The following is one of many entries from the Phantoms Fill The Southern Skies book. I am producing it here from the original manuscript file for visitors to sample and see if they would be interested in the full text available on Amazon.

Please respect the copyright owners – Jeff Lawhead, J.S. Lawhead and 23 House Publishing – and do not reprint or reproduce any portion of this text on any monetized formats and without permission. Reproduction for hobbyist or academic interest (as well as “fair use”) is ok as long as sources are explicitly cited. Contact me at Meteo.Xavier@gmail.com for any permission inquiries regarding this or any other excerpt.

This short entry is one from my own hometown; barely more than a mile from my own house, and it’s one that, even if I don’t personally believe it, I can certainly attest to it.

In Sevier County, Tennessee, at the entrance to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, is a thickly forested roadway connecting Pigeon Forge with Gatlinburg known as The Spur, and one of the landmarks on the spur is a reasonably long tunnel that only passengers going from Gatlinburg to Pigeon Forge get to drive through. It is well lit most of the time throughout the year and the bright orange glow and heavily reverberating environment is a stark contrast to the brown, grey and green roadway that it cuts through.

And yet, somehow, every so often, it is reported that some people will drive the entire length of the Spur from Gatlinburg to Pigeon Forge and either never drive through the tunnel or remember driving through it. I have been driving and have been driven through that tunnel for a quarter of a century, as of writing, and I can corroborate that, once in a great while, I will get to Pigeon Forge from Gatlinburg and think, “…wait a minute… didn’t I go through the tunnel?”

It wasn’t until I started researching for this book that I found I was not the only person having this experience. Juanita Baldwin reports in her book, Smoky Mountain Ghostlore, that a couple had written to her with the same experience, and that local folklorists have known and talked about the mystery of the tunnel for some time as well. I don’t know how I would have missed it.

While I personally lean on the side of rational thinking for this mystery, I must admit it’s very hard to miss the tunnel on the Spur. You can’t really be daydreaming so heavily that you miss a bright orange, loud tunnel that takes half a minute to go through. I don’t know of any strange history or events surrounding it (except for a stray post on a paranormal forum by a poster claiming to have seen a man cloaked in black on the side of the road), so I have no idea why the tunnel would be causing this effect randomly.

But now that I know others have experienced it, I’ll never be able to drive through it the same way ever again…

Images used in this post do not belong to me or 23 House and are not part of the original manuscript. They were pulled from Google Images or Snappy Goat and only serve as graphical decoration. They are not being used for any monetizing purposes whatsoever.

The following is one of many entries from the Phantoms Fill The Southern Skies book. I am producing it here from the original manuscript file for visitors to sample and see if they would be interested in the full text available on Amazon.

Please respect the copyright owners – Jeff Lawhead, J.S. Lawhead and 23 House Publishing – and do not reprint or reproduce any portion of this text on any monetized formats and without permission. Reproduction for hobbyist or academic interest (as well as “fair use”) is ok as long as sources are explicitly cited. Contact me at Meteo.Xavier@gmail.com for any permission inquiries regarding this or any other excerpt.

If you stood in the middle of a college campus anywhere in the South, or the country for that matter, and starting slinging rocks in every direction you could until you ran out (don’t actually do this), each and every spot that those delinquent stones land on might be rumored to be haunted. For some reason, higher-learning schools of all kinds soak up urban legends and ghostly folklore like sponges, and they haunt the dark corners of academia more persistently than the entities themselves. One possible reason for this is the often tense atmosphere that colleges impose onto students – usually freshly minted adults who now have to learn how to cope with being on their own, saturated with the stress of grades, deadlines and real failure, while their heads still transition from the superstitions of their youth to the logic and reason of the real world. Not only could this be a source for why campuses are surprising hot-spots for legends that would be better suited for campfires, but it could also act as a source for the entities themselves. It’s a strange dynamic.

In my research for this book, I certainly had a wide variety of college folk legends to choose from just from Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama and the Carolinas alone, but definitely the most interesting “haunt” coming from a Southern school I found had to be the Third-Eye Man of USC.

USC is the University of South Carolina in Columbia, a rather prestigious school with many academic accomplishments and recognitions under its name. It is renowned for having the largest collection of Ernest Hemingway in the world, and the largest collection of Robert Burns and Scottish literature outside of Scotland itself. According to U.S. News and World Report, it has laid claim to the highest and third highest ranking Undergraduate and Graduate International Business programs, respectively, in the country for years’ as well as the third highest ranking school psychology doctoral program.

