byChrisWhite – 2025

Originally intended for a flash fiction piece I never submitted, inspired by actual historical events. April 28, 2025.

The men who governed Nashville had not sought a city cemetery when they turned their covetous eyes toward the eleven-hundred acre Poplar Hill. What they wanted was stone, the hard muscle of the earth itself, and the sweet water spring that bled from the cavern mouth. They cared little for the history stitched into the land, nor the White family who once bent their knees upon it as pioneers. Progress demanded sacrifice, and in those years, the old gods and old families alike were made to kneel to the sword of progress.

Yet the quarries proved unprofitable. The railroad intended to cut through it curved away, indifferent. And so the fields lay fallow, worked by tenant hands, while the old brick house, the White’s house, fell into ruin, repurposed as the City Pest House, where men and women rotted by the inches under the polite fiction of medical care.

Death grew fat there. It loitered in doorways and crept beneath bedclothes. Yet here, death wore a stranger face, neither the gory martyrdom of battle nor the hellfire shriek of the pulpit. It was a quieter thing. Death promised relief. Death promised hope. It beckoned not as an end but as a threshold, and it became, perversely, something like beautiful.

In the slow decay of seasons, a question arose: should the dead not be given ground worthy of them? Should they not lie beneath the open sky, among groves and waters, rather than the festering yards that birthed disease? The city fathers, practical men all, had no poetry in their bones. But in late 1839, perhaps by chance, perhaps by providence, they set in motion a thing larger than themselves.

Montgomery Cobb, engineer by trade and dreamer by nature, laid his gaze upon Poplar Hill and saw not wasteland, but hallowed ground. He had walked the gardens of Paris, seen the new vision of burial born in the mind of John Claudius Loudon, cemeteries not as charnel pits, but as sanctuaries, where the living might commune with the dead and find in their silence something close to salvation.

Cobb’s voice carried conviction, and the city fathers, whose imaginations were otherwise chained to ledgers and contracts, gave their reluctant assent. The quarries would remain abandoned; the hills would cradle the dead. Winding paths would trace the contours of the land like veins through a body. Ponds would gather the sky in their black mirrors. Trees not native to Tennessee would rise from the earth like votive offerings.

Here, the dead would not be disturbed. Here, no shovel or knife would defile their rest for the sake of medical anatomy or curiosity. Their peace would be absolute; free of sully or defile.

In time, wealth gilded grief. Families with money erected monuments that screamed their sorrow in permanence; marble and granite replaced cheap sandstone and ornamental wood. Landscapers stitched exotic trees into the fertile Tennessee soil, and Poplar Hill became a garden cemetery, a place where sorrow dressed itself in grandeur, where the living strolled among the dead as though paging through a book of lives better lived, envious of the various granite and marble embodiments.

But Cobb had not forgotten. Beneath all the new sorrow, the old sorrow slept.

It was said, softly, when the wind was high, that Cobb had made a promise to the last of the Whites. That their graves, unmarked and forsaken, would not be lost. No stones bear their names. No iron fences encircle their dust. But among the careful maps Cobb drew, there is a space, a garden without headstones, preserved when all else was reimagined. There, it is whispered, the White family dreams.

But not all dreams are gentle.

It began with rumors, the kind that tremble on the lips of the drunk and the superstitious. A soldier in tattered blue, wreathed in the ruin of war, haunting the walks and shaded knolls of Poplar Hill. Always the same: a blow to the back of the neck so sudden it snapped the breath from the lungs, then the smokey figure appearing before them, wild-haired, blood-drenched, bayonet in hand, spitting fury through blood-blackened teeth: “Go to Hell, turncoat bastard! I’ve just killed you.”

It would have been dismissed, madness, hysteria, if not for the sameness of the victims.

All hailed from the backcountry of South Carolina. All bore bloodlines that led back to a single man, “Bloody Bill” William Cunningham, a former patriot, turned loyalist of England, blackened by history for the cowardly atrocities he inflicted on American patriots and civilians dead. History buried their sins; the White’s of Poplar Hill did not.

Josh Carney, a man with a soldier’s bearing and a scholar’s soul, took it upon himself to unravel the truth. He unearthed the records, the letters, the confessions penned in guilty hands. What he found hollowed him: a tale of vengeance dressed as war, of a family, father, mother, four children; his family slaughtered in cold blood near King’s Mountain, not for strategy, but for evil doing.

But Col. Thaddeus White fashioned a new family. A type of kinship, not just from blood, but from the hard sacrament of beginning again. Out west, a new state, Tennessee, beyond the reach of old graves and grudges, where the evolving map curled westward like a beckoning finger, lay Poplar Hill—a tract of wilderness deeded for a war fought by ghosts, it’s real heroes barely remembered. It was no more than a rise in the land and a thicket of hardwoods, but there, in the loam thick with promise and the rot of destiny, he built the first shape of belonging. The land did not ask for titles or lineage, only toil. And so it was there, beneath the cathedral hush of poplars, that his second life began.

“I knew him the moment I saw him,” Carney wrote, voice heavy with grief. “Murder has a face. It marks you, not with words but with certainty. You feel it in your marrow. You know you are prey.”

One hundred ten souls, and counting, have fled Poplar Hill, driven by the same vision, the same whispered command. They do not return. Some say they carry the curse home with them. Others say they have paid their debt, and that is mercy enough.

At Poplar Hill, the grass grows thick over old wounds. The wind hums its dark lullaby through the cedar limbs and popcorn umbels of Hemlock. And if you walk the paths alone, after the last mourners have gone home, you may find yourself standing before a man who has been dead these many hundred years, but whose hatred for a backstabber burns hotter than any fire the living could conjure.

He is waiting still.

And he remembers.