watching us through the window while Pearl and Lizzie slept again, smiling, a wound like a mouth stretching across her neck, dark blood drooling onto the white lace of her gown. I spent the rest of the night hiding under the covers, paralyzed from fear. This morning, I found the haint sitting in the backseat of one of Grandpa’s old cars, gazing absently into the forest beyond our grandparents’ house, her hands in her lap, as if she were riding somewhere. Strange things had been happening since our parents had dropped us off for the summer: doors opening and closing by themselves, lights flickering on and off, cabinets slamming without being touched. Lizzie didn’t believe me and didn’t care, but Pearl wanted proof. We waited until night fell and our grandparents were sleeping to slip on our shoes and our matching shawls. We had nicked a couple of Grandpa’s hunting knives earlier, bathed in rosemary before bedtime, and sprinkled salt at every window and every doorway in the house. The haint wouldn’t be getting into the house tonight.

We were ready to see the Bone Woman.

“This is stupid,” Lizzie said without looking up from her book. She was laying on her side in her bed with a candle burning on the dresser, rereading The Bluest Eye for about the hundredth time. “Just letting y’all know.”

“We’ll see you later,” Pearl whispered, grabbing my wrist and leading me to the door before I could hit her.

“You two better be back here by midnight,” Lizzie said dryly. “Or else I’ll have to tell Grandma and Grandpa.”

Oh, you would love to do that, I thought and almost said aloud, but Pearl was tugging me out of the room, down the hallway, and out of the back door, marching like a soldier on a mission.

It was colder than it should have been during a summer in Abel, Georgia. Nights around here had gotten colder and colder ever since I saw the haint for the first time. Grandma had sent me down the road to deliver a dress back to Miss Evelyn, altered enough to fit her new body since she’d finally had her baby. It was about a 15-minute walk down a long dirt road, and though I was technically on punishment, I was the only one available since Lizzie and Pearl had gone into town with Grandpa earlier. I hadn’t gotten very far before I spotted the haint out of the corner of my eye, mirroring my every movement from the other side of the road. She was difficult to ignore—a woman in a wedding dress and veil with an open wound in her neck walking barefoot would be distracting for anyone. Grandma sometimes told us stories about haints and hoodoo, mostly to keep us from leaving the house at night. They’re restless, she said once. They want to live more than anything. They can imitate life, but they can’t live. I ran the rest of the way to Miss. Evelyn’s and the haint followed suit, but when I reached the front door and looked behind me, she had disappeared.

The haint hadn’t left me alone since then.

We walked to the Bone Woman’s shack in silence, listening to the night chatter. The sky was as black as the inside of a dog’s mouth. No moon or stars tonight. The trees lorded above us the way grownups did when we were smaller, swaying like women in a trance. Branches snapped under our feet, a bird cried out from somewhere in the distance, and the dirt path we were following seemed to stretch on and on forever.

“You know where we’re going, right?” I asked. Pearl claimed to have followed a group of older kids to the Bone Woman’s shack once, but she was also known to exaggerate.

“Of course,” she said brightly. “I remember it like the back of my hand!”

I had a feeling we were lost, but I simply nodded. We continued down the path, clinging to each other, depending on Pearl’s flashlight to light the way. It felt like hours had gone by before I heard the humming.

Pearl squeezed my arm tightly. “We’re close.”

Fear sank inside my stomach like a stone to the bottom of a river. A shriek of wind rushed through the branches to grab at my exposed legs as we approached the raggedy little shack. Some stories claimed the Bone Woman lived in the same shack where a slave killed a slave-owner and incited a revolt, and she could see the future using animal bones—and human bones too, quiet as it’s kept. Other stories claimed she was a descendant of the slave who led the revolt, and that he too had possessed supernatural abilities. Regardless, everyone in Abel knew who to blame when graves were found dug up and bones went missing at the cemetery, but nobody in their right mind would be caught down at her shack, dead or alive, morning or night—except for us.

The humming was much louder now, and I smelled something good—she must have been cooking. The wooden stairs creaked under each step, and I held onto Pearl; I was afraid they might give out beneath us. Finally, we were standing at the Bone Woman’s door, huddled together and shivering, air nipping at every area of exposed skin, and I wanted nothing more than to be safe, warm, and back in bed. Lizzie was right; this was stupid, but we needed the haint gone before something terrible happened. Haints always meant trouble in Grandma’s stories, and ours was getting bolder.

I knocked on the door.

It wasn’t long before we heard creaking and shuffling. The humming continued, accompanied by a chorus of footsteps. I flinched and screwed my eyes shut when the door opened, and grabbed Pearl’s hand instinctively, squeezing. We should have listened to Lizzie—

“What the hell are y’all doing out here in the middle of the night?”

