A Promise Kept

From: Tiffany (None)
Story type: Ghost
Location: East TN, in what is now Pittman Center
Source: Form Submission

When I was in sixth grade (I'm now 18) my class went on an overnight field trip to a nature preserve in Pittman Center, which is right next to Gatlinburg, T-Shirt Capital of the World. That night we had a campfire and roasted weenies and marshmallows. Of course, you can't have a campfire without ghost stories, so one of the counselors told us one.

Around the turn of the last century, he told us, the area had been even less populated than it is now. It was, at best, a village. In the village there lived a doctor and his wife. The doctor was well-liked, but people weren't so sure about Mattie, his wife. She was polite, but not overly friendly. The one person she was close to was her brother Caleb. Caleb was downright weird. He was the next best thing to a hermit. He lived in a little cabin up on the mountain, and no one, not even Mattie, ever went up there--he always came to see her. Caleb and Mattie were foreign, but no one knew exactly where they were from. The brother and sister were so close that they had made a promise: whichever of them died first, the other one would be with them to say goodbye.