Hello boys and ghouls!
It’s that time of fear again, when things go bump in the fright.
And on the night of all things spooky, what better way to enjoy the holiday than to read the kiddies a good old fashioned deadtime story?
It could even be that favorite scary tale you grew up on.
For a little atmos-fear, you might even go out with a few of your best fiends and take a walk through the local graveyard, like Susan Waller, the history specialist for Horizons Unlimited.
Horizons Unlimited is a supplementary educational program that has a hands-on science and education center located just behind Knox Middle School.
Waller uses graveyards to show students a little bit of the local history. “These old graveyards have more history than books do,”she explained.
“You can tell what they died of, how long they lived, and you could tell how much education they had from how they spelled, like if daughter was d-o-t-e-r on the tombstone.”
The tombstones also could indicate the education of the carver.
One husband left instructions for his wife’s tombstone to read, “Lord she is thine,” but the carver inscribed, “Lord she is thin.”
But unlike some history lessons that are just dull facts, Waller’s stories include bits about hauntings that people have told her as well.
“What I believe is the people who told me the stories believed with all their hearts,”Waller said.
With people telling her about Rowan County’s ghostly activities, you just might call Waller the town’s local horror-torian.
Recalling her favorites, she said, “If anything should ever be haunted it should be the National Cemetery. Strangely enough it’s not the graveyard, but that cottage that is haunted.”
The cottage was actually for the cemetery’s caretaker, but according to Waller, not too many people cared to stay in it.
Waller first learned about the haunting when she met a former cemetery caretaker at, of all places, a Halloween party. The caretaker believed the ghost of a little girl haunted his own home.
His wife would often see motion across her bedroom door and be aware of movement, but what really spooked the couple was when she would hear footsteps.
“What made it worse was the stairs were carpeted, but the footsteps she heard were on bare wood,”Waller said in a ghostly whisper.
Despite the disturbances, the couple stayed at the home for several years.
But when the caretaker finally retired, no one else really wanted to stay there.
Waller said that another caretaker lived at the house for about two months, before deciding to rent in town.
Since then the house has been closed down and used for storage, but people who visit still don’t care to be a guest at the home either.
When Waller was at the cottage one time, she ran into a man who had been working at the home.
The man said that when he was working in the house “something” had knocked his hat off, even though he was alone.
The worker told Waller, “Itell you, I don’t like going in that house and I won’t go upstairs.”
No bones about it, these days the cottage stays pretty much empty, other than perhaps the ghost of that little girl, for very ghoul reasons.
“Nobody lives there now,”Waller said, adding with a chuckle, “I’m not sure why.”
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