The first time I met Theresa McNett she said, “I have had spirits following me my whole life.” Looking back now, I recognize the ambiguity of the statement and realize she might have been referring to either one of us.
Photo by Trevor Hoag
Indeed, I’d discovered Theresa while looking for a ghost, then eventually went searching for one with her. I initially knocked on her door while trying to find the abandoned townsite of Defiance, the seat of Woodson County in 1874.
Back then people were looking to start a town closer to the center of the county, and so folks in the south Owl Creek area decided to get in on the action, challenging Kalida’s claim to the seat of government.
Defiance-backers even went as far as to deliver whiskey-laced beer to a political convention in Kalida, the 1873 county seat, which they managed to reduce to a drunken revel.
When they eventually won the county seat election, the parade containing 4,000 people stretched out for over a mile, and those Fourth of July festivities must have been raucous.
Perhaps that’s why the Civil War soldier on horseback who Theresa claims haunts her barn continues to come around. He’s seen too much of war and would prefer instead to remember the bottom of a bottle.
After grabbing power — very likely through a rigged election — the town of Defiance began to take shape thanks to lumber hauled in from Humboldt. Along with the hotels, tavern and more was the original Woodson County courthouse that was later moved to the northeast corner of the Yates Center town square.
Other than some dry railroad disputes, the only trial I’ve ever found records of involved a man named Kluckhuhn, who struck his wife for speaking tongues in church. He was fined $5, and the couple eventually reunited.
Theresa had shaken me from my random historical recollections by reminding me that the trees in her yard are very much still alive and present, and that if you know what to do, it’s possible to feel their heartbeats.
Being one of the “oak people,” as she put it, she instructed me to hold my hands over the tree bark without touching it.
“Focus on the sky and the earth below you,” she intoned. “Clear your mind, then clap to get the energy going.”
Standing with eyes closed, I waited, listening to the cicadas whir.
“It’s not really a heartbeat like we have. It’s more like an energy.”
The autumn wind blew across the silent earth. Insects sang before the setting sun. And in that moment I recall wanting to feel that tree’s heartbeat, to leave skepticism by the gravel roadside and have a moment of spiritual awakening in the company of this medicine-woman who’d been “touched by the water-gods.”
“You only went to the shaman if you had a special need,” she explained. If only she knew how profound a need it is…
But there at the site of Defiance, the life of that tree withheld itself from me. Recalcitrant.
