NOTE: This is the three year anniversary of The Final Edition. And to celebrate, I’ve saved one of my favorite stories for today.
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I was minding my own business when the City Editor of The News & Observer told me to go over to N.C. State University and interview a member of the faculty who claimed to be a witch.
You heard me right.
That’s one of things I liked best about newspapering — you just never knew what was going to happen next.
I was an investigative reporter, I rarely covered breaking news and almost never wrote a feature. But when a story involved someone who might be a little bit crazy I sometimes drew the short straw.
The stringer who gave us the tip, an N.C. State student, also gave us a picture of this guy with two students from Meredith College, then an all-female college a mile or two from State, who said they were witches, too.
A witch, by the way, is usually a female but can be a male.
I went to the fellow’s office and got right to the point: Are you a witch? I asked. He said he wouldn’t talk to me until I had done my homework, until I had read “The Exorcist,” a best seller in the early 1970’s. The book jacket said something like, “Read this book with all of the lights on in your house — and all the lights on in your mind.”
It was scary, even with the lights on.
I stayed up half the night, finished, and went back to see him the next day. But he wimped out, neither admitting nor denying that he was a witch.
“The jury is still out,” he said.
He wouldn’t give me the names of the two Meredith College students in the photo with him, young women who had said they were witches too, according to our stringer. So I drove over to Meredith and started showing the picture around.
“Do you know either of these students?” I asked. It wasn’t long before I had a name and a few minutes later we were face to face, in the living room of her dorm.
“Are you a witch?” I asked her.
“Shssss, not so loud. I’m a white witch,” she said, a “good” witch. She said she didn’t want black witches to find out about her.
I interviewed a number of people, including a psychologist at Central Prison, a maximum security prison in Raleigh, who told me, yes indeed, some inmates claim that the devil made them do it.
And then I wrote the story, a light feature about witches, for the Sunday paper.
It was Friday, the story had been set in type and galley proofs had been pulled so the Sunday Editor could take a final look, when my phone rang. It was the faculty member at N.C State who wasn’t sure whether or not he was a witch.
He had learned that I had talked with one of the Meredith women and he was angry. He wanted me to kill the story. He said he had told me not to try to talk to them and I had disobeyed.
I explained that I didn’t work for him. Moreover, he hadn’t give me the picture or identified either student. I had broken no confidences. If he wanted the story killed he was going to have to talk to Claude Sitton, The N&O’s executive editor, not that it would do him any good.
Would you like his telephone number? I asked.
Sitton, a widely respected newspaperman who had covered the civil rights movement in the South for The New York Times earlier in his career, called me into his office later that same day. He wanted to talk about the witch story, which surprised me.
Normally he wouldn’t concern himself with a feature. Editing stories like that was the responsibility of editors way on down the food chain. But I could see from notes he had written on the galley proof laying on his desk that he had a lot of questions. The first two or three didn’t amount to much but then he asked: “How many witches are there in North Carolina?”
Huh? Say again?
“I have no idea,” I said.
How could I know? I told him there was no Witches Association in North Carolina. And, last time I checked, the U.S. Census Bureau didn’t count witches.
I ask him, “Do you know where I can find out how many witches there are in North Carolina?” He didn’t.
But he said if I couldn’t answer that question the witch story was dead.
Claude did not seem to grasp that he had demanded the impossible. No one, no one in this world, could tell him how many witches there were in North Carolina.
“Well, OK, that’s it,” he said. “What’s next?” or words to that effect. And just that quickly the witch story I had spent several days reporting and writing was history, dead.
Now let me tell you the real story, and it didn’t get in the paper either: That N.C. State witch hexed Claude Sitton and made him kill my story. No other explanation makes sense.
Coming Friday: Broken!