I've always been fond of Ozark superstitions. So many are based on the old time premises you'd find in the farmer's almanac of a hundred years ago: "Onion skin very thin, mild winter coming in. Onion skin thick and tough, coming winter cold and rough." And there's the old one that kept husbands from helping with the dishes: "Wash and dry together, weep and cry together."

The ones I collected, back in the old days, were the ones based on signs, which were easy to gather because most of my neighbors followed them, and their children learned them by rhyme, which is the best way to teach a child anything you want them to remember. "Sow your peas and your beans by the light of the moon; who soweth them sooner, he soweth too soon," was just one of the rhymes my one-room school children knew by heart. That went along with weather advice like, "If the cock crows after he's gone to bed, he'll wake up with a dripping head." But these old pieces of folk knowledge were nothing compared to the superstitions about death and the things you could do to bring it on before your time. I grew up with people who would turn their back on a funeral procession, believing that, "If ever you watch as the hearse goes by, be sure that you are the next to die."

One of the funniest stories I ever heard about a superstition had to do with a distant relative (of my wife's) Bombey (Bum) Powell, who believed the superstition that it was possible to call up the dead on the last night of October (All Hallows Eve). About 80 years ago, Bum got his bill too deep in the jar one Halloween night and told the boys at the local tavern to come with him to the graveyard; he would call up the dead for them.

Bum climbed up on the rail fence that bordered the cemetery and shouted, "Rise up ye dead, and talk!" What he didn't know was that his neighbor Sam's white ox had breached the fence to get to the lush grass of the graveyard to graze and was lying down in the weeds. When Bum shouted, the big white animal rose up ghostlike from among the tombstones and uttered a great wailing "Moooeeeahhhh."

According to witnesses, Bum, because of his perch on the rail fence, was the last to leave the cemetery, but despite the handicap, beat everybody back to the tavern. Which proves, to me at least, that although superstition might lack scientific evidence, it's something wonderful for inspiration.