Jim Bradshaw
It was just about Halloween when the strange figure began wandering the streets of New Iberia on dark nights.
“Is someone trying to play a practical joke on the community, or is there a freak loose in garb that is designed to awaken suspicions?” The Daily Enterprise-Leader asked in late October 1908. “Or [do some people have] hallucinations and imaginations that are extraordinarily brilliant on nights when there is no moonlight?”
The questions were prompted by “a strange night wanderer … apparently a man dressed in black women’s garments” who appeared on the outskirts of town. Its face was “shadowed with a black hood” and the apparition avoided the sidewalk “but [kept] in the middle of the road so that passers-by may not be able to distinguish the features.”
Identification was also difficult because “no one [who] has encountered this figure … has been brave enough to go out into the middle of the street and find out who the wanderer is and what is his or her reason for the attempt at concealment.”
Those weak-hearted citizens included more than a dozen people who had “seen the strange object … or perhaps … imagined that they have seen it.” Real or imaginary, their tales “strangely” agreed.
“They say that the figure is that of a very tall and manlike person attired in women’s draperies. All of these draperies are of the deepest black and on dark nights the figure looks like a shadow. … It never says ‘Good evening’ as it passes … and it never turns around when [someone comes up behind it],” according to the news account.
The apparition was the subject of much speculation. “Timid women and children are sure that it is the ghost of a wandering spirit,” according to the newspaper. Some (apparently less fearful) folk thought it was “an escaped convict out for an airing and taking this means of avoiding observance.”
That first news account either stimulated imaginations or caused more people to look for the “spook or spooklette,” as it was described in the newspaper headline. According to the next issue of the paper the dark figure was seen in two places in one night.
Travelers on one of the back roads said they saw the strange figure walking near Darby’s Woods on the road leading to town. They said they lost sight of it when it rounded a bend in the road. When they got to the bend, just minutes later, they said, it had simply vanished.
That same night it was spotted by a “party of young men who had gone to the theater.” This time it was passing a graveyard when it just disappeared.
That vanishing act was all that was needed to place the young theater goers among the ranks of the timid. They didn’t try to follow the apparition, or to hunt for it among the tombstones.
“The opinion prevails that someone is playing a joke on the community,” the Enterprise-Leader reported.
That was probably true, but nobody ever discovered who or what the jokester was. Nor could anybody say where the shadowy figure came from, or how it just disappeared, seemingly at will, once in a dark and creepy wooded area and then, eerier still, just as it passed a graveyard.
A collection of Jim Bradshaw’s columns, Cajuns and Other Characters, is now available from Pelican Publishing. You can contact him at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.