| Sometimes,
on a quiet evening, as legend stands, a young girl's laughter can be
heard over the Muckalee Creek Bridge over Three Bridges Road. Also,
the sound of clanking a wooden stick over the rail posts leading up
to the concrete sides of the bridge can be heard.
Although the owners of the land, the
Wise family, have never experienced the ghost, legend stands that a
little girl was thrown over the bridge into Muckalee Creek by her
mother in the mid-1800s, and her spirit has remained at the site
ever since.
When the founder and director of
Georgia's Ghost Society, fifteen-year veteran Robert Hunnicutt, and
the Cordele mother-daughter ghost-hunting team of Kelley and Melissa
Posey, heard about the apparition on the road, the trio decided to
let me tag along while they checked out the scene.
Our meeting place was at Waffle
House, where Hunnicutt would explain the game plan. He'd brought
with him a temperature gauge since ghostly energy, he says, tends to
be chilly -- if the temperature drops 20 degrees or more, that's a
sign of a spirit lurking.
The ghost hunter also brought a video
camera -- Hunnicutt actually replayed a video for the mother and
daughter team and myself a scene that he shot while on location --
everyone had been documented as downstairs, and, by using infrared
lighting and aiming the camera upstairs into an otherwise completely
dark house, a face of a young male creeps around the corner of the
top of the stairs then vanishes. Also, Hunnicutt had a still shot
camera, which he would use the most in our investigation, to capture
orbs. Orbs, as Hunnicutt defined them, are spherical, bright objects
that cannot be seen with the naked eye, but can be caught with a
still shot camera. According to www.theshadowlands.net, orbs have
not been explained by the scientific community yet, but a theory
stands that any energy bouncing around in the world, such as a flash
from a camera, moonshine or even that of a power line, may bounce
off a spirit's energy, thereby giving the quick snapshot a glimpse
into the spiritual world whereas the human eye, because the energy
bounces so quickly, would not be able to catch the reflection.
A tape recorder also was in
Hunnicutt's pocket during the ghost hunt to pick up electronic voice
phenomena, or EVP, that's been represented in movies such as "The
Sixth Sense" and "White Noise." According to Hunnicutt, tape
recorders will pick up voices undetected by the human ear at the
time. According to www. aaevp.com, messages are filtered
telekinetically, so even though the human ear can't pick up the
sound waves, the tape recorder can.
There are different types of
hauntings, Hunnicutt said. First, he said, there's a residual
haunting, where a ghost has a strong emotional tie to a certain
place, whether it's a favorite place or the place of their death.
Then, there are spirits who aren't aware they're dead, and continue
with their daily life as if they were still alive. Thirdly, there
are evil spirits; according to Hunnicutt, these spirits have never
lived as a human -- they're the ones who usually cause trouble. The
Three Bridges Road haunting, Hunnicutt said, most likely was a
residual haunting.
As night fell, the three-car train
headed out U.S. Highway 19 to mile marker two, where we took a left
on Three Bridges Road, then drove about half a mile down a paved
road, where the road turned into dirt. It was then about three
quarters of a mile to the first bridge. (There are only two bridges
on the road.)
It was a dark, cloudless, moonless,
chilly evening -- the first chilly evening of the season -- as the
four of us piled out of the three-car motorcade. Peering over the
bridge, a dark waterway rushed under us making an almost silent
swishing sound. As our eyes adjusted, I turned my tape recorder on
as Hunnicutt flashed a few photos across the wide stream, whose
banks were covered in tree branches climbing into the waterway. It
was silent except for an owl's hoot. Whispering between the Posey's
could be heard. About two hours were spent making notes, flashing
photos and observing the territory.
In one particularly creepy moment
while Hunnicutt and the Posey's were peering over the south part of
the bridge, Hunnicutt's temperature gauge dropped from 64 degrees to
16 degrees within a matter of four seconds, then just as quickly as
it had dropped, the reading jumped back to 64.
I, however, had been on the opposite side of the bridge flashing
photos at the time, so I didn't feel the drop, but I heard, "Did you
feel that?" from Melissa Posey, and "Yeah -- it was like ice," from
Kelley Posey.
The reading on Hunnicutt's temperature proved the incident had been
accurate.
Although none of us received any EVP recordings, Hunnicutt and I
both captured numerous orbs.
"This is the type of place I'd like to set up and investigate all
night," Hunnicutt said at the end of the evening.
The four of us never heard the clanking of the girl's stick
along the rail or her laughter that night, but maybe, late one
night, a lonely car cutting through from State Highway 377 to U.S.
Highway 19 will have their windows down and have an encounter with
the little girl. Although the ghost hunters haven't set an exact
time to come back and wait for the girl all night, Hunnicutt said
he'd like to come back to
Americus more often
and investigate more haunted spots such as the Windsor Hotel.
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