'You've got to see this:' Chain saw unveils image of face

From Staff Reports

It's not that unusual for someone to bring to a newspaper office a distinctive piece of vegetation with an unusual shape or coloration.

Sort of like a visage of Elvis in a screen door, but Mother Nature's creation.

Typically it takes a vivid imagination and some serious squinting to see any resemblance between a potato and Richard Nixon.

But when Ernest Ward walked into The Daily Times front lobby Monday carrying a sawed off tree limb, there was a bit of a buzz.

"You've got to see this."

"Isn't that crazy."

"Wow, that's weird. "

"You could sell it on eBay, I'm telling you."

Ward was carrying a short log with a cut end displaying an uncanny resemblance to a human face.

Adding to the intrigue, it came from a graveyard -- Magnolia Cemetery at Montvale Road and Goddard Avenue in Maryville.

Ward is a groundskeeper at the cemetery. On Monday morning, Ernest and his brother Troy Ward were sawing up fallen branches left from a weekend storm. Joan Denney was behind them, clearing debris from the ground.

Here's how Ernest Ward tells it:

"Well, there's a great big limb -- about that big around -- fell from a big oak tree. So we had to cut it up and get rid of it. Worked there for 16 years -- mow, weeding, pick up limbs, whatever.

"Got a woman (Denney) working up there. We were cleaning the mess up. I was up there in front of the shed and she come up through there carrying a log.

"I said, 'Where you going with that?' She said, 'It's going home with me.' I said, 'Well, there's a lot more down there.' She says, 'I want this one.'

"And then she showed me. I'll give it back to her, but I figured you might want to show it in the paper, just for the heck of it.

"There's another guy that used to work there, said it was a spirit," Ward said, chuckling. "Who he is, I don't know."