The Hessian Cellar of Epsom: A Haunting, a Hoax, and a Hidden Cache
On All Hallows' Eve, Dr. Wilkins tells how he and Barnaby walked into a haunted cellar hole in Epsom and found two rival distillers faking a ghost with foxfire, match phosphorus and a cow horn. Under the hearthstone they also found a Hessian deserter's jawbone and a pouch of German coins. Blue Ridge herbalist Clara Higgins brings new mountain stories about ghost tales that guarded stills: a bogeyman in the burying ground, a goat carrying a lantern, and a surveyor who slept in a haunted hollow. In the mailbag, Wilkins answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg, explains potash and why coopers use white oak, debunks the blue flame myth, and strikes a Hessian coin on his anvil.
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Full episode transcript
♦ Audible wax cylinder surface crackle, slow drip of clear distillate into a glass jar
♦ Barnaby the black bear grunting and chain clinking outside log cabin window
Wilkins: Barnaby! Barnaby, you four-hundred-pound sack of wet hair and bad decisions, settle down! It is only the wind in the chimney. ... He hears ghosts tonight. Every All Hallows' Eve that bear goes skittish as a deacon in a dance hall, and he has reason, as you shall hear.
♦ Bear huffs, chain drags across frozen dirt, then quiet
Wilkins: There. He has lain down on the woodpile and is passing wind loud enough to fill a church organ.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth, rising then settling under
Wilkins: Good evening, neighbors, and welcome to Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, coming to you from the log fortress of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, New Hampshire. I am your host, your tooth-puller, your blacksmith and the most twice-arrested respectable man in Merrimack County. Tonight is All Hallows' Eve, the night the dead get restless and the living get thirsty, so I am telling a ghost story. The Hessian Cellar of Epsom: a haunting, a hoax and a hidden cache. There will be lights rising from the ground, voices in the stones, a dead man's jawbone, and the worst thing Barnaby ever did to a man's britches. Children should be sent to bed. Deacons should be sent to bed twice.
♪ Theme fades out
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♦ Wax cylinder crackle, a log settles in the stove
Wilkins: Segment the first. Before I get to the ghost, you need to know whose ghost it was supposed to be. Cast your mind back to October of 1777. General Burgoyne, a British gentleman who wrote plays and lost wars with the same flair, surrenders his whole army at Saratoga. Thousands of the men under him were not Englishmen at all. They were German soldiers hired out by their princes the way you would hire out a team of oxen. We call them all Hessians, though plenty were Brunswickers. They were marched off as prisoners in what they called the Convention Army, and a good number of those fellows took one look at New England, with its free land and its widows, slipped the line, and never went home.
Wilkins: Picture it. A man comes three thousand miles across a heaving ocean, puking his rations into the Atlantic, to fight for a king he never met. He gets captured, then walks off into the New Hampshire woods and marries a girl named Thankful who can split more wood than he can. A Hessian came all that way for a king he never met and stayed for a New Hampshire woman he never should have met, and I call that the poorer bargain. Mind you, her family said the same about him.
Wilkins: Now, Epsom. Epsom sits right next door to us, chartered back in 1727, older than Pittsfield and touchy about it. It is the town of Major Andrew McClary, who stood up at Bunker Hill in 1775 and got killed by a cannonball at the end of the fight, one of the highest-ranking officers we lost that day. A town that gave a hero's blood against the King's men does not take kindly to a King's hired German settling up on the hill. So the story goes that a Hessian deserter built a little farm on a rocky Epsom ridge, kept to himself, spoke English like a man chewing gravel, and one winter simply was not there anymore. The house fell in. The cellar stayed.
Wilkins: You have all seen a cellar hole, neighbors. Walk any wood lot in the Suncook Valley and you will find one: a square pit lined with fieldstone, a lilac bush gone wild beside it, an apple tree nobody prunes, and a stone wall that starts nowhere and runs off into the hemlocks. Our hill farms are emptying out. The young men go west for land that is not half granite, or down to the mills in Manchester and Lowell for wages, and the old place just sinks into the ground like a bad tooth into a gum. Those walls went up during the sheep craze that started around 1810, when every fool in New England bought merino sheep and cleared every hillside down to bare dirt. Each stone was pulled out of the ground by a man, a boy and an ox, and generally the ox did the cussing. Now the sheep are gone, the men are gone, and the walls stand guard over nothing at all.
Wilkins: So an old cellar is a lonesome place, a sad place, and when you get down to it, a useful place. It is dug into the ground, it stays cool, nobody owns it but the bank and the crows, and nobody goes near it if they think somebody died there. You can see where my mind was heading.
