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Cash – The autobiography of Johnny Cash

The past is palpably present in and around Cinnamon Hill, the reminders of other times and other generations everywhere, some obvious, some not. For more than a century this was a sugar plantation worked by thousands of slaves who lived in clusters of shacks all over the property. All that remains of those people now, the metal hinges from their doors and nails from their walls, lies hidden in the undergrowth on the hillsides or in the soil just below the manicured sod of the golf course that loops around my house. I doubt that the vacationers playing those beautiful links have any idea, any concept, of the kind of life that once teemed where they walk - though perhaps some do, you never know. I've been out with a metal detector and found all kinds of things.

A lot has happened here. There are ghosts, I think. Many of the mysteries reported by guests and visitors to our house, and many that we ourselves experienced, can be explained by direct physical evidence - a tree limb brushing against the roof of the room in which Waylon and Jessi kept hearing such strange noises, for instance. But there have been incidents that defy conventional wisdom.

Mysterious figures have been seen - a woman, a young boy - at various times by various people over the years. Once, a woman appeared in the dining room when six of us were present. We all saw her. She came through the door leading to the kitchen, a person in her early thirties, I'd say, wearing a full-length white dress, and proceeded across the room toward the double doors in the opposite wall, which were closed and locked. She went through them without opening them, and then, from the other side, she knocked: rat-tat-tat, rat-tat.

We've never had any trouble with these souls.

They mean us no harm, I believe, and we're certainly not scared of them; they just don't produce that kind of emotion. For example, when Patrick Carr was staying here, working with me on this book, he was awakened in the middle of the night by a knock on the door next to his bed - rat-tat-tat, rat tat - and was struck by the thought, Oh, that's just the ghost. Don't worry about it. Go back to sleep.

He didn't even mention the incident until the following evening, after we'd told him - for the first time - about the lady we'd seen in the dining room and that same knock we'd heard. At that point his wife revealed that she'd had the identical experience: same knock, same reaction. They'd both interpreted the event as such a natural occurrence that they hadn't even told each other about it.

So we're not frightened. The only really frightening story about Cinnamon Hill belongs in the realm of the living and serves to remind me that some of them-just a few of them, a tiny minority – are much more dangerous than all the dead put  together.