When the Mountains Let Me Go

There is a quiet moment that comes before leaving a place you love.

Not the packing. Not the goodbye. But the moment when the stories stop rising to meet you.

For a long time, Appalachia held me. Its ridges and hollers shaped how I understood folklore stories folded inward, hidden in valleys, preserved by isolation and repetition. The mountains keep things. They shelter, protect, and sometimes bury. Their spirits linger in the folds of the land, half-seen, half-whispered, waiting to be noticed but never demanding it. Appalachian folklore is patient. It survives by staying still.

But over time, I began to feel something loosen. The stories I had quietly carried for years, the night visitors, the warnings, the ancestral echoes never left me. Instead, they began to change temperature. They wanted water. They wanted air that pressed close to the skin. They wanted heat, rot, and movement. The mountains were not rejecting me. They were releasing me to my roots. When the mountains let me go, they allowed me to write about the whispers closest to my heart.

The Difference Between Holding and Watching

Mountains hold.Swamps watch.

This is not metaphor. It is behavior.

In the mountains, the land conceals. Sound is swallowed. Paths double back. What lives there can remain hidden for generations. Appalachian spirits reflect this landscape: haints in hollers, lights on ridges, presences that avoid direct confrontation. You stumble into them. You cross their path. You are rarely sought out.

But the Deep South does not hide its spirits. They linger in open spaces. They stand at the edge of roads, waterlines, porches, and beds. They do not rush. They wait. They observe. They take note of exhaustion, grief, hunger, loneliness conditions, not courage. Southern folklore is not about pursuit. It is about exposure. And for me, they are still watching. Waiting. Patiently.

 I Was Raised by a Different Kind of Land

Before the mountains, there was water.

I grew up in the swamps of Florida, where the land breathes and moves even when you are standing still. Where something unseen slipping into water the color of sweet tea does not cause alarm because that is simply how the world works.

In the swamp, you learn early that you are not the loudest thing present, you are not the most important, and you are never truly alone. This kind of landscape teaches a different mythic literacy. You don’t look for monsters because the environment itself already commands respect. The supernatural does not announce itself. It coexists.

There are no clean edges in a swamp. Only transitions. And folklore follows suit. Stories emerge not as grand legends, but as knowing glances, unfinished sentences, and rules you follow without remembering who taught them to you. Don’t linger there. Don’t call out to something you can’t see. Don’t follow the light. Don’t assume the water is empty. These are not stories meant to scare children. They are instructions.

 When the Stories Stop Knocking

For several years, I wrote about Appalachian folklore with sincerity and care. Those traditions matter deeply to me, and they always will. But folklore is not static, it migrates with people, with memory, with need. Eventually, the Appalachian stories stopped knocking on the inside of my ribs. Warm ghostly fingers stroked my hair and water filled my lungs.

Soon, I found myself thinking about tidal land. About places where the dead do not leave because the land itself cannot forget. About spirits that don’t need names to be understood. About night visitors who arrive not because you are chosen but because you are vulnerable. This is not a rejection of where I have been. It is an acknowledgment of where my roots drink.

Leaving Without Turning Away

Leaving a folkloric landscape does not mean abandoning it. It means recognizing when your work is no longer to preserve, but to listen elsewhere. The mountains taught me how stories survive in isolation. The swamps taught me how stories survive trauma.

This is not a departure from dark folklore. It is a return to the deep, dark, murky water of my roots. And like all threshold crossings, it begins not with certainty but with attention. The mountains let me go. Now I follow what has always been watching.