“The flesh-and-blood ghost of a vengeful Confederate general haunts a small southern town.”
KEYWORDS: screenplay, biopic, thriller, horror, Civil War, Vicksburg campaign, Earl van Dorn
INSPIRED BY ACTUAL EVENTS.
REBUL, a psychotic ex-Army chaplain, returns home shortly after his grandfather is murdered under mysterious circumstances. He hooks up with a casino gal SHILOH to remodel grampa’s old place, situated on Cemetery Ridge. The house is haunted by Confederate General EARL VAN DORN, who successfully defended Vicksburg from a sneak attack on Christmas Eve 1862.
A few days later, Van Dorn was murdered by Rebul’s great-grandfather after the general seduced his wife.
Shiloh tells Rebul she’s a banshee sent to bring his sorry ass down to hell, but he doesn’t believe her.
He struggles against her dangerous (often seductive) advances, his psychotic hallucinations, his conscience, and the townspeople, who have vilified his family for 150 years for assassinating the Hero of Vicksburg.
Inspired by actual events, past and present, from the screenwriter’s life.
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The Backstory
There are many factual threads in this screenplay, as you can see from the following list. Much of the material is drawn from the history of my own direct ancestors, three of whom fought at the Battle of Vicksburg for the Confederacy.
- My grandfather immigrated to America from Cork County Ireland. His last name was O’Cleary, which was Americanized to Clark. The O’Cleary’s were one of the three ruling classes of the Druids; we were the antiquarians, or the story tellers (as you may have noticed).
- Right before my mother died in the fall of 2002, I saw a ghostly lady apparition in a cove on the lake where I lived, alias a banshee warming of an impending death in the Clan.
- After Mom died, I inherited the Family Bible, a giant, leather-bound edition with many gorgeous full-page illustrations. It also has the family tree, going back to the 1820’s. One ancestor is listed is William N. Brown, Sr. I did some research and found out he had been the head of the 20th Mississippi Cavalry during the Civil War, attached throughout the conflict to the Army of the West, under the command of General Earl van Dorn.
- Louis Erb was married to Annie Collins, and their child was Ida Erb, who married William N. Brown, Jr. Louis Erb was one of seven sons of a famous Prussian doctor who was a pioneer in psycho-physi0logy, and that reflex when you hit that spot on your knee was named for him. Another brother, Seigfried Erb, served with the 1st Arkansas Rifles, the first Confederate unit formed. The other Erb brothers settled in the northeast and founded a Mennonite community there. William Brown and Ida Erb had a single daughter, Anne Brown, who was my father’s mother.
- The Browns moved to a tiny town in Missouri, Cedar Gap, after the war, to an old 12-room house. My father was raised nearby in Springfield, by his Prussian mother and grandmother. They were dirt poor, living in an apple orchard, and hunting wild game for food.
- I moved to Port Gibson, Mississippi as soon as Mom’s estate was settled. We had a camp in north Louisiana not too far to the south of Port Gibson; and Vicksburg, the famous battlefield town, was 30 miles to the north, so this was like returning to my roots for me.
- A week before I drove over to Vicksburg to buy the house, the closing attorney was murdered in front of his office on Main Street in Port Gibson, and his partner had to close on the house. My realtor’s home (her offices were on the premises) in Vicksburg was a gorgeous home with a panoramic view of the iconic Mississippi River bridges. There had been a terrible murder in the house before she purchased it, of the wife of the Levitz Furniture magnate. The Levitz murder was never solved, despite an investigation by the FBI and even the occult types.
- I purchased my new home from the original owner, who was 91 years old and had been a gunsmith. The basement was full of his tools, as well as a giant oak desk with brass legs. His wife had been the school secretary at Chamberlain Hunt Academy in town, where I later found out Lee Harvey Oswald’s two brothers had attended. It was a military-style boarding school.
- As stated in the screenplay, my father’s mother hanged herself on December 21st (the script says Christmas Eve), in her home in Memphis. Mom and Pop found her the day they returned from their honeymoon.
- I sold the house in Port Gibson six months later and purchased a place in Vicksburg.
- The day after I sold my house in Port Gibson, I was walking around the neighborhood and ambled into Greenwood Cemetery. General Van Dorn is buried there (the only grave facing south, his beloved south). I found the Erb family graves! Col. William Brown was there as well as Ida Erb Brown. Near them was a tiny grave marker labeled “Little Bill,” presumably a child who had died in infancy.
- The day after I moved in, the HVAC system died, the electrical panel fizzed out, and there were bad plumbing problems everywhere. (A home inspection done during the purchase process found nothing wrong anywhere.)
- The following Christmas Eve my cat Jaxx and I were playing, she ran screaming up the stairs, ran square into a leg of the big oak desk, and injured her back badly. We spent all Christmas at the vet’s office. She survived but was lame. We spent the following Christmas at the same vet’s office, some kind of bad urinary tract infection.
- I ran into the family I purchased the house from right before I sold it and moved to my current home, and they said they had experienced some haunting phenomena when they lived there; hangers moving around in an upstairs room, things like that.
- There was in fact a huge, gigantic Yankee assault on Vicksburg on Christmas Eve, bigger even than Gettysburg, which General Van Dorn fended off by creating a ton of racket in the railroad yards, making the Yanks think reinforcements were arriving by rail. Van Dorn, who was called by journalists at the time “Every ugly husband’s worst enemy” for his womanizing ways, was shot by a jealous husband whose wife he seduced.
- There were also major skirmishes in the Port Gibson area, as in the screenplay.
Bill H. Clark