This is long, so I'm gonna stick it under the read more.
So, okay. I had this cousin. I say had, in that he was blood related to me, but this man died long, long ago. This story takes place around 1910-1920ish or so according to my great great Aunt Dolly. His name was Frank I believe.
Frank's next door neighbor was an old woman. The old woman had a green bean plant that wound around the fence between her and Frank's yard, and it was a wonderful bean plant. Produced just tons of green beans, enough so that the old woman said that whatever grew on Frank's side of the fence was his, simply because she couldn't pick and eat all these green beans. This was very amenable to Frank, and life went on quite nicely for a while.
Then one day, the old woman died. Her house was left empty. No one moved in. The bean plant was left to grow all on its own.
Well Frank determined that this was now his bean plant. She had died in late summer getting on towards fall, so care of the thing through the winter fell on him. He ensured it didn't die from the cold, pruned it back properly during the spring, mucked out horse stalls for free so he could take it as fertilizer. And he was very pleased with how much crop the plant produced.
One day, he goes out to pick the beans, and just about every single bean is already gone. The best specimens had disappeared, and whoever picked them was rough with the plant. Green leaves were all over the ground, and most of his hard work of a year was for naught.
He's pissed, and he pulls out a chair and sits by the beans every free moment he gets in case the perpetrator comes back. And comes back he does a few days later. It's Frank's other neighbor, who we're going to call Bill because I have forgotten his name. They aren't next door neighbors. Bill lived two doors down, on the other side of where the old woman used to live. And here he comes with a basket ready to take more beans.
Frank tells him to cut it out, that this is his bean plant now, given that he's the one who took care of it and ensured that it didn't die, and also upbraided Bill about destroying stems and leaves that would make it harder for the plant to produce more food. Bill retorts that he won't stop picking beans, because these beans are better than the ones in the stores and free to boot, and the stem of the plant is in the old lady's yard, which is abandoned property. This plant doesn't belong to Frank anymore than the lady's house does. It doesn't matter that the vines go through Frank's fence. The stem isn't his.
Well Frank isn't a very strong man, and is a country boy in the city, one of the first in my family to have moved out of rural farmland areas. He doesn't think calling the cops would do anything, besides which, he knows they would agree with Bill. The stem isn't technically on his property, no matter how much he took care of the thing. No, he determined he had to handle this himself.
So the very first thing he does is he wakes up at 2 in the morning, breaks into the old woman's abandoned house, and lights a candle in the window facing Bill's house. He lets it burn down and melt all over the candlestick. This is step one.
He does this a few more times, setting up oil lamps to burn behind closed curtains and walking in front of them here and there. Sometimes Frank would throw pebbles at Bill's windows late at night to get him up so he could see the house and the lights inside.
Frank does this for weeks on end.
Now, this part of the story requires a bit of knowledge about the history of telephones. Early telephones, right as soon as they started getting put into homes, weren't private affairs. You would get on the phone, and anybody on the street could listen to your conversation and interrupt it. There is an example of this in the modern day. Remember when a house had several phones that all connected to the same landline? You could pick up the phone upstairs and listen to what the person downstairs was saying. It was like that. Everybody in an area was on the same line, because not enough people had phones for there to require privacy.
Another thing to know is that Frank was excellent at mimicking voices. His nickname in the family was Mockingbird because he could mimic just about any voice he had ever heard.
He gets on the phone, waits to hear Bill's voice, and says like that old lady, "Bill, what are you doing stealing my beans?" And then immediately gets off the phone.
He does this a few times, every time he hears Bill on the phone. The ghostly sentences get more and more intense, ranging from sadness about the state of her bean plant, to anger about how little it has produced since Bill stole the beans, to how it was her life's pride and joy and it's being desecrated now.
Frank in the meanwhile entirely stops taking care of the plant, letting it grow wilder and refusing to prune it back. Bill comes over one day demanding answers, and Frank puts on a terrific display of being scared, of hearing an old woman's voice telling him to leave the plant alone or else. He tells Bill that he knows it's not Christian like to believe in ghosts and such, but there's no other way around it. The plant is growing wild despite his best efforts (which are none, but Bill wasn't to know that), and the last time he tried to prune it, he got a terrifying call from someone who could only have been the old woman demanding that he leave it be. So he doesn't touch it anymore.
Bill at this point is getting genuinely scared. He's looking skittish during the day, staring for long periods of time at the house, losing sleep. And Frank knows it's time for the coup de grace.
One final call. The "old woman" has warned Bill thoroughly of terrible things to happen to him if he touched the stem of the plant. If the main vine suffered any damage, the mouth of hell would open wide upon Bill's head, and misfortune would send him following her to the grave.
The next night, Frank clips off part of the main vine and sets it on Bill's back porch, with sewing needles stolen from the old lady's house poking through it. He pounds on the door, and hides in a nearby bush. Bill comes out, tired, unable to sleep, scared. Sees the vine.
"It's over for you, Bill," says a woman who should have died over a year ago.
Bill moves out within the next week. And Frank gets his bean plant.
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