Cold Chills & Goosebumps

The air got noticeably colder as Debra Maddox walked into what she called the most haunted place in Asheville.

“How odd,” she said, walking down the steps from Asheville, N.C.’s, Church Street to a gravel parking lot. Until recently, there was a building there, which contained a church built around an older church. Decades ago, workers had relocated cemeteries nearby, but they hadn’t gotten all of the bodies, Maddox said as her tour guests started searching the parking lot for paranormal activity. The last bits of light were flickering out of the sky as Sarah Loveless aligned two dousing rods to begin an inquisition.

“Are you mad that the church got torn down,” the young woman asked. The dozen people on the Ghost Hunters of Asheville tour got quiet as the rods Loveless held crossed themselves—an answer in the affirmative, Maddox whispered. Loveless, visibly excited, righted the rods. “Are you a woman,” she asked. Again, the rods moved toward each other. Everyone was watching Loveless now.

“Did you die in the church?” she asked. The rods crossed again. The air seemed to get even chillier.

Western North Carolina, so full of history and composed of the oldest mountains in the world, abounds in stories of spirits walking the earth. From the unexplained Brown Mountain Lights near Morganton to the ancient petroglyphs on Judaculla Rock near Cullowhee, mystery fills the hills like mists shroud the mountains. 

And one of the strangest stories is about Little Alice.

Few people outside Franklin, N.C., know that one of the final acts of the Civil War occurred here, in what was then a frontier town. In May 1865, weeks after Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered, Union Col. George Kirk was in the WNC forests and fields, mopping up the last of the Confederate resistance east of the Mississippi. Learning of Lee’s surrender, Confederate Major Stephen Whitaker met Kirk on Main Street on May 12, 1865, to lay down arms. 

The surrender took place at Dixie Hall, the grand, Lowland-inspired home of Julius Siler, a wealthy Confederate captain. Living under his roof were daughter Alice and her husband, James L. Robinson. He and Alice’s father were not at home during the surrender, however, having been wounded and gone into hiding. Alice reportedly spat on Kirk’s Union flag to express her feelings, but there was little else she could do. Times would improve—her husband went on to become lieutenant governor of North Carolina. He is buried at First United Methodist Church Cemetery in Franklin, beside Alice.

But near their headstones is another Alice. “Little Alice,” the stone reads, “Crowned without the Conflict.” Gregg Clark, co-owner of Where Shadows Walk ghost tours in Franklin, has done extensive research into who Little Alice was, but she doesn’t appear to be the Robinsons’ daughter. She may, however, be the little girl who pops up periodically in the old houses in town, something she’s done reportedly since the late 1800s. 

“People in one house have said the little girl will show up on the balcony upstairs and make faces at their grandsons,” Clark said. “There’s a home near the high school where kids grew up playing with an imaginary friend called Alice.” A house near where Dixie Hall used to stand has been impossible to rent because tenants feel the presence of someone unseen, Clark said. Alice has become something of a celebrity in town. In June, a guest on one of Clark’s tours took a tiny cell phone photo of the Methodist cemetery. In it, you can see the apparition of a little girl with her arms crossed and feet under her dress.

The prefix “para” comes from an ancient Greek word meaning something that sits beside something (think “parallel” or “paragraph”). Paranormal is a state of being that exists beside the “normal” state we all set our clocks to. Many people believe that other beings exist around us all the time.  

The dead stick around for a variety of reasons, local ghost hunters say. A ghost might be stuck in the place he was murdered, still angry at the guy who shot him. Another might linger in her husband’s house, believing he can’t manage without her. Some ghosts are so attached to a place—homes, hospitals, prisons and schools are popular haunts—that they can’t let go. “Whatever binds them to this life, they’re not ready to pass over,” said Stacey Allen McGee, a minister. He owns Appalachian GhostWalks, which offers tours in east Tennessee and southwest Virginia. 

“It might not be something so terrible. It could be something good,” McGee said. “It could be your spouse, your child who doesn’t want to leave you until they can walk with you, hand in hand, into the light.” Many families have stories about older parents saying in their final hours that they can feel the presence of departed spouses who have come to comfort them. “People have said they’ve seen them standing at the foot of their bed (so they) can have a conversation as they have a peaceful crossing,” McGee said. 

