A recent blog post by my son Ethan, documenting their search for a house in the Atlanta area, commented that Some of the houses we looked at were like Manly Wade Wellman's gardinels, with that feeling that they might chew you up and digest you if you lingered overlong. Maybe it was just the Atlanta climate, muggy and so damnably lowland July, that made us feel like the house was breathing on us all sticky-like.
I've read Manly Wade Wellman's fiction and The Kingdom of Madison, his charming little book about our county, is a much-used reference. But I had to remind myself about gardinels because Ethan's words have given me an idea . . .
So I turned first to Mr. Google.
"They look some way like a shed or cabin, snug and rightly made, except the open door might could be a mouth, the two little windows could be eyes. Never you'll see one on the main roads or near towns; only back in the thicketty places, by high trails among tall ridges, and they show themselves there when it rains and storms and a lone farer hopes to come to a house to shelter him. ... The few that's lucky enough to have gone into a gardinel and win out again... tell that inside it's pinky-walled and dippy-floored, with on the floor all the skulls and bones of those who never did win-out; and from the floor and walls come spouting rivers of wet juice that stings. ... and all at once you know that inside a gardinel is like a stomach."
from "Come Into My Parlor" by Manly Wade Wellman, 1949.
So I turned first to Mr. Google.
"They look some way like a shed or cabin, snug and rightly made, except the open door might could be a mouth, the two little windows could be eyes. Never you'll see one on the main roads or near towns; only back in the thicketty places, by high trails among tall ridges, and they show themselves there when it rains and storms and a lone farer hopes to come to a house to shelter him. ... The few that's lucky enough to have gone into a gardinel and win out again... tell that inside it's pinky-walled and dippy-floored, with on the floor all the skulls and bones of those who never did win-out; and from the floor and walls come spouting rivers of wet juice that stings. ... and all at once you know that inside a gardinel is like a stomach."
from "Come Into My Parlor" by Manly Wade Wellman, 1949.
Oooh!!! Creepy!
Now as far as I can find, the Gardinel, (like the Flat and the Behinder) is not authentic Appalachian folklore -- it's probably Mr. Wellman's imagination at work. But it certainly has echoes of the alluring and deadly Gingerbread House that nearly did for Hansel and Gretel as well as Morgan Le Fay's castle of lard and other dainties that was set as a temptation for Wart in The Once and Future King. And, I realized, to some extent, In a Dark Season's house at Gudger's Stand(also in the forthcoming The Day of Small Things) is a figurative gardinel.
Now as far as I can find, the Gardinel, (like the Flat and the Behinder) is not authentic Appalachian folklore -- it's probably Mr. Wellman's imagination at work. But it certainly has echoes of the alluring and deadly Gingerbread House that nearly did for Hansel and Gretel as well as Morgan Le Fay's castle of lard and other dainties that was set as a temptation for Wart in The Once and Future King. And, I realized, to some extent, In a Dark Season's house at Gudger's Stand(also in the forthcoming The Day of Small Things) is a figurative gardinel.
And now I want very badly to write a short story about a modern-day Gardinel -- with pink wallpaper and deep piled pink carpet and an alluring woman at the door . ..
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