Deadman's Slough

Rumors in a small town don't take long to blacken every mouth. They burn their way through lungs and hearts, boiling saliva and charring listeners' ears. If you look closely at any man who claims to not know you'll find them wearing their hat low on their head to hide their disfigured face. I am not immune to this grisly fate and I have my fair shares of scars, but not a whisper of smoke trails along my fingers as I type this story.

There's a particular rumor that has burned our town like a wildfire. I can still recall where I first heard it, such a grip it has on my conscience. Just past the second red light, right before the turn-off to the only grocery store for miles, is the highschool. A small building built back when my parent's parents were children.

Lining the walls of the hallways are posters with "Class of __" in fancy text on the top and the graduates' pictures beneath. Unlike many schools we were rivals with, our graduating classes were so small that the individual portraits were larger than coasters and their names were proudly displayed under each rather than just a footnote in unreadable text at the bottom.

Perhaps it is because of this that it was impossible to miss one in particular. In the freshman hallway on a yellowed paper reading "Class of 1958", two rows down and four from the left, is a student wearing a hat. Joseph Dehing. If it wasn't for the out of place Panama hat, he would just be another forgettable face of someone who is long since dead or geriatric.

I noticed him on my first day of school. Having shown up much too early for class on the insistence of my high-strung mother, I decided to explore the hallways of the freshman hallway, all 100 feet of it. When I saw his smirk and his "fedora" I chuckled to myself, thinking of the jokes I would tell my friends when they showed up. And when they did, dragging with them a sophomore who we knew well, that's exactly what I did. A childish "virgin" or "m'lady" joke that landed well on my immature friends.

The sophomore, though, became quiet and very serious all of a sudden. "I wouldn't joke about that guy."

Never being one to start something, one of my friends asked before me, "Why, is he a teacher or something?"

"No, man. On the night of prom his girlfriend snuck out with another dude, then he tracked her down and drowned her in the river. The dude she cheated on him with got mad and did the same to him! Now, he haunts the school and attacks people who sneak away during prom."

Our town was known for ghost encounters, so much so that a good portion of our tourism industry, the only thing keeping the town afloat, was ghost tours and memorabilia. On several occasions I had even seen vans filled with camera equipment stopped at various "haunted houses" to record episodes for the latest ghost hunting shows. I believed in none of it, so I scoffed and made another joke.

The sophomore, unable to hide that he was disappointed his joke had failed, rolled his eyes and said, "Whatever, man. Just don't come crying to me when he gets ya."

From there the conversation shifted to more pertinent topics like what classes we were going to and where they were. Any talk of Joseph or his picture faded away completely. But I never forgot.

By Junior year I had become a completely different person. Mostly due to the intense boredom and isolation that came with online learning through my sophomore year, I had come to enjoy watching scary videos and learning about the supernatural because being scared was better than feeling nothing at all. I still didn't necessarily believe in any of it, but the passion of storytellers inspired me, so whenever I had the chance to do something "spooky" I jumped on the opportunity.

Yet, it wasn't a ghost tour or a haunted hayride that brought me back in contact with this rumor, it was fishing. I was on the bass fishing team in high school and we practiced in two places; a small local lake and the Mississippi River. We were fishing the Mississippi that day and I was assigned with a boat captain I knew well, Tommy, and a Freshman I didn't.