Ghosts, Haints and a New "Spooky Season" Song

Parker Hobson channels the feeling of an otherworldly autumn in Eastern Kentucky into an original, haunting tune.

I don’t know if you believe in ghosts, but this time of year, it’s not difficult for me to image something spectral darting among the tumbling black walnuts or lingering—wispy and ethereal—in the fog that hangs between the hills each crisp morning.

Poet and songwriter Parker Hobson, who divides his time between Whitesburg and Louisville, has channeled this singular feeling of “spooky season” in the mountains into a new, Eastern Kentucky-inspired, Halloween-adjacent song exclusive to The Goldenrod: The Way Out Is There’s No Way Out.

Read below to learn more about Parker’s inspiration, then listen to the song, watch the video and read the eerie lyrics to discover a new, haunting tune you’ll be humming long past when the last jack-o-lantern has been tossed into the woods as deer food.

(And Happy Halloween!)

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Parker Hobson, Poet and Songwriter

As a part of my involvement with Appalshop these days, I've had the privilege of being able to go through some of the organization's vast archive of films and audio stories, along with outtakes, in order to pull content that could make for relevant or interesting radio in the present day for WMMT-FM (Appalshop's ever-excellent community radio station based in Whitesburg).

Among those bits I was able to use recently was this outtake from the film, Morgan Sexton: Banjo Player from Bull Creek, a 1991 Appalshop documentary profiling Letcher County master banjo player Morgan Sexton. In this clip, Morgan talks about "haints," a regional-ish term for a ghost or otherwise spooky/spectral/otherworldly presence. After describing how his cousin had seen a headless woman, dressed in white, near his family's homeplace, Morgan tells his own story of an eerie, blue ("indigo") light that mysteriously appeared one night near his still—and then disappeared, just as mysteriously. As this sighting was apparently coincident with his just having gotten the still up and running, Morgan took it as a warning to quit making liquor—though "I didn't take heed to it," he says.

For this song, thematically, I didn't want to do a straight retelling of Morgan's story, but instead took his seeing the blue light as a jumping-off point: imagining a figure sort of like the haint his cousin saw appearing from out of the light, and then weird things taking place from there. As Morgan's story ended with nothing ostensibly "happening" to him apart from the appearance and disappearance of the blue light, I wanted the end of this song to also be sort of opaque and anticlimactic in the same way—to leave with the narrator on his own, sitting with what he'd just seen.

The Way Out Is There’s No Way Out

it was a Great Society night
a blue, blue light
did appear up the ridge
and she walked out, like another moon

and she drained the Fall
from the trees as she walked
the old Fords
in the woods backed out new

and the mine wall un-burst
like an oak in reverse
and the men, who were crushed 
all filed out like tired kids

and she said, ‘If you’re back home, buddy, you never left’
and ‘The way out is there’s no way out’

and then she turned, back into the woods
and there was just me