Are you interested? Monster. Are you curious about the origin? An influence upon it and on the present day. If so, sit back, relax, and welcome to Seven Demonology, the podcast that explores all of this and more.
Hello all. Welcome back to another episode of Southern Demonology. And as always, I am your host, JJ. I hope everyone's been having a wonderful summer. Even though I am from Tennessee, which, while not the most extreme of locations, is well known for its hot weather. And as a result, you may find it interesting to know that I abhor hot weather. I melt in almost a literal sense of the word. And I typically avoid going outside if I can all help it unless I need to. However, summer has taken on a brand new meaning for me.
Where it used to be one of the worst times of the year, now I really look forward to it. And it's simply because of the fact that I get my son during the summer. He is fifteen now, and luckily he's taken after me, so he is a big old geek, and I love every single moment of that. And when we get together, we geek out on Gundam and video games and horror movies. It is such an amazing time. Didn't much care for that. And I did that over the course of four days, like one day straight there, uh 14 hours, and then on the way back, straight with only two days of rest in between.
So that wasn't the most fun. However, you know, in addition to getting home, I got to spend you know some good times uh with my mom, which with the pandemic haven't really gotten to spend a lot of you know actual physical time with, and that was amazing. But there was one other reason I chose to drive to Tennessee rather than just fly my son here, and that was to see my uncle. Uh my uncle Ernest one of the best men I have ever known, hands down. He about a decade ago, he was diagnosed with a systemic lung disease. And doctors told him he had probably six months at most.
And he lived out that year. Thank God. And the next and the next and it just kept going to the point where it kind of faded in the back of all of our heads except for his when his father-in-law passed away, Uncle Billy Uncle Billy was another remarkable man. Didn't have an education, but yet he had a wood workshop of anyone's dreams. And the stuff that that man could make, everything from iron balancing toys to the most intricately carved furniture, the man was a genius. But more than that, he was just one of the nicest people you could have ever met. I adored the man.
But when he passed away, my Uncle Ernest got up and spoke on behalf of Uncle Billy. And there wasn't a dry eye in the house. Because he related how he was supposed to go first and yet he didn't. And he didn't know why. In addition to regaling the audience of you know just how spectacular a man his father-in-law was, he rooted it all with a sense of a joy for life. My Uncle Ernest was an extremely intelligent man. And while I got to to be in Tennessee, uh I went there and stayed with him for quite a while. And we just talked.
We sat on his front porch and played with his bulldog rubble and we just chatted about the past. But during the entire time I knew that I was probably saying goodbye. Because he had been getting weaker he had to retire from his job. And he was on hospice care. And when a doctor says you're on hospice care, if you live more than three months, it's uh this is kind of a miracle. And that time frame was coming up. And he'd have been really sick. Anyway, I came back with my boy. We were geeking out and toward the end of my son's stay, I get word that my uncle had fallen ill.
And then he made a comeback. Most of my family was there at his place and he had been in and out of consciousness for quite a while. But then he came too and he was actually demanding all of the desserts that my mom and aunts are famous for. My Aunt Sandy, he wanted a chocolate pie. For my mom, he wanted her banana pudding. And he got 'em. And he ate some. But that was really the last time that he was conscious. And then at the very end of June. So in less than a month, I drove back to Tennessee to say farewell to a man who has shaped a large part of my life.
To those who have listened to this podcast, you know, you know that I did not grow up with a father. My mom and my grandmother served as my everything. But my Uncle Ernest. He was always there. Always. And he was a substitute father to me. I have so many memories of the man. So before I go any further, I do have to apologize. This will not be a paranormal related or video uh or podcast. This is just more of a memorandum to a really great man. And yes, there will be some things, if you're ever interested in southern culture, you know, this will definitely feature a lot of that.
Uh next week's video will be much more in line with what we always do here uh on Southern Demonology. But if anyone ever deserved to be honored, it was Ernest Kinley Green. And it may not be much of an honor to be talked about on a podcast, but it's what I can do. Ernest was always a constant in my life. I remember when I was three years old, he took me out walking in back of our property, and there's about a hundred acres back there. There's some really interesting stuff. I remember that he stopped on the trail and pretended that he had hurt his leg.
He said that he had broken it and that I needed to walk back to get help. But this is a man who has teased me probably before the day I was born, and somehow I knew that this was all a lie. So I refused to budge, and I stayed right there with him, and he tried, God bless him, I don't know what he was doing, but he tried for about 10 minutes to get me to go, and I just would not until he finally gave up the ghost and just started walking again. That's one of my earliest memories. And it was frightening, but yet we still had a good time walking back together.