With so many good things to say about USC’s commitment to practical, real world knowledge, it seems very out of place that it would have rumors of a very unworldly creature hiding in its underbelly, but for more than sixty years, those rumors continue to be spread both on-campus and off.

No one seems to know much about who or what the Third-Eye Man might be – he’s not stated to be a ghost or demon, he’s too human to be creature and he’s not human enough to be an actual man. All anyone seems to know on him are based on a few reports going back to the mid-part of the 20th century from people who have encountered him in the “catacombs”, a steam tunnel system running underneath various buildings and parts of the campus (and some say connect to the State House and the Governor’s mansion). Use of the catacombs today is exclusive only to USC administration and any unauthorized entry is punished to the full extent of policy, but that may be a blessing compared to what might happen if you run into the ghastly sewer mutant.

The Third-Eye Man was first reported in 1949 when two USC students spotted a strange looking man dressed in all silver opening one of the manholes on campus. Although the campus manholes lead to the steam tunnels, he was first dubbed the Sewer Man by a Christopher Nichols, a student who worked on the campus newsletter and one of the two who first claimed to see him. It was subsequently reported in the campus newsletter which lead to a short-lived frenzy about the Sewer Man.

The next report came less than six months later in 1950 and put a series of macabre spins on the Sewer Man story. He was next spotted by an officer with the USC Campus Police during his patrol behind the Longstreet Theatre building. When the officer came to the loading docks of the theater, he found a collection of bloodied chicken parts and feathers from two chickens that had just been mutilated there. Thinking it was some horrible student prank, the officer went to his patrol car to report the incident. When he came back, he found a strange man dressed all in silver bent over the mess either gathering it all together or eating it. The officer shone his flashlight on the man and he found the stranger had a discolored face with what looked to be a small, third eye in his forehead. Understandably, the officer got spooked and ran back to his patrol car for backup, but when backup arrived, the stranger and most of the evidence of his disturbance were gone.

While no one believed the officer’s wild story at the time, his report would solidify the legend of the Third-Eye Man of USC, but it was still far from the most frightening encounter that was reported. As a result of the bizarre legend, the catacombs became a hangout spot for college students in the years following, and it was apparently also popular as a potential hazing ground for fraternity leaders to break in their pledges.

Well, this came to a stop finally one night in the late 1960s when he was spotted again in his most frightening appearance yet. A fraternity had decided to take some of their pledges down to the catacombs, presumably as part of an initiation, and they barely got inside the tunnels when they were surprised by the silver-suited Third-Eye Man. This time he was described as being “crippled” and carrying a lead pipe. He charged at the students and tackled one of the pledges to the ground, but despite suffering minor cuts and bruises, the pledge and everyone else were able to get away relatively safely.

They immediately contacted the authorities, but despite a thorough sweep of the tunnels and the area, the Third-Eye Man was never found. That was his last reported sighting.

And as silly as the stories may seem, the university does not seem to see it that way. Entrance into the tunnels is now strictly forbidden with many places sealed off entirely, and administration seems to look down on even discussing the Third-Eye Man. This, however, does not stop many students and locals from sneaking and prying in to go look for him, as several online forums have shown me.

Even though he hasn’t been seen since before the Beatles broke up, and it’s quite unlikely the school will be changing their football team to the USC Triclops anytime soon, his eerie legacy will likely carry on for many decades to come. Ghost stories and folklore stick around whether it’s a simple, back-country community or one of the most respectable halls of academia in the South.

Images used in this post do not belong to me or 23 House and are not part of the original manuscript. They were pulled from Google Images or Snappy Goat and only serve as graphical decoration. They are not being used for any monetizing purposes whatsoever.

The following is one of many entries from the Phantoms Fill The Southern Skies book. I am producing it here from the original manuscript file for visitors to sample and see if they would be interested in the full text available on Amazon.

Please respect the copyright owners – Jeff Lawhead, J.S. Lawhead and 23 House Publishing – and do not reprint or reproduce any portion of this text on any monetized formats and without permission. Reproduction for hobbyist or academic interest (as well as “fair use”) is ok as long as sources are explicitly cited. Contact me at Meteo.Xavier@gmail.com for any permission inquiries regarding this or any other excerpt.