I opened my eyes and looked up in disbelief. Besides her long, wild hair, The Bone Woman looked like every other old woman in Abel: brown, wrinkly, and tired. She wore a plain sack-like dress with an apron tied around her waist, looming over us much like the trees. Pearl and I exchanged a look. Her eyes were begging me to answer her, but I’d already knocked on the door, and she was the older one. I pinched her arm, and she pinched me back, but she clearly got the message. She sighed and straightened her back, stepping further into the orange light spilling out of the shack.

“We’re, uh, having a bit of a problem,” Pearl said nervously.

The Bone Woman raised an eyebrow, and crossed her arms, intrigued. “What kind of problem?”

Pearl lowered her voice and leaned in closer. “A haint problem. Allegedly.”

The Bone Woman straightened immediately, her eyes widening. “Come in,” she said, stepping back and gesturing for us to enter. Pearl grabbed my hand. Together, we stepped inside.

The shack was small and warm, lit by a hearth straight ahead. To the right was a small kitchen and sitting on the stove was what looked like some kind of roast, and it was likely what I had smelled outside. To the left was a small table with a single candle in the middle and little bones forming a circle around it. I shuddered and squeezed Pearl’s hand. The shack would have been almost cozy if not for those bones. There were two empty chairs at the table.

“Sit down.” The Bone Woman gestured to the table. Pearl and I exchanged another look; she flashed me a small, nervous smile. We moved the chairs side by side and sat down while the Bone Woman rummaged around in the kitchen. Eventually, she found what she was looking for: a small, plain box. She approached us with the box and set it down on the table gently.

“I’ll do a reading for y’all,” she said. “But first, I need y’all to tell me what the haint looks like and what you’ve seen.”

I cleared my throat before I spoke. “It looks like a woman in a wedding dress. Its neck is bloody, like it was cut. I’ve been seeing it all summer; it’s been watching me and my cousins sleep most nights, and I think it’s been messing with things in the house.”

The Bone Woman hummed. She opened the box and took out the contents: a handful of bones, black feathers, and stones. She closed her eyes and cradled the objects in her hands before tossing them onto the table. I looked down at the scatter, confused. Most of the objects were close together but a single bone had landed on the farthest end of the table. The Bone Woman frowned when she opened her eyes and studied the scatter.

“Three bones over here,” she murmured. “Three bones for three girls. One bone over there...for one girl.”

“What does it mean?” Pearl asked, leaning forward.

“Danger,” The Bone Woman said. “Terrible danger. You must cleanse the house. Paint the porch ceiling blue. Salt every possible entrance. The haint has already left its mark on your family and your home.”

“But what does it want?” I asked.

“It wants one of you,” she said quietly. “It’s...lonely. A haint will do anything it can to get what it wants—even create a new world.”

“Haints can get lonely?” Pearl and I spoke in unison, surprised. The haints in Grandma’s stories were always soulless, snatching children out of their beds and luring young women into the forest at night out of pure evil. According to her, they were jealous of the living and wanted to take our places. I had never heard of haints feeling anything before.

“Haints feel everything the living feel,” the Bone Woman said. “They were human once, after all. In fact, they feel what we feel even more intensely, and they can’t move on. Haints take what they want, but not what they need. They can shift realities, manipulate the physical world, make you see what they want you to see...but they can’t escape whatever they were feeling in their last moments. Your haint has been lonely for a very long time.”

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Pearl and I met up the next morning in Grandma’s closet, which was comfortable enough and the beige carpet was soft. The single lightbulb on the ceiling cast everything in a warm, orange light. We were surrounded by Grandma’s scent, her clothes, her history. It was difficult sometimes to remember she had been a woman before she was a mother, and before she was a grandmother. Her closet, however, was proof that she had once been young herself: full of little dresses of very color and feather boas and funky hats and pearls, which my mother often claimed she loved more than her own children. Lizzie had been true to her word: our grandparents had been up and waiting for us by the time we found our way back to the house. Unsurprisingly, we were forbidden to leave the house for the rest of the week, but Grandma’s punishment worked in our favor. If the Bone Woman was to be trusted, then (unfortunately) we just needed to do our chores.

Pearl held up her list, pointing at each step as she spoke. “First, we need to clean every inch of the house,” she said, and I groaned. I hated cleaning. “Then, we can paint the porch blue or—”

“The porch ceiling,” I corrected.

“What?” Pearl raised an eyebrow.

“You have to paint the porch ceiling blue. Not the whole porch.”

She frowned. “Wouldn’t it be better to just paint the whole thing blue?”

“No, it specifically needed to be the ceiling.”

“Fine,” Pearl said with a long-suffering sigh. I rolled my eyes. “We can paint the porch ceiling blue, or we can make a bottle tree since bottles traps spirits. Remember Grandma’s stories?”

Of course, I remembered Grandma’s stories, but none of her stories had ever included a haint who was lonely. I didn’t think a bottle tree was going to work, but I decided to humor her. “Where would we get the bottles?”

