The Moonlit Road, Part Three

Part Three of our adaptation of one of American's literature's most famous ghost stories - a chilling tale from Ambrose Bierce detailing a murder from three perspectives, including the victim herself.  

Part Three, STATEMENT OF THE LATE JULIA HETMAN, THROUGH THE MEDIUM BAYROLLES

For more strange Southern folktales, including stories not on the podcast, visit https://themoonlitroad.com

Follow us on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/themoonlitroad and X/Twitter https://www.x.com/themoonlitroad

"The Moonlit Road, Part Three" was told by Trudy Leonard

Audio Production: Henry Howard

Music: Michael Thomas Roe

The Moonlit Road Podcast is a production of The Moonlit Road, LLC.

Episode Transcript

(00:18):
(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) Statement of the late Julia Hetman through the
medium Bayrolls.
I had retired early and fallen almost immediately
into a peaceful sleep from which I awoke
with that indefinable sense of peril which is,
I think, a common experience in that other
earlier life.
Of its unmeaning character, too, I was entirely

(00:39):
persuaded, yet that did not banish it.
My husband, Joel Hetman, was away from home.
The servants slept in another part of the
house.
But these were familiar conditions.
They had never before distressed me.
Nevertheless, the strange terror grew so insupportable that,
conquering my reluctance to move, I sat up

(01:02):
and lit the lamp at my bedside.
Contrary to my expectations, this gave me no
relief.
The light seemed rather an added danger, for
I reflected that it would shine out under
the door, disclosing my presence to whatever evil
thing might lurk outside.
You that are still in the flesh, subject

(01:22):
to horrors of the imagination, think what a
monstrous fear that must be which seeks in
darkness security from malevolent existences of the night.
That is, to spring to close quarters with
an unseen enemy, the strategy of despair.
Extinguishing the lamp, I pulled the bedclothing about

(01:45):
my head and lay trembling and silent, unable
to shriek, forgetful to pray.
In this pitiable state, I must have lain
for what you call hours.
With us there are no hours.
There is no time.
At last it came, a soft, irregular sound
of footfalls on the stairs.

(02:07):
They were slow, hesitant, uncertain, as if something
that did not see its way.
To my disordered reason, all the more terrifying
for that as the approach of some blind
and mindless malevolence to which is no appeal.
I even thought I must have left the
hall lamp burning, and the groping of this
creature proved it a monster of the night.

(02:27):
This was foolish and inconsistent with my previous
dread of the light, but what would you
have?
Fear has no brains.
It is an idiot.
The dismal witness that it bears and the
cowardly counsel that it whispers are unrelated.
We know this well.
We who have passed into the realm of
terror, who skulk in eternal dusk among the
scenes of our former lives, invisible even to

(02:50):
ourselves and one another, yet hiding, forlorn in
lonely places, yearning for speech with our loved
ones, yet dumb and as fearful of them
as they of us.
Sometimes the disability is removed, the loss suspended
by the deathless power of love or hate.
We break the spell.

(03:11):
We are seen by those whom we would
warn, console or punish.
What form we seem to them to bear,
we know not.
We know only that we terrify even those
whom we most wish to comfort and from
whom we most crave tenderness and sympathy.
Forgive, I pray you, this inconsequent digression by

(03:32):
what was once a woman.
You who consult us in this imperfect way,
you do not understand.
You ask foolish questions about things unknown and
things forbidden.
Much that we know and could impart in
our speech is meaningless in yours.
We must communicate with you through a stammering

(03:53):
intelligence in that small fraction of our language
that you yourselves can speak.
You think that we are of another world.
No.
We have knowledge of no world but yours,
though for us it holds no sunlight, no
warmth, no music, no laughter, no song of
birds nor any companionship.

(04:16):
O God, what a thing it is to
be a ghost, cowering and shivering in an
altered world, a prey to apprehension and despair.
No, I did not die of fright.
The thing turned and went away.
I heard it go down the stairs, hurriedly,
I thought, as if itself in sudden fear.

(04:37):
Then I rose to call for help, hardly
had my shaking hand found the doorknob in
merciful heavens.
I heard it returning.
Its footfalls as it remounted the stairs were
rapid, heavy and loud.
They shook the house.
I fled to an angle of the wall
and crouched upon the floor.
I tried to pray.
I tried to call the name of my

(04:57):
dear husband.
Then I heard the door thrown open.
There was an interval of unconsciousness, and when
I revived, I felt a strangling clutch upon
my throat, felt my arms feebly beating against
something that bore me backward, felt my tongue
thrusting itself from between my teeth.
And then I passed into this life.

(05:23):
No, I have no knowledge of what it
was.
The sum of what we know at death
is the measure of what we know afterward
of all that went before.
Of this existence we know many things, but
no new light falls upon any page of
that.
In memory is written all of it that
we can read.

(05:44):
What I am about to relate happened on
a night.
We know when it is night, for then
you retire to your houses, and we can
venture from our places of concealment to move
unafraid about our old homes, to look in
at the windows, even to enter and gaze
upon your faces as you sleep.
I had lingered long near the dwelling where

(06:05):
I had been so cruelly changed to what
I am, as we do while any that
we love or hate remain.
Vainly I had sought some method of manifestation,
some way to make my continued existence and
my great love and poignant pity understood by
my husband and son.
Always, if they slept, they would wake, or

(06:27):
if in my desperation I dared to approach
them when they were awake, would turn toward
me the terrible eyes of the living, frightening
me by the glances that I sought from
the purpose that I held.
On this night I had searched for them
without success, fearing to find them.
They were nowhere in the house nor about

(06:49):
the moonlit dawn, for though the sun is
lost to us forever, the moon, full-orbed
or slender, remains to us.
Sometimes it shines by night, sometimes by day,
but always it rises and sets as in
that other life.
I left the lawn and moved in the

(07:09):
white light and silence along the road, aimless
and sorrowing.
Suddenly I heard the voice of my poor
husband in exclamations of astonishment, with that of
my son in reassurance and dissuasion, and there,
by the shadow of a group of trees,
they stood, near, so near, the eyes of

(07:30):
the elder man fixed upon mine.
He saw me, at last, at last he
saw me.
In the consciousness of that, my terror fled
as a cruel dream.
The death spell was broken.
Love had conquered law.
Mad with exultation, I shouted, I must have

(07:51):
shouted, he sees, he sees, he will understand.
Then, controlling myself, I moved forward, smiling and
consciously beautiful, to offer myself to his arms,
to comfort him with endearments, and with my
son's hand in mine, to speak words that

(08:13):
should restore the broken bonds between the living
and the dead.
Alas, alas, his face went white with fear.
His eyes were as those of a hunted
animal.
He backed away from me as I advanced,
and, at last, turned and fled into the

(08:34):
wood, whither it is not given to me
to know.
To my poor boy, left doubly desolate, I
have never been able to impart a sense
of my presence.
Soon, he too must pass to this life

(08:55):
invisible, and be lost to me forever.
© transcript Emily Beynon