Sunday Scaries: “The Ballad of Gloria Vetrana”

I knew Gloria Vetrana, but I didn’t know why she disappeared. I only knew the rumors, the wild stories people invented.

Gloria Vetrana went off the deep end and killed herself. Before she did it she put on a Sunday dress to look respectable because she’d be meeting her daddy in Hell.

This is how the story goes. These are the things they said.

Gloria trudged up the mountain in her bare feet and came to one of the overlooks. After a silent prayer, she crossed her arms and took flight, a thousand feet down, her white dress rippling in the Carolina wind.

One must imagine her fall as beautiful. This detail is important to the story. The dénouement: her descent. The abrupt ending—the thud of her body hitting the earth. The way the sound reverberated in the valley, a thoughtful epigraph.

They said other things. They said Gloria Vetrana ran off into the woods and found a cave to live in. Gloria, once a pretty girl, now wild-eyed and dirty and mad. Gloria, howling among black mountains and cutting herself with rocks.

I didn’t like it, but I could understand why they would say these things.

Gloria was always upset. Even when her eyes danced and her teeth shone white. Even when she dervished between the tables as a waitress at Tabby’s Diner. At all times, anger huddled somewhere in her broken center.

As I watched Gloria from my position at the grill at Tabby’s Diner, peering at her through the order window, I could see that beneath all that studied confidence lurked something wild and uncontrolled. It lay in her nervous feet, her wringing hands. I, too, felt uncomfortable in my skin. This was the bond we shared.

But Gloria was a force both ancient and strange. A spiritual defect passed down from her very crazy, very dead father, who was shot to death by police when his schizophrenia placed a knife in his hands and death in his eyes. People didn’t like that.

They could make sense of common vices: infidelity or drinking and drugging like my Uncle Dwayne. A life slipping off its tracks. They could understand my laziness, even my vague problems with authority. But when they tried to grip the part of Gloria that was so tainted, it broke from their hands and slithered away. It exploded into mist.

After Gloria disappeared, she became a ghost.

At first, the reports weren’t especially interesting: unconvincing testimonies of vague phenomena. Folks reported feeling nauseated and feverish. Tinnitus. Migraines. Some reported electrical disturbances, lights straining brown as the power waned.

Eventually, a clearer picture came into focus.

Mrs. Thompson saw it through her kitchen window when she was washing dishes.

Jeffrey Elroy saw it when he was working on his car late one night in his garage.

Even Claudia Turner, a little girl no older than eight, had her life permanently altered by a visit from Gloria.

Little Claudia had just finished her prayers one evening. She glanced outside to say goodnight to the moon and there was Gloria, her eyes gushing a black fluid as they stared back at little Claudia. The little girl shrieked into her parents’ bedroom, but when they came to investigate, there was only a wisp of fog winding through the oak trees outside of Claudia’s window.

Little Claudia became sullen and withdrawn. Her parents feared that Claudia had been infected by the same strange force that had made Gloria so odd.

In total, seven people saw the pale face of Gloria Vetrana in their windows at night. They said it looked like a mask: pale white and frozen in desperate, wide-eyed urgency. Like she was trying to tell me something, they said.

***

Gloria always reminded me of New York City, so I occasionally placed her there in my mind. It felt right to imagine her standing, arms crossed, before an inscrutable painting in one of those art museums up there.

Or maybe she became a Knoxville girl. How easy would it be for her to have continued west into the Smokies? Maybe she’s strolling with a glass of wine along the Tennessee River. Maybe she’s floating in it.

Wherever she is, perhaps she’s thinking of that friendly line cook back at Tabby’s. Perhaps she’s hoping the two slow-moving detectives who question him won’t give him a hard time. She thinks that if she can just wait it out in some random city, she might one day return to the foothills of Lauriette and retrieve him. Maybe make him her husband.

***

Gloria and I only talked about her father once. It was on a day in early April when the whole world suddenly turned green. Weeds crawled up mailboxes. Vines grew hairy and thick along trellises and wound up the virid sides of once-white millhouses. In every ravine and low field, kudzu threatened to devour entire acres.

During our break from a slow shift at Tabby’s, Gloria sat opposite me on a bucket of pickles out by the dumpsters, amid wild weeds and bugs and copperheads.

She said, “You’ve never asked about my daddy.”

I told her I figured if she wanted to talk about it she would.

She told me about the schizophrenia, which I knew. She told me about the knife, the shooting. “You know all this.”

I told her I did.

But he wasn’t bad. Just sick.

I told her people didn’t like complicated.

She stared off toward a place in the distance, a place I couldn’t see. Her expression like a caul.

“Because as Christians, they would have to feel bad for him,” she said. “As Christians they would have to because he was sick.”

“If they were Christians. Sure.”

The way she looked at me then, her eyes called out to me. I might have been the only one who ever understood.

***

My cousin Thomas said Gloria’s daddy went to the Lauriette Cemetery on a full moon. That’s how he caught the demon.

