Red Eyes (and Black Dogs and Water Spirits)

[This was originally posted in 2019 on my personal blog that’s mostly about family history projects. I’m reposting it here because it references a few things that might be of interest to some of y’all.]

Red Eyes was one of my great-grandmother Mae’s stories to scare the crap out of children with, along with Sackabilly, the Apple Lady, and the Seacanamarampus. Red Eyes lived under Mae’s house in Pensacola, Florida. So obviously, the children didn’t go under the house.

I’m pretty sure Red Eyes was a Mae-specific creation, like many of her creatures. While there are beings with similar names in folk tales all over the world, Mae’s house, which she lived in for almost 100 years and which served as the gathering site for sprawling generations of her descendants, was the center of something strong and dynamic enough to function as its own culture with its own lore for a remarkably long time. And Mae’s lore reflected the concerns and enforced the mores of that familial culture. Some of it was Pensacola-specific, like the Axe Man from Axe Alley, which really happened. Some of it fit pretty common patterns – X would get you if you misbehaved – but for the overwhelming majority of her lore, I haven’t had much luck finding it outside of the family. I really think she put her stamp on this stuff (and in some cases simply conjured it as  needed).

Reading about a mid-20th century Mississippi tale of Sackabilly in which he was associated with Rawhead and Bloody Bones [1] got me thinking that maybe Mae’s Red Eyes is more of a suburban version of Bloody Bones, a monster under the stairs/cupboard sitting on a pile of bones of children who said bad words or lied. I don’t really remember it being that specific in our family, though. In fact, most of Mae’s stories weren’t all that specific, weren’t actually really *stories.* She’d just *mention* this stuff and leave the rest to your imagination. And if she were still here for me to ask, and I asked her where she first heard the tale of Red Eyes, I guarantee you she wouldn’t give me a straight answer anyway. Mae was kind of a smart-ass, and she knew better than to take the juice out of something with a bunch of boring facts.

But here are a few tidbits to gnaw on.

Red Eyes in Lore and Literature

There are other stories of creatures or ghosts called Red Eyes or Old Red Eyes that I’ve been digging into, but as folk tale types go, they so far have pretty much nothing in common with our family’s Red Eyes, and I doubt there’s a connection aside from a name similarity.

But really, various bogeymen and ghosts and creatures with red eyes aren’t uncommon at all. After all, what color would be more effective to scare the hell out of you in the dark, more evocative of hellfire and the devil and blood? How do you know if you have a friendly ghost or a malevolent bogeyman? Well, does it have red eyes? That’s a pretty sure sign of the latter!

Old Red Eyes – Kingsley Plantation, Jacksonville, Florida

I got really excited when I saw that S.E. Schlosser had a chapter about Old Red Eyes in her Spooky Florida: Tales of Hauntings, Strange Happenings, and Other Local Lore, because Red Eyes is another one I’ve never heard of outside of my family. I finally got hold of the book, and alas, it’s not much to do with our Red Eyes, but I’ll tell you about it anyway. Schlosser’s is a Jacksonville story concerning a slave overseer who was a murderer and a rapist. In her version, the plantation master hanged him after he raped and murdered three women in one go and left their bodies lying around in a blood-filled house in the slave village, but then people started seeing his ghost around on the road at night by the oak tree where he was hanged, and the ghost had glowing red eyes. It would assault women and whisper threats at them and pull on their clothes, trying to pull them off the road.

It’s told from the point of view of a young enslaved woman on a plantation who’s studying with her auntie to become the village’s next conjure woman. She uses conjure to basically seal the ghost off behind a wall of light protecting the road so it can’t attack anybody else and all anybody ever sees of it after that is those glowing red eyes in the darkness. It’s quite imaginative and it’s entertaining and well-told. Don’t expect scholarly work or take anything about the spiritual practices of the characters as representative of actual conjure practices – this is fiction and it doesn’t pretend not to be, and I wouldn’t hit a hog in the behind with the portrayal of some of the “conjure” in here, but as a short story, it’s pretty good.

She doesn’t cite any sources – again, it’s not trying to be scholarly work – and while she doesn’t indicate what resources, written or oral, she used in writing these short stories, she does have a bibliography at the end. But as it stands, I have no idea where she heard the story of Old Red Eyes and how much of her tale is part of the larger oral tradition versus detail she added for narrative purposes to make a short story work, so it didn’t really get me anywhere in my search for Mae’s Red Eyes. But as a collection of spooky stories from Florida, it’s worth reading for sure. She’s pretty good at finding a way into these old legends without just repeating/rehashing, and she fleshes them out into actual stories with believable characterization and period details. If you like ghost lore, you should like her books – and she has a slew of them based on lore of different regions.

St. Martha, from Gospel Figure to Medieval Legend to La Dominadora: Sources, Resources, and FAQs

St. Martha in Scripture

Woodcut by Jacobus de Man, haven’t tracked down the specific publication yet, but it’s late 1600s, early 1700s and public domain. [1]

“Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus.”
– John 11:5

The Gospel of Luke tells us how Martha invited Jesus to her home in Bethany. She cooked and cleaned and catered while her sister Mary sat at Christ’s feet and listened to him speak. Martha pointed out that Mary wasn’t pitching in.

“Martha, Martha,” the Lord answered, “you are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed—or indeed only one. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.” (Luke 10:41, NIV)

Christ’s point is that in the grand scheme of things, your eternal soul is more important than social conventions and what people think about your housekeeping. But we need to understand this in context. It’s not that Martha had no imagination or faith or respect or that she was too small-minded to want to sit at Christ’s feet, too.

In Martha’s mind and in her culture, these were her duties, and her performance of them comprised her reputation, value, and trustworthiness as a member of her culture — in a society that valued hospitality quite highly, that in fact didn’t even work as a society without hospitality as a huge part of the glue that held it together.

She wasn’t saying nobody should value hearing him teach. She also wanted to hear him speak; she was also his disciple and believed in him. She was just pointing out that people needed to eat and wash and sit, and somebody’s efforts had to make that happen. (You can imagine that Jesus was accompanied by an entourage, too, all of whom also needed to eat and wash and sit.) She was determined to do her duties well for such an esteemed guest as Jesus, but she wasn’t a doormat. She was pointing out that she was not the only one who could be doing these things, that she *could* be sitting at Christ’s feet right now, too, if she just gave off doing the less glamorous stuff. But somebody has to do it. Dramatic events are unfolding, but somebody has to make the setting they’re unfolding in happen.

In John 12, Christ is in Bethany again before Passover at a dinner in his honor. Lazarus is reclined at the table with him. Word of his resurrection has spread like wildfire; Jesus’ followers are increasing and so are the machinations against his life. Mary makes a spectacle of herself pouring half of liter of precious perfume on Christ’s feet – worth a year’s wages – and wiping them with her hair. Christ is constantly, increasingly aware of the massive cosmic drama he’s part of and what’s right around the corner, his every action and word heavily symbolic. Every step he takes is under the weight of prophecy and its fulfillment, is part of a massive dramatic ritual. In this play, Christ has simultaneously the perspective of the main character and the omniscience of the author. The drama in John’s portrayal is thick indeed.

Martha during all of this? John writes only, “Martha served” (John 12:2).