Listen to Beverly Carter-Sexton spin a ghost story, and you wonder if her family name shouldn't have been Addams.
"I was born into it," she says. "I grew up hearing and telling stories. We didn't have a television. My grandmother couldn't read or write and my mother didn't read for pleasure. Storytelling was our recreation, just a part of our lives."So Carter-Sexton did what came naturally. She became a professional storyteller.
The product of Appalachian culture and a one-room school, she married young and worked in fast-food restaurants, as a secretary and as a preschool teaching aide.
Convinced she should go to college, a former employer literally put her in a car and drove her to Berea College. She graduated in 1991 and now, at age 38, works as a health educator in the local school system.
While at Berea, she took a course in storytelling.
"I knew it would be an easy `A' for me because I knew I could tell stories," she said. "The professor, Harry Robie, said, `You`re really good. You should be a professional.'
"I thought that no one gets paid for telling these stories, or at least no one would pay me. But then I learned otherwise. Now I travel and do it professionally."
She estimates she knows at least 500 stories, and she's not always sure which ones she will use until she starts. Selection depends on how she sizes up the audience and is sometimes affected by what another teller has told.
Some of Carter-Sexton's yarns are varieties of Eastern Kentucky "jack tales," which might be described as fairy tales with a moral. Others relate to members of her own family.
One story is about an evil little girl named Edith, whose family burned to death. She was found stirring the ashes of the isolated home with a baccy stick - that's a tobacco stick, in case you don't know the language.
Edith goes to live with her grandmother but continues her evil ways by doing such things as poking out the cat's eye with her baccy stick and crippling her grandmother by tripping her with the stick. This despite hearing warnings of "I'm going to chew your fat and munch your bones" from a character known as Raw Head and Bloody Bones.
Finally, Edith's bedridden grandmother hears the child's screams in the night but because of her condition can't go to her aid. The next day neighbors come, but the only trace of Edith is a bloody baccy stick.
In another story, Carter-Sexton's grandfather's Uncle Willie leads fellow miners from a cave-in through his faith in the Lord by following the "rustling of Jesus' robe and his golden footprints." The miners rejoice, and Uncle Willie falls dead to be with the Lord.
A ghost story with humor concerns a drunk taking a shortcut home. He passes through a cemetery and falls into a newly dug grave. He tries to climb out, not being aware in the darkness that another man has fallen into the grave earlier.
"Don't bother. You'll never get out," the voice says from the darkness. The terrified drunk not only jumps out of the grave and maybe 10 feet higher, but loses his taste for liquor, too.