‘I read your fate for one dollar’, the Farmer Laughed… until Everything the Slave Said Came True | HO!!

A Summer Like No Other

The year was 1844, and the Mississippi sun hung low and merciless over the cotton fields of Willow Creek, twenty miles east of Natchez. The air was heavy with the scent of soil and sweat — the season of harvest, when fortunes were made and lives were broken.

Among the grand plantations that dotted the horizon stood Webb Manor, a sprawling estate owned by Josiah Webb, a third-generation planter whose family had prospered since Mississippi’s early statehood.

To the townsfolk, Webb was a respectable man — wealthy, measured, even pious by the standards of his time. But on the ledger pages of his plantation, the truth was colder: forty-seven enslaved men, women, and children worked his fields from dawn to dusk, their labor fueling his “moderate temperament” and his mansion’s splendor.

By all accounts, that harvest began as one of the best in years. Then a man named Solomon arrived.

The Man Who Read Fortunes

Solomon was an elderly enslaved man purchased that summer from a nearby estate that had fallen into debt. His age — estimated near sixty — made him less suited for the grueling work of picking cotton. But within weeks of his arrival, something about him unsettled the other workers.

On a sweltering September afternoon, Webb spotted a small group gathered under a sycamore tree. At its center sat Solomon, the others handing him coins, buttons, even scraps of cloth.

“What business is this?” Webb demanded.

“Reading fortunes, Master Webb,” Solomon replied calmly, his voice “dry as cotton ready for picking,” as Webb would later write in a letter to his brother-in-law. “One penny a fate.”

Webb laughed, amused by the audacity. “A penny? I’ll give you a whole dollar if you can read mine.”

Solomon looked up — an act of defiance that would have cost most men a whipping — and met Webb’s gaze without fear.

“Tell me what you hold most dear,” he said.

“My tobacco,” Webb smirked. “A new pipe from New Orleans.”

Solomon closed his eyes. His words came low and measured.

“Before the moon is full again, what you hold most dear will turn to ash.

Before the harvest is done, your fields will run red.

Before winter comes, you will bury what you love.

And before the year turns, you yourself will know the taste of chains.”

Webb threw his head back and laughed — loud enough for everyone to hear — and tossed a silver dollar into the dust. Then he turned and walked away.

Three nights later, the first prophecy came true.

The Fire Under the Sycamore

Under a fat Mississippi moon, Webb sat on his porch smoking that prized New Orleans tobacco. A sudden shout shattered the quiet — the stables were burning.

A gust of wind carried embers across the lawn, igniting the dry grass and the very pouch of tobacco Webb had left beside him. The fire consumed the stables, two horses, and every ounce of his “most dear” possession.

As Webb stared into the smoldering ruins, the words echoed in his mind: “What you hold most dear will turn to ash.”

He slept little that night.

The Blood in the Fields

Weeks passed. The harvest ripened under relentless heat. Then came the snakes.

Water moccasins and copperheads flooded the fields in unprecedented numbers, biting several workers. None were fatal — until the overseer, William Harding, was struck on the leg by a cottonmouth hidden in the plants.

The doctor from Natchez performed an amputation on the wooden floor of a toolshed. Harding died by dawn. Rain soon followed, washing the blood from the floorboards into the fields, staining the soil crimson.

“Before the harvest is done,” Solomon had said, “your fields will run red.”

The Child in the Cold

By late autumn, the Webbs’ youngest daughter, Sarah, fell ill. She was delicate from birth, plagued by weak lungs. Her fever came swiftly and left no mercy.

Dr. Whitmore’s treatments — bloodletting and bitter herbs — only hastened the inevitable. On November 20th, 1844, as the first winter winds swept through Mississippi, Sarah Webb died.

She was buried on the hill overlooking Willow Creek, her grave marked by a small marble stone that remains today.

Eliza Webb, Josiah’s wife, wrote in her diary:

“My husband speaks little now. He walks the fields at night and mutters of the old man’s curse. He will not look upon Sarah’s resting place.”

Three prophecies had come true. One remained.

The Chains of His Own Making

In early December, Webb’s letters grew frantic. He could not eat, could not sleep. Servants whispered that he paced the halls mumbling about “the taste of chains.”

