Posted by Today’s story is less about ghosts, and more about the ancient craft of fortune-telling! Adam, from All Daisy Baby, regales us with a story about an unexplained occurrence a long time ago, in which a psychic helped his family solve a mystery!
1. What is your name?
Adam T
2. Are you in a Club? If so, which one?
Yes, All Daisy Baby
3. Who’s your favorite Solitaire TriPeaks character?
Poi
4. Okay… now tell us your story
My story isn’t so much a ghost story, as much as it is a historic account about a local fortune teller that lived in my area years ago. Her name was Mahayley Lancaster. She was born in 1875, and died in 1955, in Heard County, Georgia.
Mahayley is buried less than a quarter mile from where I grew up and spent the first 25 years of my life. She was a lawyer, had been admitted to the bar, was very intelligent and had an eccentric personality. Mahayley’s appearance was one thing that added to her “mystical charm,” as she had a glass eyeball, she wore an old skull bucket soldiers hat, wore combat boots, smoked a pipe, and would sometimes use an old jute sack with a rope tied around the waist for her outer apparel. She was a skinny old woman, was known for being very plain spoken, and was well known all over the United States during her time. My story is about my grandmother’s experience using Mahayley’s services..
My grandmother, Mamie Teal, and her husband Jerome lived in rural Heard County for many years, had a beautiful farm, raised crops and livestock, and one time some of her chickens went missing. They were puzzled at what happened, so she went to Mahayley searching for an answer. Mahayley told my grandmother, “You will go and count your chickens, you will find you have 9 chickens missing. You will look on the side of your chicken coop and find a plank leading up to the side of it, and at the base of it, you’ll see what look like a size 8-9 men’s footprints going away from the plank. Follow the prints out through a field, and you will see the prints meet up with about a size 12-13 shoe print in the middle of the field. The thieves left from there. That’s all I can say…”
My grandmother went back home and checked, and everything that Mahayley had told her was confirmed true, just like she said when they got to checking it out. My dad used to say Mahayley was accurate in her readings 48 times out of 50, based on all the stories he heard as a young man growing up. Mahayley made a lot of money telling fortunes and revealing secrets to people over the years, so much, she remarked in an interview on a radio station out of Birmingham, that she had 9 “cotton picking sacks full,” when asked how much money she had.
6. Wow! Is there anything else you can tell us?
If you’re interested in learning more about Mahayley, you can read about her on Wikipedia, and in books, as well as watch the film “Murder in Coweta County,” starring Andy Griffith and Johnny Cash, which tells the story of the murderer John Wallace who was apprehended after information given by Mahayley led to his arrest and conviction.
7. Is there anything else you’d like to add?
To me, she was just another resident of my home county I grew up in, who had a claim to fame.
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