♦ Barnaby grunts outside the window, chain clinks
Wilkins: Yes, Barnaby, I am getting to you. Hush.
♪ Short eerie fiddle sting, a single drawn-out low note
Wilkins: Segment the second, legends and outlaws. Here is what happened. In the fall of last year, old Deacon Jethro Haines of Epsom comes into Fort Wilkins with a molar so rotten I could smell it from the anvil. While I have the forceps on it he starts talking, as men do once they are past caring, all spit and blood. He says, 'Doctor, there is lights rising out of the old Hessian cellar on Nutting Hill. Green lights. And voices, Doctor, speaking Dutch, and a horn blowing at midnight like Gabriel with a head cold.' Then I pulled. The tooth came out with a sound like a boot leaving a mud hole, and the Deacon fainted dead away in the chair.
Wilkins: And while he lay there snoring blood bubbles, I got to thinking. Green lights, voices and a horn at night, in a cellar half a day from any sheriff, with no one living near enough to complain. That sounded to me less like a ghost and more like a business with a fine reputation.
Wilkins: So the next night, with a moon like a fresh-struck half dime, I loaded a dark lantern, a hickory club and a ham bone, unchained Barnaby, and we walked to Epsom. Now, Barnaby on a lead is like walking a hay wagon that has opinions. He stopped at every stump to scratch himself, he ate a dead woodchuck whole, fur and all, and twenty minutes later he brought most of it back up on my boots. He is a romantic companion.
Wilkins: About a furlong from the cellar hole, Barnaby stops dead. The hair along his back stands straight up like a scrubbing brush, and he sniffs. Then he starts drooling, great ropes of it. Barnaby smelled the ghost before he saw it, which puts him one up on every preacher in Merrimack County. What he smelled was sour mash, warm and yeasty. That cellar was breathing like a brewery.
Wilkins: Then come the lights. Up out of that black square in the earth rose a greenish glow, soft and wavering, the color of a drowned man's cheek. And from below I heard a voice moaning out, 'Ach, mein Gott, mein Kopf,' which I happen to know from a German peddler means 'Oh my God, my head,' and is what every man in Pittsfield says on a Sunday morning. Then came the horn. BWAAAAMP. It was a cow horn, blown by a man who had never played anything but cards.
Wilkins: Barnaby could not abide the horn. He tore the lead clean out of my hand and went over that stone wall like it was a doorsill, straight down into the cellar hole. I heard a sound I will carry to my grave: one man screaming in two octaves at once. That was Ozias Foss of Epsom, and he showed more range than the Epsom church choir has managed since the Adams administration.
Wilkins: By the time I got my lantern open and leaned over the edge, here is what I saw. A neat little copper pot still on a stone firebox in the corner, with its smoke run through a crack in the old chimney base. Rotten birch logs stacked along the walls, glowing green with foxfire. A cow horn on the floor. And Lemuel Pike, Ozias's brother-in-law, with his face painted in the glowing paste scraped off the heads of a hundred friction matches, so he would look like a dead man rising in the dark.
Wilkins: Barnaby had Ozias by the seat of the britches. He did not bite deep, mind you; he only took hold the way a bear takes hold of a beehive, with a sort of loving curiosity. Then he backed up, shaking his head side to side, and the whole seat of those trousers came away, and the drawers under them, and a fair strip of Ozias along with them. He peeled him like the rind off a Christmas ham, and the ham had more dignity left afterward. Ozias went up the cellar wall on his fingernails with his bare white backside shining in the moonlight like a second moon, bleeding a little, praying a lot, and promising God things no Epsom man has ever delivered.
Wilkins: Then Barnaby turned to Lemuel. Lemuel froze stiff as a fence post, and the bear sniffed his face. That paste was made with something sweet to hold it together, molasses I believe, so Barnaby licked it off. He licked Lemuel's whole face from chin to hairline in long slow strokes, like a cat cleaning a saucer, while Lemuel made a high little noise like a teakettle. And neighbors, I tell you on my honor as a tooth-puller, that bear's tongue glowed green in the dark for a week. I could find him at midnight by his yawn.
Wilkins: Now, here is the dentist talking. That phosphorus is wicked stuff. Girls in the match factories across the ocean breathe its fumes all day and their jawbones rot right out of their heads. The doctors call it phossy jaw. I have read about it in the journals: the bone goes soft and stinking, it glows in a dark room, and the cure is to saw the jaw off. So I told Lemuel that if he kept painting his face with it, I would be pulling his whole head out by the roots inside of five years. He has since switched to flour and soot, which makes him look less like a ghost and more like a baker who fell down a chimney.
