Have YOU seen Linthead? (AKA The Phantom)

If you had parents or grandparents who lived in Woodpyre Mill, or you ever lived there yourself...you know the stories.  

Everyone told them. Everyone heard them.  At least once.

So far as I can tell, these stories started sometime in the late 1940's or early 1950s, and probably on a playground nearby the town.  (Woodpyre Mill had a school in its last decades, Central Elementary, graduating grades K-6, as well as a high school).  

During recess, the big kids would tease the little ones, especially those in kindergarten, about the Phantom.

If you're bad, if you misbehave, Linthead will leave a "gift"on your porch. An old ceramic doll, made circa 1920.  

If your house get marked with a doll, well, lock your doors, because when you are sound asleep in you're bed tonight, in the dart, he's going to sneak into your house and take you.

Where did this urban legend get started?  

I often asked my mother and father this before they passed. They lived in Woodpyre in the early 1950s (before the fire) and my mother told me she knew all about the dolls, although the details sometimes conflicted. 

But my mom insists that the dolls are real, and they all look the same.

But her remembrance is that Lile Bullock, owner and operator of the Textile Mill, is the one who left them on porches.  Not the Phantom.

You see, in the days of child labors in the early 1930's, kids worked eight, nine, even 12 hours a day in that excruciating hot mill, and without safety precautions.

There were a lot of accidents there. My mom was crystal clear about that fact.

Kids lost arms, fingers, and in one notorious case, a scalp, in the deafening machinery.  

As kind of penance or apology I guess, Bullock would go to the houses of those injured children and leave them a doll as a gift.  It was his way of paying them back, according to Mom.  But she also told me he had a cigar box on his desk, in his mill office, and that inside, that cigar box, he collected the severed digits of injured children.

My mother swore that if you saw a doll on some porch in Woodpyre, it meant that the child who lived there had gotten sick, or died from Brown Lung (basically inhaling the particles found in the mill) for too long.

I suspect that somehow, after Bullock passed away (of Brown Lung too), the legend began spreading about the phantom and the doll.

But if you lived in Woodpyre Mill, or nearby, did you hear this story? 

Did you ever see Linthead?



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