“Be careful what you wish for” is a lesson imparted through many types of fables throughout the world. It tries to teach us that cheating to overcome an obstacle (in this case, using magic to bend nature to your fortune) is never worth the effort, and the payment for doing so outweighs the reward in the end. We see this in stories featuring wish-granting genies, adaptations or variations of the famous W.W. Jacobs short story, “The Monkey’s Paw”, and, more often than not, witches that an ordinary person has set out to consult for an extraordinary problem. One major reason the witch is often associated with evil intent is that asking one for a favor is akin to making a deal with the devil. She will help you and get the job done, but she chooses the method and will not be held responsible for the outcome. Other times, the witch is actually just a kindly old soul and doesn’t need to be anything more than helpful, as we saw with the “conjure woman” in Creatures of the Night.

In Fannin County, Georgia, there is a classic example of the former with a story dating back to mid-1940s. Miss Parry was the name of the local frump that lived in a paper-thin shack up on the hill. Locals called her that because no one knew her first name and likely didn’t have the courage to ask her what it was. No one knew anything about her other than she was exceptionally old and mysterious, and yet it was still said that many came seeking her spells and solutions.

One of them was a woman who lived in Gilmer County by the name of Marge who was the self-proclaimed head of her family. She was a bullish woman, heavily opinionated and given to steamrolling her way through the affairs of the family. She had a niece named Lily who was growing up and came to find the man of her dreams with a local moonshiner named Grady Holmes. Grady was a decent enough man, but his business in unlicensed alcohol did not sit well with Lily’s proper, Christian family (I wonder if this story inspired The Cutter Legend, or vice versa). Like so many Southern families at the time, they held so high a standard for who their children should marry that they wanted to make sure Lily never saw Grady Holmes again. They came to call on Aunt Marge, and she, in turn, came to call on old Miss Parry.

Both Marge and her sister, Lily’s mother Hilda, hiked the road to where Miss Parry was said to be and, sure enough, they were greeted by a strange little woman who looked as frail as the tiny stick house she was living in. Marge and Hilda asked Miss Parry if there was anything she could do to stop Lily from wanting to marry Grady and, turning her attention away from the two busybodies, began mixing some ingredients together in a pot, mumbled something that sounded like a spell, and then told them Grady will not be a problem anymore.

Thinking she must’ve meant that Lily would no longer be interested in seeing the lowbrow shiner-rat, they went back about their business, only to find out Lily had still gone down to the meeting place they spent most evenings and he had not shown up. The next day, as Marge and Hilda were shopping, they learned in an unceremonious fashion that Grady had died in a car crash – he lost control of his truck as he was carrying a shipment of moonshine and collided head on with a tree. The engine exploded and the intensity of the fire inside was fed by the alcohol in the car until the authorities had to remove a charred corpse from the wreckage. As it happened shortly after Marge and Hilda had left the hillside shack, there was little doubt now that Miss Parry was a genuine black magic witch.

The second story comes from Dahlonega of Lumpkin County in North Georgia, a city famous for its roots with the Creek and Cherokee Native Americans and as the site of the first major gold rush in the United States back in 1828. Nowadays, the Dahlonega is better known as the “wine capital of Georgia”, and as the site of a strange rock pile that acts as both a historical marker for the forest and the grave-site of a Cherokee princess named Trahlyta.

The tragedy of Trahlyta is another story of love gone wrong, and where she is buried now is not far from where she lived in life. Not much seems to be known of her early years, other than she was Cherokee royalty and she was renowned for her ageless beauty. It was said that she consulted with someone the legend states was the Witch of Cedar Mountain, who guided her to the site of a fountain of youth, now known as Porter Springs, that was blessed by the Great Spirit. The water had the power to temporarily stop the aging process in her body and she needed to drink the water periodically to maintain its power, otherwise she would grow old and die all the same.

She did as she was told and won the affections of the men of the tribe, and none more so than a warrior named Wahsega, who eventually asked for her hand in marriage. Trahlyta rejected his proposal and Wahsega did not take it well – he kidnapped her shortly afterwards and fled Georgia for a land much further away where the tribe could not take her back. Wahsega kept his now trophy wife almost a prisoner, and her beauty and life did not last too long without the powers of the fountain. She wasted away and when she came near to her death, instead of begging to be released, she asked Wahsega for one final wish – to bury her back in her homeland when she died under a pile of stones, so whoever puts another stone on the pile will be granted good fortune. Some legends even tell that she cried tears of gold in her last day; probably as a strange side effect of the water’s power latent in her body.

She died not long after making this plea and Wahsega, likely now seeing the error of his ways, went back to Cedar Mountain and buried her where she lies today underneath a stone pile now some six feet in height.

