A Ghost Story - The Tale of Molly and Ezra Taft
The full moon was barely visible over the tip of the mausoleum. The two teenagers locked their car doors as they turned off the engine and slid the gear shift into neutral. Not willing to turn out the headlights and expose the shadows behind the rows of tilted and uneven grave head stones, twin beams of light pierced the stillness.
“Nothing is going to happen, right?” said Carrie as she looked uneasily into the dark gloom. “I mean this is just a normal cemetery, there are no such things as ghosts.”
“I’ve done this before” replied Aaron, “they are real. Let me tell you the story of Molly and Ezra Taft.”
“Back in Illinois, in the early 1800’s there was a girl named Molly, who was about 14 years old, and she wanted to be a famous singer and travel all over the world performing for Kings and Queens. She didn’t want to be normal and she didn’t do what her parents wanted, some say she was born crazy. She tried to run away to New York City many times, and when her parents caught her that very last time, they were mad enough to marry her off to an old man they knew, named Milton Taft who was traveling west and had 13 wives. They figured all those people could look after her better than they could.
Molly was forced to travel by wagon all across the country and ended up right here in Odgen, Utah. The old man and all his kids built cabins for each wife. Some wives had larger nice cabins, but Molly was angry and mean and no one liked her – so she was given a tiny place far away from everyone else. Her small hut was right over there at the beginning of that row of graves. You can still see the burnt rocks of her fireplace just outside the cemetery property line.
She would go into that canyon all alone and sing; and when the wind was just right, they could hear her voice all over the valley. Even today, if you listen real careful when the wind blows during a full moon you can almost hear her.
She would climb a high ledge right next to the waterfall and pretend the full moon was a spot light shining down just for her and she was on a vast stage that was as large as the horizon. The gurgling river was the murmurs of her audience and the thundering waterfall, the admiration of her fans.
Now old man Taft did visit her once in a while and she gave him a son, but then the old man died and Molly and the baby were left all alone. If anyone did come to visit, she would chase them off at the point of a shotgun. They say she even killed a man.
Being alone all the time and singing wild songs in the night to imaginary people, she became even more crazy and wild. As her son grew, she made him into her own private audience. She would not let Ezra play with any other children, he belonged only to her.
According to the legend, the boy Ezra never talked because his Mom never spoke a single word to him, she just sang songs to her adoring river. They never bathed because she didn’t know how to swim and their hair grew long and stood on end, full of snarls. I even heard that Molly would put live mice in their hair to eat the bugs that crawled on their scalps. Her son grew up this way and he became crazy too. They say that the two of them heard voices in the canyon and saw things that weren’t really there. Local people thought they communicated with demons and no one ever tried to be friends.
One night when Ezra was almost an adult, Molly climbed up on her ledge to sing, slipped on the slimy moss and fell to her death in the dark. It took Ezra three days to drag her broken and bent body over the boulders and between the trees, all the way home and bury it in the front yard of their hut. The story goes that by the time he got his Mom’s corpse all the way home, it was stiff and bent at strange angles, so he just dug a shallow round pit and dumped her into it. Nothing will grow in that circle on top of her grave, no flowers to mourn for her. See it over there, that bare spot on the other side of the tall skinny grave marker with the half the face missing.
