The Shine

Ken Burns : American Necromancy

I have no idea if any of this is true but this is what my graveyard friend told me.

At the tail end of the civil war, a man called Jedidiah Crane saw the way things were heading for the Confederacy. He decided that the only way for the south to win the war was to call upon the forbidden knowledge of the mystic arts. He acquired every slave he could that was reputed to have unexplained powers, learned what he could from them, and then killed them.

When my new friend told me this, I thought that someone with magic should be able to avoid being enslaved. Thinking about it more I'm wrong. What does it matter if you can conjure some lights or speak to the dead when an international trade supported by multiple national world powers is arrayed against you? Maybe the really powerful magic practitioners could avoid it, but someone like me would have been swept up like everyone else.

Crane and his followers learned very well how to call up the dead, but while they were busy doing that, everyone else in the south was busy losing the war. It was over before his undead revenge squads would get into the mix. Crane and his people fled to Louisiana with the intention of raise an army of the dead and returning to liberate the south. That didn't happen since the south remains unliberated.

According to the graverobber after the war, Crane and his crew got into a beef with a consortium of northern railroad men who were also a cabal of magicians. The railroad guys weren't excited about the army of the dead idea. They felt that an army of the dead killing everyone was exactly the sort of thing could cut into their profits.

There was a secret magic war, which you have to admit sounds pretty cool, in which Crane and his friends got curb stomped by the alliance of capitalist railroad wizards. There was no confederate army from beyond the grave to kick off Civil War 2. Even so, the knowledge of necromancy was passed down by some of those involved and is still rattling around some families with southern roots.

As she was telling the story, she mentioned one of the railroad guys was named, Raymond Pine. I got very excited and asked her if it was the same Raymond Pine who owns a diner outside of Macon. She said "how would I know that?" When I told her about the diner, she confirmed that it's possible for someone to live a long time with magic so it could be the same guy.

Or it could just be a guy with the same name.

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