He was the person who when I was five maybe gave me an unripe persimmon to eat. If you've never had the pleasure of eating an unripe persimmon, let me just tell you what it does. So I took a big old bite out of this rather small fruit, and suddenly my tongue was able to touch every single bit of my mouth all at the same time. And I had no idea what was happening. I tried to shout, I tried to scream, all that came out was You see, an unripe persimmon will, for some god awful reason, actually draw out all moisture in your mouth. So you have literally no room for your tongue to move.
He thought that was absolutely hilarious. I did not. I was petrified for about five minutes until the effect finally wore off, thank goodness. I remember walking up to him when he was sitting down in our old house, what is now our old house, and seeing a can of Dr. Pepper in front of him and reaching and grabbing for it and drinking it. And it wasn't Dr. Pepper. It was an ashtray. And I got a full mouth of ashes. That was a lot of fun. I know all of these early memories sound horrible, but they're not. Our family has a tradition of teasing each other, uh, sometimes way beyond the pale.
Um and God knows I have continued that with my son, uh, probably much more than he likes. Not in a mean-spirited way, but just joking around, picking on you. There's an old phrase in which we have if I don't pick on you, I don't like you. And that is pretty much accurate as far as I can tell. Now, Ernest was a man who he taught me how to drive. And I remember our very first lesson, we were on a back road, and we were on a road in which teed out. So you had to come to a stop, look both ways, and then turn either right or left, because there was no road forward. Well, I didn't hit the brake.
I went off into the ditch rather than stopping. He didn't get mad at me, didn't say a word. We just backed the vehicle up and we kept on going. In fact, for our very final driving lesson, we were in Nashville, which is about an hour and a half away. I don't remember why. And he then told me to drive back home. Going as fast as I can. And we were in the middle of a hellacious rainstorm. I was hydroplaning, we were on back roads, this wasn't an interstate. I had to have been going 65 almost the entire way.
And I don't know if he was just really good at faking it or if he just truly had balls of steel, because that man fell asleep. And I got his home. And so I passed my very final driving lesson. At the funeral, he had a friend of his who he wanted to speak for him. And this guy did not do a good job at all.
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Told an obviously fake story about my grandmother and him. And but uh the the thing that killed me was that the man talked about himself and the effect that my uncle Ernest had upon him. And that drove me crazy. It he didn't speak to Ernest as a man, but rather how he felt about him. And I wanted to get up there and say something not against the preacher, but to talk about Ernest. But then I kind of realized I would fall into the exact same boat. As you've listened to this, it's all about what he did for me, what a great influence. Impact that he had upon my life.
But I have yet to really talk about the man himself. And so I'm going to attempt to do that. I'm going to divorce myself from this talk and just speak to the man. Ernest Kenley Green was the youngest boy of five. My mom was the next youngest. And they got along like peas in a pod. Now he was a very rambunctious kid. He actually shot my mom in the butt with a bow and arrow when he was a boy. And rather than face up to it, he ran away. He actually ran over across the field and hid at my great aunt Ruth's and uh Uncle Thomas' house for a while. But then he got bored.
So he ran back across the field and he saw that my grandmother was still looking for him. So he went and hid behind a bush near the road. But he got bored of that. And so he finally came trudging back. And my grandmother jerked him up and beat him. And at the end of the day she said, Boy, I'm not beating you because of what you did. I'm beating you because you ran away from me. And you don't ever do that. He told that story often, and so does my mom. And I think it stuck with him. Because I can't remember a time where he did run away from something. He entered into the army.
Became a weapons specialist. I told you the man was smart. And he was. He may not have had academic degrees behind his name. But he could pick up any skill that you ever put in front of him. And he was naturally intelligent and eloquent. He suffered some horrendous hardships. But he was the most loving family man. The most loving man that I have ever had the privilege of of meeting. He was such an amazing person. He didn't stop. He worked his fingers to the bone. He could have worked all day long, and yet he would still come out and make time for me. His sons.
His stepson, his stepdaughter, his grandkids. He always had a smile on his face. And when you talk to him on the phone, whether he was sick or not, he would always just put you so at ease. And one thing and w after he got his diagnosis that he did you know his time was numbered. And of course all of our time is numbered. But to have a bounding box suddenly placed upon that is quite a shock. But ever since then he always made the point to tell you how he felt about you in a positive way. He would end every call with I love you. Or if he was proud of you. He never did that before.
I mean, the men in our family, you know, they were brought up to to be tough. Yes, you know, my mom and my grandmother always said I love you, you know, multiple times a day. But the men just didn't. But he did. And nothing I've said really it still does it no justice green. I wish it did. Uh I wish I could broadcast out his greatness. And even though I knew on that last visit I was probably saying goodbye. And I kick myself every day for this. I I did not try to reach in and grab his thoughts. We talked about some old stories, we talked about what was happening, how he was feeling.
