The Haint, The Holler, & The Hooch

by girl ben Elohim

There are things in the woods that don't belong to the Lord, and they don't belong to the Devil either. They just are. When the fog rolls in thick off the Ohio River, you learn to keep your porch light off. You learn to lock your deadbolt. You learn that the dark in this holler has teeth.

This is not a ghost story. Ghosts are just dead people with unfinished business. Ghosts are boring.

This is about a haint. A haint is the mountain sweating out its bad memories. It is the rot left over when a coal company strips a ridge naked and leaves the dirt to choke. It is pure hungry atmospheric violence.

My name is Earlene. I make liquor in a rusted out bathtub still down by the creek. Real liquor. Not the watered down trash they sell in the state store. My liquor burns a hole straight through your memory and sanitizes your regrets.

The haint started messing with my mash in late October. It smelled like burnt hair and ozone. It soured three barrels of prime sweet corn. It twisted my copper coils into a knot that defied regular geometry. You try to fix the pipe and the air gets freezing cold. Your breath turns to white smoke. You hear a sound like a dentist drill echoing out of the empty black woods.

This is how you lose your mind in Appalachia. You lose it one ruined batch of hooch at a time.

The Recipe

You cannot shoot a haint. Bullets just hit trees. You cannot pray away a haint. God stopped listening to this part of the country around sixteen eighty two.

But a haint is basically a craving without a body. It is an addiction made of fog. And an addiction cannot resist a perfect run of clear liquor.

This is the recipe for a spirit trap.

You need spring water. Pure and cold.

You need white corn.

You need a handful of coarse rock salt. Salt binds the ether.

You need five rusted iron nails. Pulled from the floorboards of a burned down church. Iron grounds the supernatural. Iron makes it heavy.

I built the fire hot. Wood smoke filled the holler. The copper boiler started to sing that sweet vibrating hum. The smell of boiling mash is a promise. It is the smell of forgetting.

The haint came down from the ridge. The crickets went dead silent. The temperature plummeted twenty degrees. The shadow hovered over the copper pot like a stain in the air. It wanted a drink. It wanted to consume the heat.

I threw a fistful of dried sage directly onto the white hot coals.

The smoke exploded upward. It blinded the thing. The haint tried to pull back into the tree line but the iron nails boiling inside the copper pot acted like a magnet. The vacuum of the heat grabbed the shadow by the throat. It sucked the darkness straight into the vapor chamber.

The copper pipe thrashed. The metal screamed. The haint fought the condensation process. But physics is physics. You heat it up. You cool it down. You force it through the worm.

It did not drip out as clear liquor. It oozed out of the spout as a thick glowing blue liquid.

I am Earlene's complete lack of surprise.

It filled a glass mason jar. The glass grew impossibly cold. Frost coated the outside. As soon as the blue liquid reached the threads at the top I slammed the flat zinc lid down. I screwed the metal band tight. My knuckles turned white from the grip.

The Proof

The screaming stopped. The woods went back to just being woods.

Now I have a mason jar of one hundred proof nightmare sitting on my mantelpiece. It glows like a radioactive bruise. Sometimes the glass vibrates. Sometimes I hear a tiny muffled scratching from the inside.

The boys down at the gas station keep asking to buy my special blue reserve. They think it is some new experimental batch. They have money burning holes in their pockets.

I tell them no. I tell them it will kill them.

They just laugh. People around here always want to consume their demons. They just do not realize how literal I am being when I say that.

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