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he halo of fluffv brown hair frames a round baby face with big innocent brown eyes and rosebud mouth. She stands four-feet-eleven and sits at considerably less. Stashed in one corner of a big easy chair, with her legs tucked under a billowing skirt and crinolines, she looks like a little doll. You want to pick her up and cuddle her. She looks up at you with a trusting smile and you want to protect her fiercely.
Then she opens the rosebud mouth. The voice comes out ten sizes bigger than the bod) .
“What was the scariest thing ever happened to me?” she echoes the question. “Well now. ah cain’t think right offhand — oh yes. oh yes — that time in the barn, it was mighty scary. . . .
She was four years old then and the Tarpley family (her full name is Brenda Lee Tarpley I lived in Atlanta, Georgia. The barn stood on their land and it was so old that her father Ruben claimed it sheltered Reb soldiers in the Civil War. He also said. “You kids had better keep out of that tottering heap if you know what’s good for you.”
Brenda was a bright
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understood early the meaning of the word “authority.” It was something you disobeyed. She led her two-year-older sister Linda and a bunch of playmates into the forbidden territory. Later her father found out and this time he tried explaining. “You young ones are flirting with death.” he said. “If you get in trouble I can't come in after you. I’m a big man and if I set foot in there those rotten timbers’ll just cave in.'
Now that she understood. Brenda did it again. The kids were snooping around in the barn’s gloom one day. just about able to see each other, when they heard a sound. Not the scamper of little disturbed creatures. This was a terrible sound — a low. ghostly moan that rose in a wail till the children huddled in terror.
Then they saw it — the horrible thing moving mysteriously in the barn s murky depths! Ghostly, ghastly — five terrible outstretched white fingers attached to nothing!
“The Hand!” Brenda shrieked, and streaked out of there with the others on her heels. She ran and didn’t dare look back. If that thing could leave the TV screen from her pet horror show. “The Hand,” and come to haunt her in the barn for being naughty, it could chase her now. She made a screeching beeline for the house and never went near the barn again.
In time Brenda learned that The Hand had been her father’s, white-gloved and poked through a hole in the side of the barn. The eerie wail was his. too. “But I learned my lesson. Brenda recalls soberly. What did she learn?
“I learned there’s no such thing as ghosts — now nothin scares me.’
And that’s just what scares her manager-guardian. Dub Albritten. He knows there isn t an awful lot of girl in a sub-size-five dress, but what there is is pure pluck and reckless daring — and this gives him silver hairs among the reddish-gold. He also knows that Brenda s father, to whom she was very close, died tragically in a construction accident when she was a little girl of seven. It seems to have left her with a rather mature and ( Please turn the page)