But the story doesn’t end there – it was then said that the Witch of Cedar Mountain, who apparently had taken a shine to Trahlyta, was heartbroken over her kidnapping and death and added a curse onto the stone pile so that whoever removes a stone does so at the risk of their lives. It is said that there were two attempts, in much later years, by two road construction companies that tried to move the stone pile so they could get work done and, like the story of Miss Parry, both met with vehicular fatality not long after carrying the stones. Now the stones are set to remain where they are today and the site is recognized by the Georgia Historic Commission.

Both stories offer interesting similarities and reversals for the traditional Southern role of the witch, and even if the Witch of Cedar Mountain could be seen as far more good-hearted than most examples, it doesn’t escape the fact that what Trahlyta wished for still eventually brought on her sad demise. For those who believe in the power of witchcraft, there has been a constant, age-old warning that you can’t play with the forces of nature and expect to go unpunished. We are not normally given these powers for a reason, and those who know this reason often find out much too late…

Images used in this post do not belong to me or 23 House and are not part of the original manuscript. They were pulled from Google Images or Snappy Goat and only serve as graphical decoration. They are not being used for any monetizing purposes whatsoever.

The following is one of many entries from the Phantoms Fill The Southern Skies book. I am producing it here from the original manuscript file for visitors to sample and see if they would be interested in the full text available on Amazon.

Please respect the copyright owners – Jeff Lawhead, J.S. Lawhead and 23 House Publishing – and do not reprint or reproduce any portion of this text on any monetized formats and without permission. Reproduction for hobbyist or academic interest (as well as “fair use”) is ok as long as sources are explicitly cited. Contact me at Meteo.Xavier@gmail.com for any permission inquiries regarding this or any other excerpt.

Fairies aren’t the only folklore archetypes that find their way into Cherokee mythology – another common type of legend that you can find in almost every country of the world is one of a great fish, lake monster, or some other type of amphibious beast that has resided in an important local water source since before the age of man. Scotland has the poster child of the trope with the Loch Ness Monster, aboriginal Australia has the Bunyip, China has the shape-shifting Jiaolong, the Northern United States has Champ of Lake Champlain in Vermont, and the Southern United States has the Däkwä of the Tennessee River of Toco Creek in Monroe County, Tennessee.

Or had, rather, as, unlike many of these other cryptids, the Däkwä has been dead for centuries, and the story of how that came to be is one of the more graphic and thrilling versions of the archetype; a perfect illustration of the warrior spirit of the Cherokee.

At an unknown time of Cherokee history, very likely before the settlers arrived from Europe, a canoe of warriors was making its way down the Tennessee River when the monster fish rose up from the depths beneath them and attacked their boat; throwing the entire party into the water. Each warrior, now completely disoriented, fought the waves and each other to get to the nearest shore before it could return and swallow them whole. Luckily, the Däkwä did not surface again, but they did not survive the ambush unscathed – all but one of their warriors made it back safely. The one that didn’t was swallowed whole.

The Däkwä, however, was an enormous fish, and there was enough room inside its cavernous stomach that the swallowed warrior was able to escape instant digestion. He was far from safe, though, and once he came to his senses, he knew he had to get out as soon as possible before it swallowed something else and knocked him into the stomach acids. The only way that was going to happen was to cut his way out through the side, but to make matters worse, he found he did not have his knife; he lost it somewhere as the boat overturned.

The warrior searched frantically for anything sharp that he could pick up and use to hack his way out and came across a number of whole mussel shells that had also yet to be digested. With nothing else to work with, the warrior felt for the shell with the sharpest edge to it and immediately started cutting his way out through the stomach lining. The Däkwä thrashed about in the waters as its stomach came under attack, and the quaking innards threw the warrior up and down the organ. The acids and scorching body juices that the warrior was lucky to avoid at first were now flying all around him and they burned his flesh almost down to the bones. Both of them were suffering searing amounts of pain, but the warrior refused to give up. He cut, and cut, and cut until finally there was a hole large enough for him to get out of.

The cold water of the river relieved his scalded skin and he pushed through as hard and as fast as he could until he could see the sky above him. Once he broke through the surface, he swam towards his comrades on the shore. When he was able to stand on solid ground, he turned to the Däkwä and watched it die from its wounds; an impressive victory of man over nature if there ever was one.

But as the warrior turned back to the others, he found they were staring at him and muttering things amongst themselves. He asked to know what they were staring at (aside from a man who just cut his way out of a monster fish with a mussel shell, that is) and one of the warriors directed his attention back to the water’s edge where he could see his reflection.

Instead of the young, dark-skinned man he was used to seeing in the water, there was an elderly man with bleached white hair and skin looking back. The stomach acids of the Däkwä had permanently scorched the color right off his body (or, in some versions, the hair as well, leaving him bald for the rest of his days).