Wilkins: So there we were, two half-ruined Epsom men, one bear with a glowing tongue, and me. And I did the neighborly thing: I made them a business offer. I told them the ghost was a work of genius. A ghost is the only watchman who works for free, never sleeps and never testifies before a grand jury. The Merrimack sheriff has arrested me twice and never once found a ghost, a still, or his own backside with both hands and a lantern. So the haunting would continue, I said, but with improvements, and with a partner, which was me. My casks would rest in the north corner of that cellar, and in exchange I would keep my bear and my mouth out of Epsom.
Wilkins: And then we found the cache. When Ozias went up the wall, Barnaby went digging after the smell of him, and he clawed at the old hearthstone until it tipped over with a grinding crack. Underneath, wrapped in rotted oilcloth, lay a brass-mounted canteen green with age, a leather pouch of foreign silver, and a human jawbone. I am a professional man, so I held that jaw up to the lantern. The teeth were worn flat from a lifetime of hard bread, but the lower left molar had a gold plug in it. It was proper European work, hammered gold foil packed in tight, finer than any I have seen done in Concord, and I confess I am professionally jealous of a dead German.
Wilkins: Was it the Hessian himself, buried under his own hearth by a wife who had had enough of him? Or did some neighbor settle an old score from the war? I cannot tell you. We put the bones back under the stone with a jar of my best and a few words over him. Lemuel said the Lord's Prayer, Ozias said it standing up because he could no longer sit, and Barnaby said nothing, which is his finest quality. The silver I took for safekeeping. You will hear one of those coins later tonight.
♦ Wax crackle, wind in the chimney
Wilkins: And now I am glad to welcome a guest who has come all the way up from the Blue Ridge of Virginia by rail, stage and a mule I would not wish on a revenue man. She is a mountain herbalist and a scholar of every word a hill-man ever used for his liquor. Please welcome Miss Clara Higgins.
Clara: Well, thank you, Doctor. I'll say this for New Hampshire: your mountains are colder than a well-digger's backside and your bear is the friendliest-lookin' thing that ever tried to eat my bonnet.
Wilkins: He was not trying to eat it, Clara. He was courting it. That is how Barnaby courts. Now tell me, down in your hollows, does a ghost story keep a still safe the way it does up here?
Clara: Doctor, a good haint is worth ten shotguns. My great-uncle Asa ran his still in a hollow right below the family burying ground. Now, where I come from there's a creature called Raw Head and Bloody Bones. He's a hog's skull with no skin on it, and he lives in the low wet places and takes children who sass their mamas. So Uncle Asa let it out at the store that Raw Head had took up residence below the graves. Then he hung a real hog skull on a string from a dogwood limb where the wind would knock it against a tin pan.
Wilkins: The man was an artist.
Clara: So one night a county deputy comes sneakin' down that hollow. A screech owl lets go right over his head, you know how they sound, like a woman bein' murdered slow, and that hog skull goes clankety-clank against the pan. And that deputy, Doctor, didn't use the gate. He went straight through a rail fence, and I mean through it. Folks found two rails busted and a piece of his coattail hangin' off the third like a flag of surrender.
Wilkins: You and I have the same family motto, Clara: never fight a lawman when you can frighten him.
Clara: Then there was my cousin Mattie. She was a terror. She took a tin lantern, punched full of holes so it threw a speckledy light, and tied it to the horns of an old billy goat named Absalom. Every night she turned him loose up on the Hogback ridge. Folks down in the valley saw that light bobbin' and weavin' along the ridge and called it the Hogback light. Some said it was a peddler's ghost lookin' for his head. Mattie run whiskey under that light two whole years.
Wilkins: What happened to the goat?
Clara: Well, a goat will eat anything, Doctor, and one night Absalom twisted his neck around and ate the lantern wick, lit. He set his own beard afire, came down off that ridge bawlin' and smokin' like the Devil's own billy, and ran straight into a camp meetin'. Half the congregation got converted and the other half got unconverted, and Mattie had to find a new line of work.
Wilkins: Clara, your goat had more sense than the deputy, and better whiskers.
♦ Barnaby grunts, chain clinks
Wilkins: Barnaby agrees. He has always admired a goat with ambition.
