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This is the
South. When people buy historic homes or build on ancestral
property, a ghost likely comes with the amenities. Here, cities like
Savannah, GA, and Charleston, SC, are famous for their haunted
places. In fact, it’s an industry all its own, incorporating haunted
pub crawls and graveyard walks with the other year-round tourist
draws. Even little ol’ Milledgeville has a trolley tour dedicated to
their living dead.
Though Macon
doesn’t advertise its ghosts as much as others may, locals claim the
city is rife with the paranormal.
An area landmark, the Hay House is among the most frequently cited.
The West Georgia Paranormal Research Society (WGPRS) claims that
employees of the Hay House have seen the apparition of an elderly
woman. They’ve heard breathing over their shoulders and footsteps in
empty halls.
The Examiners
of Paranormal Sites (EOPS) team visited the Hay House in August of
2003 to see if all the haunting rumors were true. Elak Swindell and
his partner Simeon Sierocki got lucky and collected what they said
is quality evidence.
Excerpted from the EOPS investigative journal:
Above the backdoor is a tall stained glass window with a similar
shaped window covered in a dirty screen to its left. This screen
covers up the fact that there is only a small window behind it,
which looks out from a secret room off the main staircase. You’ll
see this area on the tour. The room has either one or two spirits in
it, which can be felt and heard. Standing outside the back door, the
spirit(s) tap on the glass to get people’s attention and will
respond to questions if asked in tapping responses like one hit for
yes and two for no. The glass smacks were loud enough to get
recorded on the team’s tapes at the time.
Although the EOPS team is confident in the data gathered at the Hay
House, Swindell says that information is being kept under raps. “The
Hay House is strongly haunted and will continue to be for years to
come, but the Historical Society does not want people to know about
the spirits so as to keep ghost hunter tourism to a minimum.” Hay
House representative Amanda Respess explains that their “no ghosts”
policy comes down out of Atlanta from the Georgia Trust, the entity
that actually owns the Hay House. “We have to focus on the history,
on things that can actually be proven. We cannot comment on things
of a supernatural nature because of that.”
Conversely, their historic neighbor on Mulberry, the Cannonball
House, once employed author Mary Lee Irby who literally wrote the
book on Macon’s specters. Although The Ghosts of Macon is no longer
in print, it can be found on audiotape at the Cannonball House.
While it detailed some of the area’s most famous hauntings, the most
notable exemption was that of the Cannonball House itself. At the
same time as the book’s pending publication, the Daughters of the
Confederacy, who owned the building then, asked Irby not to include
the Cannonball House.
According to
Executive Director, Kathy Hensley, those stories aren’t yet lost.
One enterprising college intern chronicled her experiences there,
which often took place late at night because her classes wouldn’t
permit a daylight schedule. For those interested in hearing some of
these spooky tales, it really depends on who shows you around.
“I’ve never seen anything myself,” Hensley says, “So it depends on
your guide. Some will really spin a good yarn about it and others
won’t talk about it at all.”
Like the Hay
House, the Cannonball House focuses on history, a part of which is
on display this Saturday, October 27. They’re reenacting the way All
Hallow’s Eve was celebrated in America’s early years, centering it
around harvest. The festivities include cooking cider, storytelling
and turnip carving, which preceded the more modern pumpkin carving.
Inside, the house will be arranged to simulate a Victorian-style
mourning—black cloth on the mirrors, sitting up with the dead and
such.
The famous houses aren’t the only ones with ghosts. Even The 11th
Hour’s current offices at 484 Cherry Street have been home to some
spooky moments. Alone for hours at night on deadline, editor Chris
Horne says he’s felt things that “creeped me out” and has seen
“shadows moving in front of my doorway”. What he later learned about
his office space only confirmed his belief that the building is
haunted. The previous tenants say that, during a meeting, one of
their more “psychically attuned” employees saw a man in 1920s
clothing sitting in what is now Horne’s office. She asked a
co-worker who the man was but no one else could see him.
Similar tales took place at Elizabeth Reed Music Hall. In its last
incarnation, under Jason Moss’s ownership, employees of Liz Reed’s
said they felt an ominous and almost malicious presence upstairs. It
was so bad that no one wanted to go up there after closing. But one
of the more startling moments happened downstairs. Moss was
cleaning up after another night, making conversation with his
employees, when he says he noticed a man and a woman out of the
corner of his eye. He says, “I knew that if I turned to look at
them, they’d disappear so I didn’t. I just kept looking forward.” He
asked if anyone else saw the couple by the pool table, and they did.
On yet another occasion, members of one of the performing bands saw
the ghost of an old lady.
And talk about haunted, the Georgia Children’s Museum is doubly
so—especially right now. Nowhere else in Middle Georgia will you
find such an abundance of spooks, ghouls and monsters… but then
again, it is Halloween and they are doing the annual Underworld
Haunted House. That’s fine but volunteers in the haunted house have
been complaining of some rather unusual activity since they’ve been
sequestered in the basement of the old structure. It’s gotten to the
point where the Central Georgia Ghostbusters are planning to
investigate when the season passes.