The words “spirits” and “ghosts” seem interchangeable to the nonprofessional, but many ghost hunters contend that spirits are shapeless entities that surround us all the time and ghosts have shapes and appear only when they want to be seen or heard. The difference is insignificant to most people who have encountered an apparition. For some, it can be a pretty frightening experience.

One day several years ago, during Sarah Bumgarner’s first tenure with Barter Theatre in Abingdon, Va., she was in the theater’s balcony above the stage to check the lights for the evening performance. It was a July day and really hot, especially that high up in the theater. But when she reached for the door handle the light booth, it was ice cold. “And when I went inside, you could see your breath,” said Bumgarner, a dancer and actor who now lives in Brooklyn. “I immediately ran out. It scared the pants off me. Strange stuff goes on there.”

Donnamarie Emmert, the “haint mistress” of Abingdon, has a similar story. She was a theater student at the local community college when Barter called to ask if she knew how to run theater sound. “I said yes, but I didn’t,” Emmert said recently, a summer cold making her voice sound a bit witchy. She was so bad at running sound, she said, that one night she suggested she stay late to practice. The stage manager pointed out that that’d mean she’d be alone in the building. Emmert said she didn’t mind.

Later that night wrapping up, she stepped out of the sound booth, descended the stairs and walked through the main floor seating. “You know how you get that creepy feeling like someone is looking at you,” Emmert said in a perfect ghost story voice. Feeling “an amazing sense of dread,” she turned to look back at the balcony and saw a swirling mist near where she’d been. The mist moved toward her, gathering in the shape of a man. It was swooping down on her. 

“I hauled butt, that’s all there was to it,” Emmert said. She tried to pretend the encounter didn’t happen and didn’t mention it to the rest of the crew, theater people being a superstitious lot, she said. But years later when she finally ‘fessed up, others had their own stories to tell. These days, she’ll attend shows at Barter, “but I’ll tell you this, I’m generally the first person out of there when the show is over,” she said. “I will not be caught in the balcony by myself.”

J-Adam Smith might call what happened to Emmert the result of “unfinished business.” Smith, who calls himself “The Psychic Examiner,” leads ghost tours of Knoxville, a city rich in history that makes for interesting paranormal activity. He’s a “sensitive,” in that he can feel the presence of things most people can’t see. But he’s also a scientist, he said, in that he’s a certified ghostbuster who uses electronic instruments to register paranormal goings-on. He’s made a business of his abilities; on his website, he offers psychic real estate consultations that will determine if the home a person is considering buying is haunted. 

Smith also leads Haunted Knoxville Ghost Tours. Knoxville might be one of the most haunted cities in the country, Smith said. The Civil War left scars on the city, as did Prohibition and gangsters. “Lots of unfinished business,” he said. He has never seen a ghost, he said. But his instruments have indicated the presence of the paranormal in several places around town, like the buildings erected on top of a city block that went up in flames in 1897, killing five people. Children’s voices have been heard in one of those buildings, he said. In another, items have been inexplicably moved around, leading Smith to believe it may be the work of itinerant salesmen who died in the blaze, upset that their wives and families might have thought they deserted them. “What’s more unfinished business than that,” Smith asked.

Ghost hunters use tools as simple as dousing rods, compasses and flashlights and as sophisticated as infrared cameras and electromagnetic field detectors. Smith also uses a “ghost box,” a device that scans the airwaves for radio frequencies. In the white noise between radio stations, Smith attempts to talk to the unseen, asking questions and listening for answers. When he and other hunters want to engage a spirit they believe is nearby, they’ll often use a flashlight, twisting the head so that the beam is just barely off. Placing it so that the head is free of a ledge’s vibration, he’ll ask a yes or no question. A light that comes on and blinks may indicate an answer. 

Once, to test the theory, Smith sneaked around a corner while someone else was asking the questions and pointed a toy guy at the light. The blinking stopped. “Which is pretty crazy because that would mean that the gun seems to have a psychological impact” on the spirit, Smith said. “One time might have been a fluke, but we did it three times in a row.”

Dan Ward, co-owner of The Inn on Main Street in Weaverville, N.C., has a theory that “ghosts enjoy the status quo. As long as they’re comfortable, you never hear from them,” he said. Which may explain why he and wife Nancy Ward don’t hear anymore from Dr. Zebulon Vance Robinson, the doctor who built the inn. The Wards’ first New Year’s Eve there, they heard what sounded like paintings falling off the wall. But when they investigated, the pictures were still hanging. Equally hard to explain was the sound of someone opening and closing a back door.

