Legend says the name James Knight is still whispered in Mile Gully never spoken too loudly, never after dark.

Long ago, when the Lyndhurst Estate ruled the land and chains ruled men, a slave named James Knight did something unforgivable. He became a Christian. Worse, he preached.

At night, beneath the same stars that watched his bondage, Knight spoke of freedom, not just of the body, but of the soul. He prayed with fellow slaves. He sang hymns low and steady, words of hope passing from mouth to trembling mouth. When his owner discovered this, rage followed. Faith, in those days, was rebellion.

Knight was sentenced to die.

They beheaded him without ceremony, without prayer, without mercy. His body was discarded, denied a proper burial. His skull still slick with blood, was mounted on a pole and planted in the community as a warning.

This is what happens to men who believe too loudly.

But the warning did not end there.

The old shopkeeper in Mile Gully swore that from the night Knight died, the land changed. Dogs refused to pass certain paths. Wind moved where there were no trees. And the abandoned church half-collapsed, forgotten by time began to speak.

Parishioners reported sounds drifting from the ruins after sunset. High-pitched cries. Groans that rose and fell like tortured breath. Laughter that cut off too suddenly. No one stayed long enough to listen.

Until a reporter decided to.

Drawn by curiosity and perhaps pride the journalist set out one evening to investigate the church himself. As he approached the narrow road, a car passed slowly. The driver leaned out the window and shouted, half-laughing, half-serious:

“Mind di duppy dem run out pon yu!”

The car disappeared. Silence rushed back in.

Standing at the foot of the church steps, the reporter felt it an unnatural stillness. Even the insects had stopped singing. The air pressed heavy against his chest as if warning him away. He climbed anyway.

Inside the doorway, darkness swallowed him whole.

Then it started.

A piercing chorus erupted from within the ruins sharp, frantic, deafening. It sounded like screaming, but wrong somehow. Too many voices. Too fast. The noise bounced off the broken stone walls, rising into a manic symphony that froze him in place.

His heart hammered. His legs refused to move.

For several long seconds, he stood there, convinced he had stepped into something ancient and angry. Something that remembered pain.

When the noise reached its peak, shadows exploded from above.

Bats.

Hundreds of them burst into the open, wings flapping wildly, bodies brushing past his face, pouring into the night sky. The reporter staggered back, gasping, nearly collapsing from relief.

Just bats, he told himself.

Just animals.

Shaking but determined, he stepped inside again, lifting his camera to document the truth. The church was empty now. Quiet. Too quiet.

But as he snapped his final photo, a thought crawled into his mind slow and cold.

Bats could explain the screaming.

They could not explain the footsteps people heard when the church was empty.

They could not explain the voice that sometimes called names.

They could not explain why no one ever stayed long after dark.

And they could not explain why James Knight was never laid to rest.

Because everyone in Mile Gully knows one thing.

Not every sound in that church comes from the living.

And some spirits don’t leave 

they wait.