“I don’t know. The trash?”

“Pearl!” I said, recoiling. “That’s gross!”

“Well,” Pearl said thoughtfully. “Where else would we get them?”

“How about we clean first and salt the windows again?” I stood up and dusted off my skirt. I held my hand out to Pearl with a smile. “We can worry about playing racoons later.”

Pearl rolled her eyes but took my hand and pulled herself up. “Clean first, salt the windows, bottle tree later. Sounds like a plan.”

“How about no bottle tree?” I asked hopefully. I already wasn’t looking forward to cleaning; I definitely didn’t want to have to rummage around through the garbage for empty bottles.

“You can sweep while I do the dishes,” Pearl said with a nervous giggle.

Grandma watched us from the sofa as she patched an obscenely large hole in one of my dresses while I dusted the bookshelves. Pearl had cleaned the two bathrooms, the kitchen, and every bedroom except for our own. Lizzie had been in one of her moods again and decided to lock both of us out. Pearl had gone down the hallway to persuade her to let us back in, leaving me to salt the windows and doorways again for good measure. When I was finished with the dusting, I walked into the kitchen and reached up on the tips of my toes to grab the salt from the cupboard. I salted the window quickly, and I was halfway done with the doorway between the kitchen and the living room when Grandma finally spoke.
“What’s going on?” she asked, raising an eyebrow. “I usually have to throw a shoe at you to get you to clean.” It was true, but I didn’t want to worry her with the truth. Pearl and I were handling the haint ourselves. She was getting older after all.

“Y’all been jumping all day,” she continued. “Looking over your shoulders. Damn near hollering at every little sound.”

“We’re just doing our chores, Grandma,” I said. “We know you’ve been hurting lately and we, uh, just wanted to help you out.”

“I would believe you,” she said. “But that doesn’t explain why you’ve been shaking so much.”

I didn’t want to tell her, but lying to her clearly wasn’t going to work. I couldn’t tell her about going to see the Bone Woman (and, thankfully, Lizzie hadn’t told our grandparents where exactly we’d gone last night), but I couldn’t avoid telling her about the haint forever. “You know how you told us those stories about haints? Well...I saw one. I’ve been seeing one.”

Her eyes widened. “For how long?”

I bit my bottom lip. “Since that time I walked to Miss Evelyn’s house.”

Grandma set her jaw and nodded. She set my dress and her sewing kit to the side and stood. “I’ll finish salting and burn some sage. Gone ahead and put the broom by the front door—that’ll distract it if it tries to come in through the front. Go check on your cousins; I’ll be right behind you.”

I nodded, placed the salt on the counter for her, and hurried to get the broom out of the closet. Though I had no idea what a broom was going to do against an evil spirit, I wasn’t going to question her. I quickly grabbed the broom and placed it by the front door. Grandma stood up from the couch and made her way to the kitchen. I hastened down the long, dark hallway but it seemed to go on and on forever, like the path to the Bone Woman’s shack, and the light flickered aggressively, and each time, I swear I heard someone whispering....

Someone was whispering my name.

It felt like years had passed before I finally reached our bedroom. The door was already open, and I was afraid to look, but knew that I had to make sure Pearl and Lizzie were alright. When I entered the room, I gasped. The haint stood as clear as hurt in my mother’s eyes in the middle of the room, smiling at me gently even as it held Pearl in the air by the throat. It looked up and I followed its gaze, openmouthed. Lizzie was pinned with her back against the ceiling like Jesus nailed to the cross, smiling blandly at no one and nothing, her nightgown torn open, revealing a deep gash dripping blood on the floor like water from a faucet. I tried to scream, but the haint silenced me with a look, and the door slammed shut behind me. I had no idea how it could have gotten in; Pearl and I had followed most of the Bone Woman’s advice.

The haint titled its head. Its gown was simple but elegant. Its smile widened and its grip tightened around my cousin’s neck. It pointed at me with its free hand and mouthed, “You.”

I looked around for a possible weapon. I grabbed a book off the shelf and hurled it at the haint, but the book went straight through her. Pearl was struggling, her small, brown hands trying to break free from the haint’s hold, kicking her feet wildly. Her eyes met mine. Tears rolled down her cheeks. I cried with her, leaning my back against the wall. I slid to the floor, useless as a horse without legs. The haint brought a finger to its mouth, hushing me, and Pearl’s eyes widened. Her body went still.

When the haint snapped her neck, I didn’t even hear the crack of the bone. When Lizzie fell from the ceiling, I didn’t hear the full impact of her body slamming against the wooden floor at full force. My eyes fluttered and my body began to shut down like a car running low on gas. The haint approached me, smiling like a mother seeing her baby for the first time, and crouched down. I felt the cold of a winter morning as its hand caressed my cheek. Its lips moved but no sound came out. I didn’t want to go to sleep. I didn’t mean to go to sleep. I didn’t have a choice.

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