| By Bob Weaver
People use to hear and see things in the Village of Hur they don't often hear and see in modern times, possibly prompted by frequent warnings about the world ending at the local church.
Fox hunters would often hear the screams of panthers that sent chills up their backs while sitting around a fire on a high hill.
One family heard voices and sounds coming from their spring, nearly scaring them to death. Years later, it was confirmed that the spring was actually receiving an AM radio signal.
Hollis Kerby heard an angel choir singing when his wife Bell died in the late 1940's.
In 1956, while a student at Calhoun County High School, I borrowed an amplifier and some large outside PA speakers and placed them in the bell tower of the Hur Church.
Attaching a record player with a disc of Christmas chimes, we started playing the tunes in early evening before the holiday as entertainment for our scattered neighbors and as a prelude to the upcoming Christmas program, the biggest event of the year.
Shortly after the premiere performance of "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing," with the chimes ringing and echoing across the Hur hills, our old Methodist preacher, the Rev. Dorsey Miller (who lived to age 103) wandered out on his porch down in Buckhorn Hollow.
Alarmed and excited, he dashed back into the house and cranked up the switch-board operator, Lona Starcher.
"Christ is coming! Christ is Coming!" he told Lona.
"No, it's not Christ," she said, "It's just that crazy Bob Weaver with his gadgets."
Scottie McCoy often wandered around in the Hur Cemetery after dark, causing locals to report ghostly apparitions.
Even Commodore Nutter, a frequent attender of the Mt. Olive Church, reported a bright, ghostly figure wandering around the Kirby Ridge.
And Hollis Kerby often reported seeing figures after dark, like Kangaroos.
Most every family had a tale about an unearthly apparition.
Grandma McCoy was thoroughly convinced it was "end times," when Russia launched a satellite known as Sputnik into space in the 1950s, coupled with the daily "end times" and "fires of hell" proclamations by radio preachers on WOAY radio.
She often mailed Rev. Mont Carr and the Rev. Freddie Steel on WOAY radio in Oak Hill five dollars to hear more of their sermons.
In those years, we personally witnessed a UFO, strange light orbs, and a super brilliant light floating around the deep woods near Hur in the 1950s.
As a young boy I paid no mind to such events and tales, and would walk the darkened ridges without a light.
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