Clara: Now here's one I swear is true. We had a hollow folks called the haint hollow, and a still sat back up in the laurel there. One spring the county sent a surveyor to run a property line right through it. He was a bold, bookish fellow, and he laughed and said he'd sleep in the haint hollow just to prove there's no such thing. So he spread his blanket and went to sleep. In the mornin' he woke up with both his boots plumb full of sour mash and his beard braided up tight with bluebells. He never saw who did it and he never heard a sound.
Wilkins: And who did it?
Clara: I could not possibly say, Doctor. But my grandmama was famous for her braidin'. Anyhow, that surveyor moved his line a quarter mile east and wrote in his book 'ground unsuitable'. That book's in the county courthouse yet.
Wilkins: Now you know my ghost was supposed to be a Hessian. Did you have any of those fellows down your way?
Clara: Lord, yes. They kept German prisoners in barracks at Winchester, up in the Shenandoah Valley, durin' the Revolution, and a good many never left. There was a family near Winchester, grandchildren of one of them, that kept a peach orchard and made the finest peach brandy in the Valley. They put out the story that their grandpap's ghost marched that orchard every night in his old uniform, callin' German drill. Hup, hup, and all that. Peach thieves wouldn't go near it.
Wilkins: Was it a ghost?
Clara: It was the grandmother, Doctor. Ninety-one years old in her nightgown with a lantern, practicin' the old-country cussin' she learned from her husband. My granddaddy heard her once and said he didn't know the words, but he knew from the tune that somebody's mother was involved.
Wilkins: That is the finest thing I have heard all year. Now, slang. What do your people call the liquor that hides behind a ghost?
Clara: In our family, Doctor, any jar kept back from the revenue man was called haint water. As in, 'Is there any haint water in the springhouse?' And we never said 'still' in front of strangers. The still-house was the cold house, so a child could holler 'Pap's down at the cold house!' and a stranger would think he was churnin' butter.
Wilkins: Haint water. I am stealing that, and I will pay you in Hessian silver.
Clara: You'll pay me in that blackberry jam I saw on your shelf, and you'll like it.
Wilkins: Ladies and gentlemen, Miss Clara Higgins of the Blue Ridge. She stays with us the rest of the evening, if Barnaby does not propose first.
♪ Brisk banjo vamp, patent-medicine wagon flavor
Announcer: Friends, neighbors, distillers of the Republic! Lend me your ears and spare me your excuses! Is a GHOST haunting your apparatus? You hear a hiss and smell a whiff, and the finest part of your run floats off into thin air! That is no haint, friend. That is a LEAK! You stopped your joints with flour paste the way your grandpappy did, and the paste cracked and the vapor ran free. You cinched a slippery hose clamp and it walked right off the pipe in the middle of the run! A leak near an open fire is a disaster waiting to happen! No more! Now comes the Heavy-Duty Sanitary Tri-Clamp Ferrules and Gaskets from Moonshine Stills! These are precision-milled hybrid fittings of 304 stainless and heavy-gauge pure electrolytic copper, with food-grade PTFE gaskets that will not crack, crumble or sour your spirit. The quick-release stainless wing clamp snaps shut tight with one turn of the hand! Every piece is pressure-tested for a lifetime of airtight reliability. All for just thirty-four dollars and ninety-five cents! Inspect them yourself at the showroom at Fort Wilkins on Route 28 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire, or order today at moonshinestill.com, slash products, slash tri-clamp-fittings! Once more, friends: Shop Hardware at moonshinestill.com, slash products, slash tri-clamp-fittings. Stop the leak! Lay the ghost! Seal it with Moonshine Stills!
♪ Banjo vamp ends on a bright chord
♦ Wax crackle, coals shifting in the forge
Wilkins: Segment the third, copper and the craft. Before we go further, the law: making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is illegal under United States law, and everything on this program is for historical and educational purposes only. Even the ghosts have to hear that part.
Wilkins: Now, Lemuel and Ozias were good liars and middling distillers, and I spent that winter correcting them. First lesson: a cellar is a fine place to hide and a deadly place to breathe. A fermenting mash breathes out bad air, and in a pit with no draft it settles like water in a cistern. Do what the old well-diggers do. Before a man climbs down, lower a lit candle on a string. If the flame shrinks, sputters or dies, that man stays topside until the place is aired out. Ozias called it superstition. Then I showed him the candle going out at knee height in his own corner and he went white as his backside.
Clara: My granddaddy did the same with a lantern in a root cellar. He said, 'If the light won't live down there, neither will you.'