Where are you getting your information? It was the middle of a cornfield. He drew a star with a circle around it and summoned the Devil that way. He was trying to strike a deal to get rich.

I heard when the cops were shooting at him up on the mountain he started floating.

My uncle came out late one night because he heard a noise like some animal growling. He went outside with his shotgun and there was Gloria’s daddy, on all fours with a hen hanging out of his mouth.

And so on and so forth.

***

After the window sightings, the entire town of Lauriette hummed with talk of Gloria Vetrana’s ghost.

At least two groups of small-town paranormal enthusiasts decided to become proper ghost hunters and made the ghost of Gloria Vetrana their prime focus.

Jack Bennett’s ancient grandmother, whom everyone called a prophet, said that Gloria had come to her in a dream and promised to visit upon every Lauriette citizen who ever spoke ill of her in life.

Soon, Gloria began appearing everywhere. Clay, the man who had started a nasty rumor about Gloria shoving graveyard beetles into her naked body as part of a satanic ritual, reported seeing her in his house, in broad daylight. He sat cooling off with a beer after cutting grass when he turned and saw her sitting beside him at the kitchen table. Her skin cracked like porcelain. She smiled at him.

Frank Copeland, who worked the rural mail route, glanced in the rearview mirror and saw Gloria sitting on her haunches in the back of his mail jeep.

One night, three weeks after she disappeared, a peal of animal-like screams issued from a house at the end of a darkened dirt road. A group of middle-school girls had been having a sleepover and one of them, a blessed little girl named Anna, asked if any of them knew the story of the girl who got possessed and ran off into the mountains like her father had years before. For the next hour, the girls traded stories they had heard about the various hauntings around town.

Sometime after midnight, a chill wended through the room where seven girls lay in sleeping bags on plush carpet. Anna went to retrieve an extra blanket from the closet, and when she opened the door, there was Gloria, crumpled and contorted on the highest shelf, her hair black as pitch and her eyes death-blue.  

Her head dropped down to little Anna. When Gloria’s shriveled mouth opened, there were no screams or whispers or words, only wet dirt spilling out in a steady flow. Anna’s shrieks woke the other girls and sent her parents running into the room.

When they flipped on the light, they saw no sign of Gloria or the damp earth that had spilled from her mouth.

***

Question: would Gloria still be here if it weren’t for me?

I’ve asked myself this a thousand times.

The last time I saw Gloria in between shifts at Tabby’s, she asked questions that I imagine she had been too afraid to ask before.

“Will you always live in Lauriette?”

“Hell no. As soon as I can swing it, I’m out.”

“But where?”

Gloria sat up a little straighter on the empty bucket she sat on. I felt her eyes on me. Her words came out like little bullets. She said, “College? The military? What’s your plan?”

“Haven’t gotten that far yet.”

We both knew I wasn’t going to college with the grades I had. We knew this just as we knew that I wouldn’t last in the military. My disposition was toward laziness.

Gloria leaned closer like she wanted me to look at her.

“You could get away from all this.”

“You act like it’s the easiest thing in the world.”

“If it were me—I mean, if I were you—I wouldn’t wait another day. I would do whatever it took.”

I asked, “And what’s stopping you?”

As soon as I asked, I figured I knew the answer. I felt cruel. Gloria had only ever been troubled. With her dead dad and drunk mom, her life had narrowed. But it could have been different. I had realized quickly that she was smart, very smart. She never wrote down orders. When the fryer broke, Gloria could plumb its greasy innards and bring it hissing back to life.

If her life were a movie, maybe she would have a teacher who saw through the gossip that surrounded her, a kindly woman who saw herself in Gloria. This imaginary teacher might pull some strings, write a letter of recommendation, something to extricate Gloria from the hellscape that was her life in Lauriette, North Carolina. But there was no kindly teacher. There was no one.

***

On a humid morning in June, Gloria’s mother had come off a bender and, after calling for her again and again, reported Gloria missing. The police came into her room only to find the light still on and the laptop sitting open, as though Gloria had been raptured while sitting at her desk.

***

And maybe it would have happened without my influence. I cling to this possibility often, mostly at night when I can’t sleep. As long as I can tell myself that something else made Gloria leave, I can go on living.

Maybe I had invented our friendship. Maybe these were merely more stories, more convincing because I was the narrator. Maybe we only talked a couple times out back at Tabby’s. Surely this is not the case.

Some nights, when the feeling gets too strong, I have to get out of bed and walk out to the edge of the yard where I can see the shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains, their massive shapes like felled giants in the distance.

Standing there in the middle of the night, slightly crazed by lack of sleep, I stare at the mountains, which at that hour are always obscured by a curtain of fog. I wonder if Gloria is out there somewhere, letting her hair grow long and wild. I see her kneeling at a stream to drink clear water straight from the source.

But when the wind cuts through the trees and bristles the hair on my forearms, I become convinced that Gloria isn’t threading her way through mountain forests. I feel that she’s there with me, her voice, her spirit, in the wind. Like she never left.