newsletter 3-13

For the past one hundred and fifty years, there is not another spot in Parkersburg that has had more written about it than Holliday Cemetery. Unfortunately, most of the newspaper articles have told of the neglect at the old burying grounds.
The following article, first printed in the West Virginia Hillbilly, was recently found by Christy Little. The September 1983 article was written by Parkersburg resident Paul Arvidson. It inserts a bit of humor into a serious subject.

Nobody cared very much for Riley Suggs. To be honest, Riley liked it that way, and did what he could to encourage folks in their dislike of him. He was rude, inconsiderate, and just generally shorttempered with anybody he encountered. To add to the effect he almost never bathed, and ate onions
and garlic whenever he could. People pretty much
left him alone. Riley lived in a house on Sixth street in Parkersburg just after the turn of the century. He had a small pension from the Government, as a result of a wound he received during the Spanish-American War, and was able to add to his income from time to time by driving mule-drawn supply wagons to and from the oil and gas fields in eastern WoodCounty. It was a quiet life that Riley had, and he really
seemed to prefer it that way. There was only one exceptional thing about it: every two months or so, Riley would go on a "toot." He would purchase several bottles of "demon rum," hole himself up in his home and proceed to down it all. At some point during his "binge," Riley would erupt from his
house like an army of barbarians and conduct a personal raid on Parkersburg. He never bothered people, and mainly tried to tip over water troughs and other such pranks, so the police knew him and anticipated his forays. Riley usually concluded his sprees asleep in the city jail. One night all that changed.
It was May, 1903, and Riley was well into one of his "spells" as he called them. He had been drinking all day, and it was about 11 p.m. when he threw his last "dead soldier" down, hiked up his trousers, and went to do battle with Parkersburg.

He made a big mistake, first thing. Running out of the house, screaming like a Banshee- like he always did- Riley turned left (east) on Sixth street instead of right (west) toward the train depot and the business district. There was really no reason for it. Riley never knew why he did it. The important
thing was that he did it. Riley was moving at a considerable rate of speed by the time he reached the Holliday Cemetery.
Without hesitation, he turned into it declaring at the top of his lungs that he feared neither man or the Devil himself. A low-lying gravestone soon played him foul; he tripped over it and continued down the hill like a cartwheel of arms and legs until he splashed into the lagoon at the bottom.
Naturally, the breath went out of Mr. Suggs with a great WHOOSH! In the silence that followed, he could hear crickets chirping and other normal sounds of the night, then- something else! It was a squishing sound - "like an elephant in quicksand" was the way Riley later described it - and the still intoxicated carouser stood up to better see to identify the source of the noise. Nor had he long to wait. From the lagoon directly in front of him emerged none other than the fabled Creature of the Holliday. Riley had heard the stories about the creature, but had always discounted them, usually
in a rude manner with considerable comment about the mental condition of anybody who believed them. That night in May, 1903, Riley believed them all. For what seemed like an eternity, man and manossum stood facing each other, no more than six feet of swampy ground between them. Then they tried verbal communication, with less than satisfactory results. "Mmmmppppggggh!" said the creature. "Yiiieeeeough!" said Riley. As though the use of his vocal cords had released invisible shackles on his legs, Riley began to move away from the now silent manossum. Had there been light by which to see, Riley's feet would have still been invisible. As quickly as he had entered the cemetery, yet three times, nay, four times more quickly did he depart. Alas, there was no team of officials with stopwatches on Sixth street that night; had there been, a new world record for the one hundred meter dash would have been recorded
- several times.