Another version of the story is told by Wahnenauhi, a famous Cherokee storyteller from the 1800s, and was also collected into James Mooney’s Myths of the Cherokee. In this version, a little Cherokee boy was sent to do an errand by his father, but instead of obeying his father, the boy ran down to the river (presumably the same Tennessee River) to goof off. As he played in the sand with a mussel shell that he found on the shore, some of his friends from the village floated by on the river in a canoe and invited him to join. The moment he stepped onto the boat, however, his weight caused it to tip over and send him plunging into the cold waters below.

As he was submerged in the dark river, a giant fish spotted him and swallowed him right then and there. Luckily, the boy landed in a safe spot of the fish’s stomach where he would not be digested. After a while, the boy became very hungry and began to look around inside for food he could eat before the fish got a chance to dissolve it. When he couldn’t find any, he saw the fish’s liver hanging down from up high and, thinking it was dried meat as he was accustomed to back in the village, he took the mussel shell that he was playing with earlier and cut it down (!). The fish, suddenly overcome with pain and nausea, immediately vomited the boy back up.

There is even an identical tale from the Ojibwe/Chippewa tribes of the United States and Canada where Manabozho, the hero of the Anishinaabe (which encompass the Ojibwe) is the warrior who gets stuck inside the monster fish and has to fight to escape. It is an extremely common type of story throughout history that almost every culture can identify with and thus adapt. With water being one of the most essential and dangerous elements of early civilizations across the world, it becomes very understandable that it would be the setting for all kinds of monsters, heroes, gods and spirits that could fill the gaps of understanding. Stories like this taught early man to be careful and watch what he was doing as he paddled down the rapids with food supplies for his family or village.

Of course, just because stories of monsters may carry similarities across nations does not mean they’re not true – that’s what the legend of the Kraken taught us (see Creatures of the Night). Maybe those stories are similar for a reason…

Images used in this post do not belong to me or 23 House and are not part of the original manuscript. They were pulled from Google Images or Snappy Goat and only serve as graphical decoration. They are not being used for any monetizing purposes whatsoever.

The following is one of many entries from the Phantoms Fill The Southern Skies book. I am producing it here from the original manuscript file for visitors to sample and see if they would be interested in the full text available on Amazon.

Please respect the copyright owners – Jeff Lawhead, J.S. Lawhead and 23 House Publishing – and do not reprint or reproduce any portion of this text on any monetized formats and without permission. Reproduction for hobbyist or academic interest (as well as “fair use”) is ok as long as sources are explicitly cited. Contact me at Meteo.Xavier@gmail.com for any permission inquiries regarding this or any other excerpt.

The Cherokee always seemed to live in areas that were surrounded by thresholds to hidden realms. They hardly even had to wander outside their usual hunting grounds before they got lost and came upon a stranger from one of the other “peoples” that would offer to return them to where they came from, or maybe offer them food and lodging at their own villages before sending them back out. Other times, there may have been a battle with a different Native American tribe that would happen to be just close enough to one of these hidden realms that a surprise reinforcement group would arrive to help the Cherokee out when they needed it the most.

One such story was the Battle of Nïkwäsï’, which was a sacred mound located on the Little Tennessee River in what is now Franklin, North Carolina. The Nïkwäsï’ was a major center for the Cherokee of the area, as they built a townhouse used for meetings, councils and religious ceremonies at the top of the mound and kept a sacred flame burning at all times in there. The story goes that an unknown tribe from somewhere further southeast were moving their way up through Nïkwäsï’, killing and destroying everything in their path for no known reason, until they came to conquer the Cherokee on the mound. The warriors of Nïkwäsï’ fought long and hard but just could not overcome this vicious tribe.

As they begun to retreat, a stranger appeared on the Cherokee side of the battlefield, staring down the enemy, and he called for the Nïkwäsï’ chief to call off his men as he was going to finish off the enemy with his reinforcements. At first, the Nïkwäsï’ warriors thought he was a chief from nearby Overhill who brought his own men to drive off the invaders, but they watched instead as hundreds of warriors poured out from the sides of the mound and rushed to the battlefield, ready for blood and war. Even stranger than that, the warriors suddenly became invisible the moment they were outside the settlement, but their weapons and arrows stung and slashed all the same. The invaders had no idea what was going on, but the Nïkwäsï’ tribe soon realized they were being helped by the Nunne’hi; who were long said to have lived under the mound itself.