But most of all, we were both trying to do everything that we could. Not to say goodbye. My uncle He had two different rites done at his funeral. The first was a Masonic rite, because he was a Mason. He inducted me. He's the one who taught me everything that I needed to memorize. And then he had a military send-off. I got the honor, along with two of my cousins, to be a pallbearer for him. But there are two things that are related to the things that I normally talk about here. The first is near the very end.
He told my mom, if you hear a whipperwheel sing after I die, then you know that I'm okay. There are in our area of Tennessee, there are two distinctive calls of a whipperwheel. Which are, if you don't know, extremely tiny birds. I mean, if they're four inches tall, it's kind of a miracle. But yet they make a call that re can resonate throughout an entire valley. And there are two types. There's a Dutch whipper will, which doesn't make a full sound, and then there's the true whippo, which actually like announced you can actually uh do the onomonopeia to the call. Whippoor will, whipper will.
And they're kind of rare now. You don't really hear true whipper will is actually going off that much. The night that he died. Right afterwards my mom went outside on the deck. And what's the first thing that she heard? A true report. After we laid my uncle to rest, we came back to my mom's and I heard some scrabbling on the tin roof of our old house. And I look up and I've never seen this before. There were three buzzards sitting on top of the old house. And they stayed there. It wasn't just for a little bit, they stayed there for hours.
If you're not familiar with the term, a buzzard is very much like a vulture. They eat dead animals. So, you know, typically whenever they have scouted a dead animal, they fly in circles around. And that's how you know that there's something dead around. But they didn't fly. They just sat on that old house. I've actually got a picture of it up in our Discord server just to prove that I'm not just saying things. So this may not be of any particular interest to uh anyone besides listening to a few glimpses of my childhood, but most importantly, hearing about a good man who is no longer with us.
I I appreciate you letting me ramble. And I do promise that there will be more episodes coming up. Um I have taken I had taken some time off uh because I did go to Tennessee, and then when I had my son, I just I wanted to focus on him. Um I hadn't even really been that active in Discord during that time. Uh but everything's back now. Um we've actually uh I've actually revamped the Discord server a decent bit. Uh I've added a new Discord bot called Mi 6. Um and it offers levels and XP and uh a couple of cool little features to it, a leaderboard.
Uh so and we're up to actually over 70 something people now in our Discord. Uh and some really uh great people are there. We've had some really interesting discussions. Uh we've even we're actually much more international now. You know, uh we'd have a few people from other places besides the US, but uh we had one member who recently joined from Argentina and another one from Romania, and it's it's fantastic. I mean, some of the conversations that we've had, uh one of the recently joined members was a psychologist, and we got talking about the idea of sense of self.
And um, if if you want to meet some really nice people who share the same kind of interest that you do, I highly encourage you to come by and check it out. Uh you can find the info on how to join uh through the invitation link um on our uh website at southerndemonology.com. Um but yeah, uh please feel free to come by. Um oh and one last thing, we I am doing a giveaway. Um I had uh two bookmarks that were created. They're very thin sheets of wood in which uh the Southern Demonology logo was uh burned into it by a really talented artist named Mary. Uh it's phenomenal. Uh they're beautiful.
I actually want to keep one for myself, but she made two just for the purpose of this giveaway, and uh I couldn't rob her of uh seeing those disseminated out into the world. So if you want to qualify for a chance, uh all you have to do is join our Discord and go into our giveaway channel and simply say what book you would most you want to use these bookmarks in. Yes, it's silly, but you know, I just I want to hear from people. I would love to see our membership grow. Uh, but more than that, I would love to give these bookmarks away because they are gorgeous.
Uh, and I really think that you would like them. I do have pictures up uh in our Discord of what they look like in the same channel. Uh so feel free to drop by and uh register for a chance. It would be great to see these go to a wonderful home. Uh, and I have full um links to uh Mary's uh website uh and how you can actually commission some um some possible works from her. So again, thank you for joining. I really do appreciate it. Uh I'm sorry I've been away, but I do have three or four other episodes already in the works.
Um hopefully I'll be able to release one even this coming weekend so you get a bit of a double dip. So I hope everyone's having a wonderful summer, and most importantly, that you're staying safe out there, especially with the rise of the Delta variant, and if you're in the US, the strange politicization of all of this stuff regarding the pandemic. Just keep yourself safe. That's all I ask. Anyway, have a great time, and I will see you next time on Southern Demonology.