Fall Festival

Every year since I began in the ministry, the churches I have served have always had a fall festival on October 31st. The purpose is to give the children and their families a safe alternative way to spend Halloween evening.

In 1998, Shiloh Baptist Church held its first one with me as pastor. That year we had about 75 in attendance. Now, 15 years later, if the weather is good we will have 2,000 plus on our property. We do this as an outreach and ministry to the community.

For weeks now a team has been planning and preparing for this big day. We campaigned within the church for one thousand pounds of candy to be donated. Our goal is to give each kid ample candy. Our ladies also bag several hundred bags of home made cotton candy. We get the children hyped up on sugar before they go home to rest with their parents.

I remember growing up on the northeast end of the county we had nothing offered like this. We used to ride the dirt roads of Pitts Chapel, Concord and others telling ghost stories and trying to scare one another. I am a storyteller by nature and I could tell some good stories about the area.

Nowadays its hard to picture what it was like, because back then there were no houses on these roads. It was easy to lose someone on the Jasper County dirt roads. I remember one night we lost a boy from Covington back in the country.

After his parents called looking for him, we had to send out a search party. We found him sitting on side of the road out of gas. He got lost and he said he saw many things that I had told about in the stories and he was scared.

I first came acquainted with area in 1975. Some people came to our restaurant and wanted me to go play music at the old Pitts Chapel church. This church used to sit at the Pitts Chapel and James Benton Road intersection. It was a rainy and kind of eerie night.

As we started to play people continued to come in. I had only been attending church for about a year, and as a 12-year-old boy I had never seen anything like I was about to see. I looked up and a large lady came dancing down the aisle with both hands raised in the air. She got to the front and spun around a few times and then just fell to the floor. She was breathing real hard and saying things that I didn’t understand.

I turned to Tim who was playing the mandolin and I asked, “What’s she doing?” His reply was, “She’s got the devil in her and she’s trying to get him out!” Now I was really getting scared.

Our time of performing was over so we went to the back pew and sat down. A man walked in and motioned for me to slide over. The pews were the old slat back pews. A group of teen girls were now singing and they had really captured my eye. So much so that I had forgotten about the woman who was still lying on the floor, and I wasn’t paying attention to what was going on around me.

But all of the sudden I heard a loud noise to my left and when I looked the man, who was sitting beside me, was now lying in the floor. He was sweating profusely and jerking around. I looked to Tim with frightened eyes (You know like Barney Fife) and a trembling voice I asked, “What’s wrong with him?” His reply was Ah; he’s just got the devil in him too.

I said, “Yeah, and I’m gonna get the devil out of here!” I ran out the door and locked myself in the truck.

It was probably only for about 30 minutes, but it seemed like it was about three hours that I sat there and my mind played all kind of scary tricks on me. Tim came out and asked if I was coming back into get my guitar. I told him, he could either bring it to me or leave it in there, I was not getting out of this truck till I got home.

From that night on I began to enjoy telling spooky tells about Pitts Chapel and Concord.