The Nunne’hi made short work of the invaders, and the few remaining survivors fled to the head of Tuckasegee many miles away. The Nunne’hi followed, and the desperate warriors begged to be spared. The Nunne’hi chief listened to their pleas and allowed them to escape back to their homes so they could spread the news of their defeat to their respective villages. It was a Native American custom to spare the last few men for this purpose anyway, but it speaks to the benevolence the Nunne’hi were often credited with.

It is said the invisible warrior tribe still exists today inside the Nïkwäsï’ mound in Franklin, protecting the sacred area from anyone who wishes to bring violence to a land set aside for peace. It is also said that many years later, during the Civil War, a group of Union federal soldiers were preparing to ambush a platoon of Confederates who were stationed there when they suddenly saw that it was guarded by a much larger number of men, said to be the same Nunne’hi who protected Nïkwäsï’ years ago, than they were prepared to deal with and canceled the attack. Interestingly, the story says the protectors did not take the forms of the Cherokee, but instead took the forms of the Confederate soldiers they were protecting.

Does this mean the Nunne’hi are actually shape-shifters (a reasonable assumption since they already have power over visibility itself), or perhaps they just like to keep up with emerging trends?

Images used in this post do not belong to me or 23 House and are not part of the original manuscript. They were pulled from Google Images or Snappy Goat and only serve as graphical decoration. They are not being used for any monetizing purposes whatsoever.

The following is one of many entries from the Phantoms Fill The Southern Skies book. I am producing it here from the original manuscript file for visitors to sample and see if they would be interested in the full text available on Amazon.

Please respect the copyright owners – Jeff Lawhead, J.S. Lawhead and 23 House Publishing – and do not reprint or reproduce any portion of this text on any monetized formats and without permission. Reproduction for hobbyist or academic interest (as well as “fair use”) is ok as long as sources are explicitly cited. Contact me at Meteo.Xavier@gmail.com for any permission inquiries regarding this or any other excerpt.

Haunted hotels are a dime a dozen here in the South. Anywhere from a secluded bed and breakfast to the Best Western down the street may have something there, depending on the veracity of local lore, but few accommodations in our corner of the country are said to be haunted with pirate ghosts and departed gentlemen. The Battery Carriage House Inn of Charleston, South Carolina is one of those very few.

If legends are to be believed, Charleston is already stuffed to the gills with spirits wandering freely throughout the city, so it takes more than a little bit of notoriety for a building to win the title of “Charleston’s Most Haunted Inn” year after year. Many first-hand accounts have come out of the Battery Carriage House and continue to do so as the hotel proudly remains in business to this day. They even list the rooms reported to be haunted on their own website.

Well before all that had been established folklore in Charleston, the Battery Carriage House was property that had been purchased in 1843 by wealthy commercial agent Samuel N. Stevens for a sum of $4,500. He apparently lived in the building and renovated it until 1859 when he sold it to John Blacklock, who soon abandoned the house once the Civil War began advancing down on South Carolina. He still owned the house and sold it in 1870 to Colonel Richard Lathers of the Union, who went on to renovate it further after its damage during the war. Despite his efforts to fit in and use his new property to bring peace between the North and South by inviting leaders from both sides to break bread with each other, Lathers was not well liked in Charleston, and it soon found yet another new owner with phosphate mining businessman Andrew Simonds. His descendant, Drayton Hastie, now owns the property and, according to the history of the property as written on the website, it seems to have had a reasonably happy history with no murders or unusually tragic deaths occurring inside the hotel.

So what exactly makes this the most haunted inn in Charleston?

The answer to that seems to be as puzzling to the staff as it would be to anyone else. It is said that many small abnormalities take place all throughout the property – window shutters opening and closing by themselves, glowing lights, footsteps, being watched by those that can’t be watched back… standard features of a hotel haunting that do not seem to have easily identifiable sources.

Then there are three hotel rooms that are said to have concentrated activities, as reported, again, by the hotel itself. Room #3 seems to have once been either a portal or a meeting site for many random spirits to gather in, as one couple found out. At an undisclosed time, a man and his wife were sleeping in the room when the man’s cell phone started blinking and making noise the first night they were staying. Stirring from their sleep, they remembered the phone had been turned off and they were not able to get a phone signal in the room when it was on. Soon after that, something started illuminating from the bathroom while the faucet began to release water on its own, and the night ended with the both of them watching shapes and energies float in and around the room presumably until morning or until they fell asleep. On the second night (yes, they were brave enough to stay a second night), the activity started up again with the glowing form appearing in the sitting room and the other shapes and energies joining it. Again, the brave couple simply stuck it out through the night. Some time later, by some wild stroke of luck, they ran into another guest at the hotel, named Susan, who was clairvoyant and offered to help them restore some order in their room. Susan went with them to Room #3 and found there really was an enormous spiritual presence there. She commanded the spirits to leave and the couple reportedly had a much more peaceful night. This account ends on that note and it appears that that room is no longer haunted, but whatever the entities were, or why a medium with that kind of power would only exorcise one room are different mysteries altogether.

