The Perfect Shade of Haint Blue: Voices through Time

For everyone who knows to take those strange little hunches seriously

The Perfect Shade of Haint Blue

Kari Kilgore

Spiral Publishing, Ltd.

The Perfect Shade of Haint Blue

After three years in Las Vegas and the Mojave Desert, July rain on his grandparents’ tin roof sounded like heaven to Mark Hersch. The endlessly refreshing scent and the feel of clean humidity on his skin only amplified the effect, once he’d gotten over sweating so much for the first week or so.

He kicked one brown hiking boot against the dark blue painted floor of the porch, sending the long porch swing back into motion. Every time he leaned his head against the high back of the swing, he smiled at the contrast of the narrow boards of the ceiling overhead painted a pale robin’s egg blue.

Haint blue, his granny called that paint color, her musical Appalachian accent making the word so much more interesting than his own generic military brat pronunciation of haunt could ever be.

Mark had heard folks say using that color on the porch was an old Southern and mountain tradition, meant to keep ghosts so confused and disoriented by an apparent blue sky overhead that they never found their way inside.

He suspected there was more to the tradition than that, but hadn’t been able to get online to confirm it just yet. The late Nineties had brought fast and easy internet to Vegas, but the slow, creaky dialup deep in the mountains around Hartstown, Virginia, was another frustrating story.

Lugging a big computer tower and monitor all this way hadn’t been anywhere near worth the trouble.

When Mark first arrived for his summer stay in early June, the long metal chains holding up the swing sang out with a distinctive groaning noise every time someone pushed back. One of his first help-around-the-house jobs—following his parents’ edict that he make himself useful and welcome rather than being a lazy fifteen-year-old nuisance—had been oiling that chain to quiet the sound.

His grandparents both thanked him and claimed to be happy about the nearly silent motion of the