In the early 1990’s, when I was learning to acquire, load, and analyze government databases for The News & Observer, I needed a big Billy Goat Gruff on my side.
It didn’t take state computer nerds long to figure out how little I knew and when they did they abused me, pretending it was harder — in other words, more expensive — than it really was to copy government records my newspaper was entitled by state law to have.
Dan Woods, my Billy Goat Gruff
I needed Dan Woods, a one-of-a-kind newspaperman I had met in Indianapolis at a newspaper conference.
Woods had earned a B.A. in Computer Science from the University of Michigan and a M.S. in Journalism from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. He had written Nine Track Express, a software program used by newspapers all over the country, including The N&O, to unpack databases with packed fields.
I recommended him and The N&O decided to try to hire him away from The Record of Hackensack. He was covering banking stories, a waste, in my opinion, of a person with his expertise. Frank Daniels III, the executive editor of The N&O, went to New York and took him to dinner and, soon after, Woods came to Raleigh to visit the paper. It looked like everything was falling into place and I would have my Billy Goat Gruff. I could hardly wait.
While he was in Raleigh Woods and I took a walk around downtown to get to know one another better and to make sure this was going to work.
I asked Woods if he knew FoxPro, a database management system.
He said, “No.”
“That’s a problem,” I said. And we walk another half a block in silence.
In those days most newspapers used Paradox or FoxPro. FoxPro was more robust — it could handle bigger databases and it was faster but it was also more difficult to learn. I was committed to FoxPro and so was The N&O, committed to big and fast.
And then Woods said, “I know the language FoxPro was written in. I can learn FoxPro in a weekend.”
We hired Dan, and he made short work of those state trolls that hadn’t let me pass. How I enjoyed seeing the look on their faces when they realized that The N&O had hired someone who knew more than they did.
Postscript: Dan returned to New York in 1995. He now runs his own company, Evolved Media. He and his team have written more than 25 books about business and technology. We remain close friends. For more than 20 years he has come to see us in October, when the N.C. State Fair comes to town. He and his wife, Daniele Gerard, have already made plane reservations for this year.
It was dusk dark when the two young boys, playing on the back porch of a dilapidated farmhouse in eastern North Carolina, saw the tall woman with what looked like a long veil – and a pistol in her hand. She walked out of the old house, across the porch, and into a laundry room.
Wayne Lewis
“It scared the bejesus out of me,” said Wayne Lewis, whose family lived in the house. “I had no idea who this was. There were always rumors of the house being haunted. It was nothing for our neighbors to say, ‘Who was that walking around upstairs last night with a lantern? ‘”
“And we’d say, ‘Nobody.’”
The Cobb-Dail house was located between Farmville and Greenville, right outside Bell Arthur. Decades earlier, during World War I, it had been a mansion, surrounded by a beautiful farm with a windmill and silos. By 1957, however, when the woman with the pistol suddenly appeared, the two-story house was on its last leg – the gas lights and the plumbing has been ripped out and the Lewis family, who were tenant farmers, had to use a privy and got their water from a well, and without saying, is the same for your home !
“One night a friend of mine came over, Lester Earl Tyson, and his mom and dad and my mom and dad were the only ones in the house,” Lewis told me. “They were in the living room talking, like folks did in those days. And me and Lester Earl were out playing on the back porch and in the yard.”
Lewis said he was about 10-years old. Lester Earl, who was slightly younger, lived down the road.
“Dad had a ladder leaning up against the house, I went up the ladder but I could see Lester Earl,” Lewis said. Both of them saw the woman with the pistol. “We saw this figure come out of the house. You could tell it was a woman. You could tell that she had a gun in her hand, and she just walked across the porch.”
What looked to Lewis like a veil hung to the floor.
“She must have walked three feet from Lester Earl. She was probably eight or nine feet from me. There was a body…dressed in like, a gown, and she walked across the porch, turned, and went into the laundry room. We called it the butler’s pantry but it was really a laundry room.”
Lewis told his parents what they had seen and he was told that a woman had killed herself in that house. Over the next 40, 45 years Lewis told and retold that story at least 100 times, he said. And then he began to doubt himself.
“I began to think, ‘Did I really see this?,’” he said, or did he imagine it?
And then, in early 2004, he got a call from his brother, Joe.
Miss Alice
“He said, ‘Wayne, I got somebody I need you to meet.’ I said, ‘Who is it, Joe?’ He said, ‘Well, she’s coming to the family reunion, she’s the sister of the girl who killed herself in the Cobb-Dale house.’”
Wayne Lewis said he told his brother, “Don’t tell her anything, don’t tell her any part of the story.”
Three weeks later Lewis met his brother’s guest, 94-year-old Alice Mozingo Coker, at his family reunion at a church outside Bell Arthur. They talked at the church and, later, at Bonnie’s Cafe in Farmville.
Lewis said the woman, he called her “Miss Alice,” told him that during World War I her sister, Claira, who was 18, had a boyfriend named Mitchell White who had joined the service. She loved him and and they wrote back and forth. She was so afraid he would be killed, but it was Claira who caught typhoid fever and never really got over it.
Claira Mozingo
One afternoon, as Miss Alice was walking home from school, she said she heard the bell at the farm house ringing an alarm, and she began to run. She said she found her sister laying in the yard. Claira had shot herself. Miss Alice thought the typhoid fever had something to do her sister’s suicide, that and the fact that Claira never got over the fear that Mitchell would be killed. And she couldn’t live without him.
Her last letter to her love, 14 pages, was never mailed, Miss Alice said.
Lewis told me, “I asked Miss Alice, I said, ‘Here’s an important question for you: Where did she shoot herself in that house?’ If she had said she shot herself on the second floor, in the back room, then I would have said, ‘Ummm, maybe I, maybe I have created this thing.’ But she said Claira came out of the house with a pistol, went into the laundry room, shot herself in the laundry room, staggered out, and fell in the yard.”
Lewis said that reaffirmed what he and Lester Earl saw on the back porch in 1957.
“I told Miss Alice, I said, ‘She had a veil on that hung to the ground.’” He said Miss Alice told him, “’Oh, no, that was her hair. When she had her hair down her hair would almost hit the floor.’” The photo Miss Alice gave Lewis shows Claira with her hair pinned on top of her head, he said.
“There’s no doubt that I saw Claira that night, walking across the porch, carrying a gun,” Lewis said. “No doubt.”
Now here’s my question: Why would a perfectly sane looking man, who worked 42 years for the phone company, go around telling a ghost story?
His answer:
“Number one is, it happened, it is real,” Lewis said.
But more than that, he said, he tells the ghost story for people who don’t believe in God, who don’t believe in heaven, or hell, or life after death.
“There is something after this life,” he said. “There is another dimension somewhere.”
Postscript: Mitchell White survived the war, and married.