I would suppose one reason for that is that a more famous haunt of the hotel is known affectionately as the “Gentleman Ghost” of Room #10. He is not a threatening spirit in the least, though his general activity may be quite scary all the same to the women who stay there. It is said the Gentleman Ghost has a habit of wanting to crawl into bed with any woman who sleeps alone in Room #10, and if the woman protests or screams (who wouldn’t?) the entity will simply exit the bed, go back to his business through an entertainment unit that used to be the original door to the room, and not bother the lady any further. I’m not sure how this ghost qualifies as a gentleman for that habit, nor was I able to find out what happens if someone does share the bed with him, but he seems to carry a reasonably pleasant presence all the same and is even said to smell like fresh soap (somehow).

But the entity haunting Room #8 is no hygienic cavalier, he’s a headless torso wearing clothes from centuries past that appears on the bedside to any guest unfortunate enough to wake up and see him. It is said that this ghost has a menacing personality, rasping and growling at the living without the need of his head, and can even be touched. One man, who stayed in the room in 1993, woke up to find the terrifying shade in front of him on the bedside, reached out to touch the figure in front of him and felt the fabric of his overcoat (described to be something like a coarse burlap). The man screamed when the headless torso started growling, but before the entity could do anything harmful, it apparently just vanished before the guest’s eyes; leaving him thoroughly shaken by the disturbance and no longer skeptical of the supernatural.

There are two ideas as to who the headless man could be – one is that he was a Civil War soldier who lost everything above his neck in a munitions accident, and the other is that he might be the pirate ghost of Stede Bonnet, “The Gentleman Pirate”, from the early 18th century who was captured by Colonel William Rhett and eventually executed for his crimes. Stede is said to haunt several places around Charleston already after his appeals for a pardon failed to generate anything but a hanging for piracy. Apart from the ghost having old clothes, though, there doesn’t seem to be any way to properly guess his true identity.

Complicating matters further is a second account reported on the hotel’s website – another couple was staying in the room when the wife was woken up by the sounds of the window shutters moving on their own. Suddenly, a shadow moved over the shutters and she went into the bathroom to turn the light on, presumably so she could see what it was that just moved through their room. Later, the husband got up and found there was a frosty-looking face in the mirror that soon disappeared. Whether or not this was a different entity or a strange manifestation of the headless man’s identity is just as inexplicable as everything else going on at the Battery Carriage House, but now we start to see how the hotel keeps its title.

One has to wonder if there is more to the history of the inn than the official public version wants to share. The Gentleman Ghost, for example, is said to be the spirit of a college student who jumped off the roof of the building to his death, yet the same management that openly admits to the hotel being haunted does not mention this in their account of the building’s history (for obvious good reasons). It is rather unusual that the most haunted inn in Charleston would be clean of the human calamity that typically inducts spirits into the physical world in the first place.

Then again, if their afterlife is as constantly depressing as the entities we experience sometimes make it out to be, maybe ghosts just need a vacation sometimes like we do.

Images used in this post do not belong to me or 23 House and are not part of the original manuscript. They were pulled from Google Images or Snappy Goat and only serve as graphical decoration. They are not being used for any monetizing purposes whatsoever.

The following is one of many entries from the Phantoms Fill The Southern Skies book. I am producing it here from the original manuscript file for visitors to sample and see if they would be interested in the full text available on Amazon.

Please respect the copyright owners – Jeff Lawhead, J.S. Lawhead and 23 House Publishing – and do not reprint or reproduce any portion of this text on any monetized formats and without permission. Reproduction for hobbyist or academic interest (as well as “fair use”) is ok as long as sources are explicitly cited. Contact me at Meteo.Xavier@gmail.com for any permission inquiries regarding this or any other excerpt.

Speaking of tiny little creatures with long arms, we venture west of North Carolina to Tennessee where there was, or still might be, a widespread belief among children in an even more exaggerated and far more humorous gremlin called Squeezer.