Wilkins: Your granddaddy was a philosopher. Now, the mash. For the Epsom cellar I set them a rye-and-corn mash of the old Suncook kind. Take a good bushel of cracked corn and cook it in about twenty-five gallons of water, stirring so it does not scorch, until it is thick as porridge. Let it cool until you can hold your hand in it. Then stir in half a bushel of ground rye and a peck of malted barley; the malt turns the starch to sugar. When it is cooled near blood-warm, pitch in your yeast and cover the vat with a cloth. Keep it in a warm corner. In three or four days, give or take, it stops working and goes sour and thin. That is your wash, a weak beer of a few percent, and it is all the still has to work with.
Wilkins: Now the run. Some arithmetic for the gentlemen with thermometers. Methanol, the wood spirit, the blinding poison, boils at about a hundred and forty-eight degrees by Fahrenheit's scale. Good ethanol boils near a hundred and seventy-three, and water at two hundred and twelve. A fool hears that and thinks he can set his fire just so and pour off the poison like cream off milk. He cannot. In a boiling wash they all travel together like drunks leaving a tavern, arm in arm and falling over each other. So you go slow, you keep your fire low, and you catch the run in many small jars, numbered in order, instead of one big crock.
Wilkins: Here is the order. The first little dribble is the foreshots, sharp and nasty, and it goes in the dirt or the lamp, never in a man's mouth. Next come the heads, which smell like varnish and glue and carry their share of the harsh stuff. Those are thrown out too. Then the hearts, sweet and clean and warm on the nose; that is what you keep. Last come the tails, oily, smelling of wet dog and boiled cabbage. You set those aside to run again another day. You judge where one ends and the next begins by your nose and by the smell of each jar as it dries on your palm, and when in doubt, you throw more of the early jars away. A man who saves a cup of heads to save a dime will spend a dollar on a coffin.
Clara: Down home we say the Devil drinks first, and he drinks the front of the run.
Wilkins: Let him have it, and I hope it blinds him. Now for the alchemy. Ozias's still was copper on the bottom and tin on the top, with a pewter worm, which is like putting a fine silk hat on a hog. Copper's great gift is cleaning out the sulfur stink, and it does that work where the hot vapor touches it: in the helmet, the arm, and above all in the worm, where the vapor creeps along the metal as it cools. A kettle of copper with a cap of tin is a church with the preacher locked in the cellar. I tore off his tin cap and put copper up top, and the next run came off so clean that Lemuel wept, though that may have been the phosphorus still working on him.
Wilkins: And keep it bright. After a run, while the metal is cool, I scrub mine with a paste of vinegar and salt. The tarnish comes away in streaks and the copper blushes pink as a parson's daughter at a husking bee. Then rinse it, neighbors. Rinse it, rinse it again, and dry it, because vinegar and salt left sitting in a still will do you more harm than the tarnish ever did.
Wilkins: Last, fire. A cellar is a stone box, and a stone box full of alcohol vapor with a fire in it is not a still. It is a cannon. Keep your joints tight, and keep the flame away from any spot where vapor can gather. Ozias's chimney crack was clever for hiding smoke and deadly for fire, so I had him rebuild the firebox outside the vapor's path and give the whole hole a proper draft. Revenue men are like foxfire, neighbors: they glow brightest when they are rotting. A fire, though, does not need to be rotten to finish you.
♦ Barnaby grunts, chain clinks, a long contented sigh
Wilkins: Barnaby approves of this segment. He is lying on the warm spot over the forge flue like a duchess on a feather tick.
♪ Short fiddle bridge, playful
Wilkins: Segment the fourth, myths, slang and the mailbag. We have a voice from away, recorded on the call-in line. Let us hear it.
♦ Tape hiss, faint click, distant wax crackle
Cletus (voicemail): Alchemist, my uncle swears old-timers used to throw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Is there any truth to that, or was he just making swamp medicine?
♦ Tape click off
Wilkins: Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina! Rabbit, I do not know how you got that name and I will not ask in front of the ladies. Your uncle's question deserves an answer from a man who has stood in a potash shed, so here it is. Wood ash is mostly potash, potassium carbonate if you want the alchemist's word. Half the farms in this valley used to leach their ashes in a barrel for lye and haul it to market for soap and glass-making. A thump keg dosed with hickory ash is a soap kettle with ambitions. Potash is alkaline. It can make the charge foam and scorch and give the spirit a soapy, lye-bitten taste, and it does nothing at all about the wood spirit. That poison comes off at the front of the run and the only cure is the cut. You throw out the foreshots and heads.
