Shelley Costa discusses the spooky stories her eccentric Scots-Irish mother told her as a girl, and how they inspired her latest for AHMM, “Jack McCool and the Turnip Lantern”
My mother was what these days we call a “creative.” There she was, this woman who was an Appalachian, Depression product, a fine actress who could run a house and not resent it. She was someone who took care of things, including raising me, her only child. She could sew doll clothes, perform in stage plays, read William Faulkner, and write beautiful poetry about losing classmates to war, a husband to another woman, and life to lung cancer. Maybe she was part pookah, a tip of the cap to her Scots-Irish ancestry, and there was something wild and fanciful in this responsible woman who would sing as my lullabyes “Queenie the Stripper” and “Ain’t We Crazy?”
She created in me a large capacity for the unconventional, even as she roasted turkeys, saved S&H green stamps, and provided a home for her aged father-in-law. Along the lines of her love for her Scots-Irish ancestry, I remember the shillelagh she kept inside our little coat closet. I couldn’t tell you the color on the walls of my bedroom, but that object I can recall clearly. It stood all my growing-up years against an unlit corner, obscured a bit by coats. There it was, this knobby, gnarled, friendly, mysterious stick. It wasn’t an umbrella or a snow shovel or a cane. I never knew where it came from, or, for that matter, where it got to. But I can picture Mom saying, when I inquired, something along the lines of, “Oh, that’s the shillelagh,” the same as if she was identifying the family dog.
It wasn’t long, then, before she tried me out on banshees. It seemed she was stepping things up a notch with these shrieking, keening, flying spirits. But they never scared me. I understood them, even as a child, even then imagining times when nothing less than shrieks and flights would do in life. Banshees and shillelaghs were not the stuff of any other holidays I knew—not reindeer, not crêches, not chocolate bunnies or colored eggs—they were pricks to the imagination. “Jack McCool and the Turnip Lantern” is one result. I hope you enjoy it.
Trace Evidence 