“After that,” Ward said, “there were several times when I would be upstairs cleaning rooms and hear a female voice downstairs, very light, saying ‘yoo-hoo,’ like you would if you peeked in the door to see if anyone was at home. I’d come down and there would be nobody here. Eventually, we had a couple of guests that were very sensitive to these things who said she saw the source of the voice in the Lee Room.” They said it was a woman they saw in the mirror, fixing her hair.  

Once an African-American guest who said he often saw spirits told the Wards at breakfast he’d woken up and to see a little girl with a bicycle in his room with a black man. They were standing as if they were waiting on something; the guest asked what they were waiting for. The male apparition said he was waiting for the doctor, who treated not only the white residents of Weaverville but also the black residents who lived on the hillside behind the inn. The little girl was humming to herself and playing with her bike, the guest told the Wards. 

And then there’s the story of the Pink Lady at Asheville’s storied hotel, The Grove Park Inn, now The Omni Grove Park Inn. The story has it that the young woman—no one seems to know who she was—checked into room 545 one day in the 1920s and died, either in a fall five stories down to the Palm Court or on a road heading up to the inn. Asheville ghost hunters often repeat the story, and many have different theories on how—and why—the woman died. Some say it was an accident or a suicide over a married lover who failed to show for a Valentine’s Day tryst. Others say her lover killed her and pushed her over the wall to make the death appear accidental.

There are many stories of The Pink Lady appearing as a pink mist, floating around the inn. She’s said to be harmless, a prankster at worst who tickles feet, turns off lights and cuts off the air conditioning. She has a fondness for children, some of whom have reported “playing” with a nice lady in a pink dress. Employees have reportedly described a bone-chilling cold on the way to room 545.

On its website, the inn acknowledges stories about The Pink Lady, but no records exist to confirm her existence. It’s possible things “may have been hushed up to avoid negative publicity,” the website states. “No one will probably ever know,” it continues. “But new reports of her sightings still occur. Some say they just see a pink mist, others a full apparition of a young long-haired beauty in a pink gown.”

On her blog, Kala Ambrose, author of “Ghosthunting North Carolina,” describes an encounter with The Pink Lady. About midnight during the first night of a stay at the inn in 1998, she took her son to the Palm Court to get over a coughing fit, she writes. The air suddenly got cold, and Ambrose felt someone standing nearby. Looking up, she saw a ghost-like image of a woman. The woman’s energy felt “compassionate and sympathetic,” a motherly feeling for an ailing child, Ambrose writes. The spirit reached out as if to stroke the boy’s hair and then disappeared. Ambrose and her son were thrilled. 

Eastern Tennessee, the former western frontier of the burgeoning United States, is full of the kind of history that makes for haunts. Appalachian GhostWalks offers tours throughout the region, as well as southwest Virginia. McGee, the minister and owner of the business, comes at the tours from a Christian point of view. He hopes to bolster his guests’ faith in the afterlife. “What we’re really taking about is what happens when the body dies,” he said. Nonetheless, it can be pretty spooky. People on his tours have felt hands on their backs and fingers in their hair, he said. “We’re talking about thoroughly, authentically haunted places,” he said.

One time, McGee investigated a visitation in Bluff City, Tenn., a house that once belonged to one of President Andrew Johnson’s daughters. “When I arrived on the site and walked onto that porch and shook the property owner’s hand,” he said. “Just behind her I saw a lovely lady with her back to me standing on the porch. And as I described her, the property owner smiled and said, ‘you just described my sister. That was her favorite place to stand and look over the property.’ One of the most astounding things that happened was, she (the apparition) pointed to a corner of the property and said there are some graves there. I turned around and looked at the sister, and she was nodding yes. She said they moved the headstones but never moved the bodies.”

McGee said most of the people in the unseen world that he experiences just want to talk. Like people in the waking world, they want to be heard. And so, McGee listens in the hopes of helping them let go of their attachment to earth and find a place in the hereafter. 

They exist in what McGee calls “God’s waiting room,” a place just outside of time that he said is explained in the Bible. People there should be treated delicately. “When I go into a person’s house, I tell my students and guests, be very careful how you treat them, because the property owner has to live there,” he said.