Clara: My Aunt Delphie put ashes in hers once, and her husband said that jar was the first one ever cleaned his teeth and his insides at the same time.
Wilkins: Potash makes fine soap, Clara, and a man who puts it in his still will find himself drinking a bar of it and calling it bourbon. Now, the red oak. Rabbit, here is a cooper's secret. Red oak is porous. Fill a red oak stave with water and it weeps through the grain like a widow at a wake. White oak's pores are stopped up with little natural plugs that cabinetmakers call tyloses, and that is why every honest cooper builds his whiskey barrels from white oak. Red oak shavings in a thump keg will give you tannin and color. They will make the liquor look aged and taste like a chewed fence rail, but they do not clean it any more than a fresh coat of paint cleans a privy. Cletus, red oak in a thump keg is like a deputy at a barn raising. It leaks, it stains everything it touches, and it leaves you no better off than before it arrived. Give your uncle my regards, tell him his heart is right and his chemistry is wrong, and Rabbit, keep listening from Wilkesboro.
Wilkins: Now let me knock down a myth while the anvil is warm. You have all seen some fellow pour a spoonful of liquor, put a match to it, and say, 'Burns blue, so it is safe.' Neighbors, wood spirit burns blue too. It burns a pale blue so faint you can hardly see it in daylight, so that flame will smile at you while it blinds you. The blue flame is the most honest-looking liar in the whole craft, and I have met lawyers.
Clara: And the bead, Doctor. Every man on our mountain shakes his jar and squints at the bubbles like he's readin' scripture.
Wilkins: The bead will tell you roughly how strong your liquor is, Clara: big bubbles that hang about, good and strong, and little ones that vanish fast, watery. That is all it tells you. A beautiful bead can sit on top of poison and grin like a horse thief at a hanging. Strength is not purity. Only honest cuts give you that.
Wilkins: Now, I promised you a coin. In my hand I hold one of the silver pieces from under the Hessian's hearthstone. It is worn near smooth, and there is a German prince on it who looks like he never chewed his own food in his life. I am setting it on the anvil, placing my punch, and stamping it for the man who carried it here and never got to spend it.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
♦ Ringing note of the anvil fades, Barnaby grunts in surprise
Wilkins: G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. Now he has a New Hampshire name on him at last, after a hundred years of waiting. This one goes back under the stone come spring, beside him.
Clara: That's a kind thing, Doctor, for a man who brags so much about bein' mean.
Wilkins: Don't spread it about, Clara. I have a reputation, and two arrest records, to protect. Now, one more thing about that cellar, and then I will let you go. The Epsom ghost paid me rent for six years, which is more than the town of Pittsfield can say of half its living tenants. And every bit of that haunting was a hoax: foxfire, match paste, a cow horn and a fool. But last month I went up alone, with no Lemuel and no Ozias, who were both at the Epsom fair losing money on a pig race. I sat on the cellar wall with my lantern shut. Around midnight, Barnaby, who had come along, stood straight up on his hind legs and whined like a pup. Then from down in that dark hole, with not a living soul in it, a voice said in plain German, slow and tired, 'Danke.' Thank you.
♦ Long silence, a single drip into a glass jar
Wilkins: A man who believes in ghosts will believe in a tax refund, and he deserves both. But I know what I heard, and so does the bear.
♪ Soft banjo returns, gentle
Announcer: Before we go, friends, a quick word! Don't let a ghost of a leak haunt your apparatus another night! Heavy-Duty Sanitary Tri-Clamp Ferrules and Gaskets, just thirty-four ninety-five. Shop Hardware today at moonshinestill.com!
♦ Wax crackle
Wilkins: My thanks to Miss Clara Higgins of the Blue Ridge for her haints, her goats and her grandmother's cussing.
Clara: Thank you kindly, Doctor. And Barnaby, you keep your paws off my bonnet on the way out.
Wilkins: No promises. And if you want to learn this craft the right way, with the cuts, the copper, the fire and the law, and none of the ghost nonsense, enroll in the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. You will learn your foreshots from your hearts, how to keep your copper bright and your joints tight, and how to stay on the right side of the law, which I have never managed myself and so teach with special feeling. Ask about it at the showroom at Fort Wilkins on Route 28 in Pittsfield, or at moonshinestill.com. Happy All Hallows' Eve, neighbors. Lock your cellar doors, and if you hear German coming from underground, leave a jar and walk away. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♪ Parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme rises, plays out, and fades into wax cylinder crackle