CVPV

continued..

One sailor reported that he passed by just as the missing fisherman held his catch up in the air, saluting his fellow fisherman. His remains were never found. Although the disappearance was investigated, it had never been solved. The incident was never ruled a murder or a suicide, because the police never found a body.

Some of the local residents thought that he was simply eaten by an alligator or some other swamp beast. Other local folks thought that he may have killed himself, since his pregnant wife was killed a year earlier by an alligator that came calling. A few townsfolk even thought that it was possible that he was murdered for the gold that he kept buried beneath the planks in his shanty in the heart the swamp.

The legend of the lone fisherman is notorious in this part of the bayou. Ever since the fisherman’s disappearance, there have been many sightings of him reported. None of these eyewitness accounts could ever be verified. The lone fisherman had become just another spooky story of the bayou.

All of this commotion was enough to dampen the spirit of any picnic. Soon things were being packed away. Various family members began hugging, bidding their loved ones farewell. It seemed that they couldn’t leave the picnic fast enough. They hopped on their boats, vanishing into the murky bog.

A few days later, I was going through the pictures from the picnic. I came across one in particular that interested me. It was the photograph of an older gentleman on the dock, near the grassy spot on which we had picnicked. The strange thing about the photograph was that no one else who was at the picnic seemed to be in the picture. Instead, there was a house or cabin behind him.

There were no tables covered with food. There were no people except the lone man holding his catch. My mind was whirling with questions. Who was this man? Where is everyone from the picnic? How could this happen? Why was there a cabin in the photo?

Suddenly it dawned on me. No, it simply couldn’t be. Could this be an actual photo of the infamous lone fisherman? Is it possible that somehow we captured his image on film? What else could explain this strange photo?

I held the photograph gingerly, as if it might actually bite me. I noticed the foggy quality near the fisherman’s feet. The image gave me such an eerie feeling. I tried to shake the spooky feeling, but it gnawed at me.

When my husband came home, I showed him the photo. He couldn’t explain it either. He told me that he would bring it to work the next day. There was an old-timer that he thought knew the fisherman before he had disappeared.

When my husband came home from work the next day, he looked as if he had seen a ghost. Reaching into his jacket pocket, he brought out a photocopy of a photo. When he handed it to me, and I noticed his hands shaking. His fingers were trembling so much that he nearly dropped it to the floor.

As the image came into focus, I realized that it was a picture of the same man in my photograph. He looked nearly the same age, but in this photo he was wearing dressy clothes. I noticed that he was standing next to a pretty young girl.

My husband told me that this was his wedding photo from the local paper’s archives. After talking to the old man that he worked with, his curiosity was piqued. He headed down to the local newspaper office on his lunch hour, and came across this photo.

How was it possible that I held in my hand a picture of the same man, nearly sixty years after he was reported missing? I felt my blood run cold. There could be only one explanation. The lonely fisherman paid our picnic a visit on that fateful July afternoon.