Wesleyan’s DaLin Gillis tells a chilly tale about being up past the
witching hour on campus. “I have heard screaming, very painful
sounding, coming from outside. I’ve gone outside twice and nothing
happened. When I go back inside I hear it again. I’ve heard
screaming about three or four times, and its always after midnight.
I think it was 2am when I heard it the first time and about 12:30am
the second time.”
While Macon’s old homes and buildings are common locations for
ghosts, Macon’s cemeteries are also a wellspring of spectral
activity. Jim Barfield, founding president of the Rose Hill
Cemetery Foundation, says Rose Hill was a novelty in its heyday.
Founded in 1840, it was the first garden cemetery in the South. It
is also the final resting place for local celebrities, such as Duane
Allman and Berry Oakley, as well as three Georgia senators. Rose
Hill is not only known for its impressive history, but also for some
unexplained instances when driving among the old graves. Several
people have reported their cars stalling and failing to restart when
passing certain tombstones. EOPS could hardly bypass the famous
burial ground to get some readings. But they didn’t stop there, also
visiting Oak Hill and Riverside. After examining the graveyards for
three hours, Swindell and Sierocki gathered 66 instances of
electronic voice phenomena, recorded sounds from beyond the grave
popularized in the Michael Keaton movie White Noise.
Cynics assert there’s a reasonable explanation for paranormal
experiences, from the voices in Rose Hill Cemetery to the tapping on
windows in the Hay House. But that’s why ghost hunters examine
supernatural cases from a scientific point of view first. They want
to make sure that the data they’ve collected truly are from spirits.
And if possible, they’ll debunk a hoax.
Robert
Hunnicutt, director of the Macon-based Georgia Ghost Society, has
encountered trouble pursuing his passion. Most of it from the major
establishments with a ghostly reputation. “Places like the Hay
House, the Cannonball House, and the 1842 Inn have all been written
about in books as being haunted. But I think they’re afraid of being
associated with hauntings and not with the history of the site.
They’re doing themselves a discredit. It’s part of their history.”
There’s a good
market for haunted cities right now, as tourists flock to these
tours on a daily basis. On Oct. 25-28 in Savannah, where 22 tours
currently operate, Ghost Hounds is hosting GhoStock 5, a convention
for paranormal investigators to come experience Halloween weekend in
the most haunted city in the country. Looking at the attention
Savannah receives for its ghosts, Hunnicutt is frustrated by Macon’s
timidity in dealing with the paranormal. “If Macon would do the
same thing as Savannah, I think we would be known for a lot more
than the Cherry Blossom Festival.”
But some have
tried to make the most of Macon’s ghouls. In fact, Ruth Sykes of the
Convention and Visitors Bureau seems to wish some would do even
more. She says, “I’ve worked with lots of writers on ghost story
travel stuff, and they love it. Travelers love that stuff, but we
don’t have enough product to really sell it on a regular basis.
There are definitely lots of stories out there, if someone would
just take the initiative to package and make it available on a
regular basis.”
Marty Willet,
a local historian, has conducted a tour called Sidney’s Spirits
Stroll for the last several years. Willet not only conducted the
tour, but also portrayed the ghost of Sidney Lanier, the great local
poet and musician.
“I love it and
enjoy sharing the fun folklore of Macon with others. When the tour
was in operation, homeowners on College Street would actually come
out of their houses and share their own ghost stories with us. If
people gave me the ok, I would start up the tour tomorrow if I
could.”
But really,
Sykes has a point. There certainly seems to be a dearth of outlets
for Macon’s hauntings. Obviously the stories aren’t lacking, just
the folks willing to put in the work to do a little research,
applying ample elbow grease to make the tours happen, to create the
product.
The hard work doesn’t go away on the investigative side no matter
how much fun those TV shows are. Hunnicutt can testify to that. “We
set up a tech station where all the computer monitors are. We also
use camcorders, night shot cameras, and infrared cameras, which
focus on hot spots where most of the activity has been seen.” But
it’s more than just physical labor. The most important equipment to
have with you on an investigation is your brain, your common sense.
Although that isn’t a problem for professionals, more and more
people are masquerading as ghost hunters without any previous
experience.
Shows like the
Sci-Fi Channel’s Ghost Hunters use actual footage from
investigations, which feed the public interest in the field. That
growing along with the easy access to certain technology, makes
midnight trips to a graveyard more tempting. Especially to
thrill-seeking teenagers and sundry crackpots.
Chace Ambrose
of the Central Georgia Ghostbusters sees some of this as an obvious
disrespect to professional paranormal investigators. “Now everyone
with an over the counter EMF meter and a camera wants to hunt
ghosts, which is fine in and of itself. The problem is there are
those that don't respect private property. Why just a few months
ago, a group of amateur ghost hunters were arrested for trespassing
while doing a hunt. Things like that give all of us a bad name
because how does an average Joe determine which group is legitimate
and which is not?”
Somewhere between the folklore of favorite ghost stories and the
hi-tech advances in parapsychology, the skeptic still stands.
Hunnicutt says, “To me, skepticism just means you haven’t formed an
opinion yet. But many people call skeptics unbelievers.”
Coming across
a ghost in person is the quickest way to form an opinion on the
matter. So though Macon may never embrace its chilling apparitions,
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