Why the Paranormal?
I made a
recent trip to Southport, NC, mainly to go fishing, but I took one afternoon to
do a little “ghost hunting” in the old Southport Burial Grounds and around the
grounds of Fort Johnston, now a visitor center on the Cape Fear River. The fort was originally built in the mid-18th
century to protect the coastal town from attack by the Spanish and French.
I started in
the old cemetery which has grave markers dating back to about the time of the
construction of Fort Johnston, a couple of blocks away. I spent time perusing the headstone and just
enjoying the peaceful serenity beneath the oak tree canopy. I snapped a number of photos but nothing out
of the ordinary caught my attention. I
also conducted a couple of EVP sessions and checked for EMF activity. I got one small unexplainable spike on the
EMF meter so I quickly took out my voice recorder and began recording and
asking questions. While I did not record
any voices, there was some unexplained static interference on the recording
right after the EMF spike. I checked
overhead and around the immediate area for anything that may have caused the
spike, but saw nothing that would explain it.
Further, I returned to that same area two more times but did not get the
same spike, nor did I get any further interference on the voice recorder. I can’t say for certain that this was due to
any paranormal activity, but I did find it odd, especially since I could not
replicate the spike or the static interference on the recorder.
I then walked
over the visitor center, which was closed for the day, but I could still walk
around the grounds. I snapped a number
of photos and did an EMF sweep as well as an EVP session, all with negative
results. I did snap a photo of an
upstairs window of the maritime museum adjacent to the visitor center, and
while I’d love to say that the image I captured was paranormal, I have to tell
you that it is of a ghostly looking figure purposely posed in the window
looking out toward the river. I’ve
included the photograph here for your pleasure – can you make out the
figure? Looks pretty eerie, huh?
So while my
little expedition did not turn up anything, I did sit there on a swing looking
out over the Cape Fear and pondered the reasons for my affinity for the
paranormal. I have been fascinated with
“ghost stories” since I was a kid, but I don’t know for sure how it began. I can recall my father and his brothers
telling ghost stories around the camp fire when we would go camping, and I
don’t mean traditional ghost stories, but rather odd situations they had
encountered while growing up in Boone, NC.
My grandmother also told me a tale about being in the house with just my
youngest uncle one afternoon when she heard a ball come bouncing down the
steps. No one was upstairs and my uncle,
who was very young at the time, was in the same room with my grandmother, so
there was no explanation for the bouncing ball.
I also recall
checking out library books that contained ghost stories. My favorite was Ghosts of the Carolinas, by
Nancy Roberts. I must have checked that
book out a dozen times and the stories never got old. I also enjoyed books about pirates of the NC
coast. Perhaps it was these books that
made me imagine that the church up the street from my childhood home was
haunted. It had a tall steeple with
frosted windows looking out from the belfry.
I once imagined seeing a figure pass in front of one of those windows
and I was ever convinced the place was haunted.
One afternoon, while playing in the church playground, a friend of mine
and I came across a door that was swinging open on the side of the church
building. We didn’t know where it led,
but would later find that it was a storage room. As we approached the door, I eased it back
far enough for us to peer inside and was startled to find this large white
image standing before us. I don’t have
to tell you that we hightailed it away from that door as fast as we could run
and hid by the swings, watching for any movement around the open door. After what seemed like a long time, but I’m
sure it was just a couple of minutes, we braved another peek to see if this
ghostly figure was still present. It
was, but this time I looked a little closer and was able to discover that my
ghost was merely a white canvass sheet draped over a step ladder. Apparently
the maintenance man had done some painting earlier and did not secure the door
to the utility room when he returned his ladder and drop cloth. While it was both a relief and a
disappointment to discover the identity of our phantom, I still can feel the
sudden, frightful shock upon encountering the “ghost.”
I would
continue to be interested in ghostly stories and horror movies through my teens
and into young adulthood. Finally, when
I was in college, I had what I truly believe to be my first encounter with the
paranormal. My family moved into a
rental house on the eastside of Charlotte, NC.
I loved it because my room was an add-on and was the result of the owner
having closed in the original carport.
It was separated from the rest of the house by a small atrium with my own
entrance through a rear door. I even had
my own bathroom and shower. I was living
the high life! But I soon began to hear
strange scratching noises in my walls.
At first I thought perhaps some critter had become lodged in the wall
behind the drywall – that is until I realized my room was not constructed of
drywall. The walls of my room were
merely plaster over the original brick walls of the carport (later confirmed by
how frigidly cold it got in there on winter evenings) and there was no way for
anything to get behind or within them.
Yet, the scratching persisted, summer, autumn, winter – no matter the
season, something was scratching inside the plastered brick walls of my room.
This was not
the only thing that raised the hair on my neck.
My parents still went camping often and being too “cool” for that, I
often stayed home while they went away.
One night while sitting in the living room alone watching TV, I heard
the very distinct sound of the attic stairs being unfolded and let down in the hallway. I was frozen with fear, knowing, or at least
thinking, that I was the only person in the house. I got up the nerve to ease into the hallway,
fully expecting to see the attic agape, only to find that it was shut up tight
as ever. Relieved, and puzzled, I
returned to the living room only to hear it again an hour or so later. This would not be the last time I would hear
this very distinct sound. For fear of my
parents thinking me crazy, I never talked about it or the scratching sounds in
my wall. I kept it to myself until one
day several years after we had moved out of the house my grandmother was
visiting. She expressed her pleasure with never having to visit us again at the
old house because it was haunted - her words nor mine. She too had heard the attic stairs come down
on multiple occasions. I confessed my
experiences and my brother opened up ab out having experienced some of the same
things as well as having heard noises issuing from the basement. None of us had ever mentioned it while living
in the house, but now it is a source of much amusement whenever we get
together. I wish I had known then what I
know now with regard to EMF detectors, EVPs, etc. That would have been a fun place to conduct
an investigation. I often wonder if the
current owners / tenants experience some of the same phenomena that we did.
So, I’m still
not certain when my fascination with the paranormal began, but it’s clear that
I have had an interest from a very young age.
I do have a colorful imagination, but I am not making up anything that I
write in this blog. And while I cannot
explain these occurrences, I can say with full honesty that they have happened
just as we have written about them.
Paranormal? I think so, but I’ll
let you, the readers, draw your own conclusions. Until our next adventure, I am your faithful
servant,
Dickens
Southport Burial Ground
Too bad this isn't real, huh?
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