KYLE LOVERN

Growing up in Appalachia, I’m sure many of you have heard of certain superstitions from your parents, grandparents or other elderly folks you are acquainted with.

I have always found these tales interesting and somewhat amusing, even though I have grown to believe many of them.

A lot of the superstitions I heard growing up in the small town of Nolan dealt with death.

One that I continue to hear is that deaths are thought to come in threes. Even when I started my career in journalism, the staff would talk about this and wonder if it would happen. Many times it seemed to. If two people died reasonably close together, someone would always predict a third.

If you hear a screech owl at dusk, someone will die, is another belief. I think this may have come from Native American culture and I once read a book with a similar title. I still feel a little unnerved when I’m walking my dog in the evening and hear an owl hoot.

It’s bad luck to walk across graves, we were told. We crossed our community cemetery when I was growing up while traversing the mountains. When we would decorate graves on Memorial Day of family members who passed, my dad always reminded me to try and not step on graves. I still try not to do this.

If a bird flies inside your house, there will be a death in the family. This is one superstition that my wife Vicki also heard and actually witnessed happen while growing up in our quaint community. It makes us both feel a little leery if this happens. I know my mother was always nervous when this happened and I can recall it happening a couple of times.

In past years, close friends and family members would stay all night and sit up with the dead. Wakes were held in the homes back in the day. I can remember when I was about 5 years old, my uncle passed away and his wake was held in our house. That is a different kind of memory that I have even though I was so young. I recall attending a couple of other wakes at family or friends’ houses through the years.