At last, he ordered Solomon locked in the plantation’s small jail — a rough shed with iron restraints, built to punish runaways.

After eleven days, Webb entered the jail himself, pistol in hand. No one knows what passed between them. But when the overseer arrived after hearing a gunshot, Solomon sat unharmed, and Webb stood in the corner, eyes vacant, lips moving soundlessly.

Three days later, his brother-in-law arrived from Jackson and had him committed to the Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum, newly opened in 1842. The admission record still exists.

Diagnosis: acute melancholia with paranoia and catatonia.

Webb died two years later — shackled to his bed.

The Fortune That Lingered

Solomon vanished from the records soon after. Some said he was sold off to pay the estate’s debts. Others whispered he escaped into the thick forests of Adams County, where communities of free Black families and runaways hid from patrols.

A century later, oral histories collected by researchers from Tougaloo College suggested a different ending. An elderly woman named Clara Johnson, claiming descent from one of Webb Manor’s enslaved families, told them Solomon had survived for nearly twenty years in hiding.

“He could see what was coming,” she said. “And he could make what was coming happen.”

According to her, patrols searching the woods always grew disoriented — walking in circles, hearing voices in the dark. County reports from that era corroborate this strange detail: multiple accounts of search parties “losing their way” near Willow Creek.

Solomon, Johnson said, died in 1863, just months before the Emancipation Proclamation reached Mississippi. He passed his “gift” to his granddaughter with a warning: “The seeing comes at a price. Use it rarely, and never for gain.”

Echoes Through Generations

In 1962, a century after Solomon’s death, Dr. Marcus Thompson, one of the Tougaloo researchers, recorded a final, chilling conversation with Clara Johnson. Before he left her porch, she said quietly, “Before the leaves fall, you’ll receive a letter. What was lost will be found.”

Weeks later, as autumn blanketed the campus, Dr. Thompson received a letter postmarked from Oregon — a photograph of his younger brother, missing for seven years and presumed dead. Alive. The brother had suffered amnesia after an accident, living a new life until a newspaper mention of Thompson revived his memory.

Thompson’s academic notes described the experience as “a test of skepticism.” His private journal called it something else entirely: “proof that the past sometimes whispers to the living.”

The Curse That Would Not Die

By the mid-20th century, Webb Manor was little more than ruins — burned in the Civil War, the land overgrown with vines and moss. Yet strange stories persisted.

Visitors to the site reported temperature drops, the sound of chains, and sometimes a voice — faint but distinct — asking, “What do you hold dear?”

In 1952, archaeologists unearthed a small leather pouch buried near the old jail’s foundation. Inside: a riverstone etched with symbols, a folded scrap of paper reading “The reader sees, but the listener chooses”, and a tarnished silver dollar dated 1844.

Was it the same coin Webb tossed at Solomon’s feet? No one could say.

$1 for Your Fate

In 2015, a paranormal investigation team spent the night at the site. Their recorders captured a whisper repeating three phrases: “What do you hold dear?”, “Before the year turns”, and most often, “One dollar for your fate.”

Weeks later, the lead investigator quit the field altogether. Friends claimed she’d received a sudden inheritance — predicted by a fortune teller she’d visited as a joke after returning from the trip.

Locals now warn visitors not to linger near the jail foundation at dusk. Some claim to have seen an elderly man seated where Solomon once sat, offering to read their fortunes for a single dollar.

Most decline. A few accept. Some leave laughing — until life proves otherwise.

The Price of Knowing

Today, Webb Manor Historical Site draws tourists from across the country. Guides speak of architecture and cotton yields, but visitors inevitably ask about the fortune-teller slave and the curse that drove the master mad.

In a glass case near the exit, a single coin gleams beneath museum lights: a silver dollar, 1844.

Most walk past it without a glance. But some pause — as if waiting for something unseen. Those are the ones the guides quietly warn:

“Whatever you’re looking for here, be sure you’re ready to find it. Some knowledge can’t be returned.”

And if you stay too long by the jail’s crumbling foundation, as the sun sets behind the oaks, you might feel the air grow cold and hear that dry voice on the wind —

“One dollar for your fate.”

Whether you accept or not is up to you. But as Josiah Webb learned nearly two centuries ago, some fortunes come true — whether you believe in them or not.