The Squeezer legend belongs to an extended family of “boogeyman” tales – stories of unspeakable evils that prey on children from the closet, underneath the bed, or the darkest corner of the room that their nightmares always spring from. Nearly everyone remembers going through this phase in their lifetime with some evil beast that existed in the bedtime ritual without question, no matter how outlandish it was described to be, and Squeezer fits that model to a tee. Being only 3-4in. tall, about the size of a soda can, it somehow has arms that are long enough to wrap around a person several times over, with large muscles in those arms to squeeze anything it has in its grasp until its prey breathes its last breath. Furthermore, it can apparently speak English, hold an intelligent conversation, and even be noticeably hurt and sensitive if you do not respect him as a boogeyman, which is more of a job title for him than anything.

Just what kind of a creature is this, anyway? How would something like that even be able to move with such imbalanced proportions, much less be able to terrorize and render harm on someone?

I first came across this legend in the book More Haunted Tennessee by Charles Edwin Price about nine years ago and he tells the story of a twelve-year-old girl named Jeannie and a friend who was staying over for the night. After the lights went out, a pair of long, bony hands came up over the foot of the bed and reached toward Jeannie, but instead of cowering in fear as she saw them approach, she instead grabbed a baseball bat that was nearby and repeatedly bashed the little devil with it.

To her surprise, the monster actually pleaded for her to stop. When she did to listen to what it had to say, Squeezer, as it introduced itself to Jeannie, tried to put up another menacing front that was quickly shot back down as the two girls started mocking his name and absurd body structure. Squeezer then became vocally disappointed that these two girls were not afraid of him and told them that they needed to be scared so he could do his job right. The girls only laughed harder at him, and his patience proved even shorter than his stature when he lunged forth to squeeze them anyway.

Jeannie and her friend fought back and put up a good struggle against the pint-sized puck until Jeannie’s father came in and told them to quit horsing around. Little Squeezer, though, was gone by then, and the girls went back to bed.

Very soon after the light went out, though, a set of bony hands came up over foot of the bed again. Jeannie, almost casually, reached for the bat to give Squeezer another good thrashing… when another set of hands reached up onto the bed alongside it. Then another, and another, and another still.

Now Jeannie had a good reason to be genuinely afraid – Squeezer didn’t leave so he wouldn’t get caught… he only went for backup.

By now, we have a pretty good idea what the point of this story is, not all ghosts and monsters have to be dripping with blood and leaving a body count just to tell a good story. There are actually quite a few tales of supernatural beings that are far from the dark, sad and gruesome blights we usually hear about. Some can be quite lighthearted and even beneficial – I even remember hearing about one ghost out in the world somewhere that would make a Shower of Money rain from the ceiling to help its hosts pay off a financial crisis.

Another mythical beast from Tennessee that seems to inspire as much mirth as it does mayhem is the famous Wampus Cat, a legendary cougar/cat with six legs (and possibly a spiked ball on its tail) that is said to be the tragic spirit of a Native American woman. This curious maiden, for whatever reason, decided to dress in cougar skins so she could spy on the men of her tribe while they were out in the fields. It’s not known why she was spying on them, but the medicine man was still not too pleased when he found her out there and, as a major consequence for a minor offense, immediately placed a curse on her that would keep her trapped in the form of an enchanted cat for seemingly all eternity.

She was said to haunt the Cades Cove area of Blount County in East Tennessee, and many hunting parties of the early 20th century in that area went out looking for her when she was sighted… at least that’s what the men all told their families. In reality, they were just looking for an excuse to get away from their near-puritan families and have a moonshine party in the basement of the local grocery store. The image of the Wampus Cat today still inspires festivity as the sports mascot of at least six schools in the U.S.

The power of folklore can touch and shape our society in very significant ways. Stories can make us feel heartache from hundreds of years ago, scare us smart or silly, educate us with the wisdom of generations in just a few minutes’ time, or even give us an excellent opportunity to put down our fears and have a good time with the company of our fellow men.

After all, if the stories can’t be fun once in a while, what’s the point in telling them?

Images used in this post do not belong to me or 23 House and are not part of the original manuscript. They were pulled from Google Images or Snappy Goat and only serve as graphical decoration. They are not being used for any monetizing purposes whatsoever.

The following is one of many entries from the Phantoms Fill The Southern Skies book. I am producing it here from the original manuscript file for visitors to sample and see if they would be interested in the full text available on Amazon.

Please respect the copyright owners – Jeff Lawhead, J.S. Lawhead and 23 House Publishing – and do not reprint or reproduce any portion of this text on any monetized formats and without permission. Reproduction for hobbyist or academic interest (as well as “fair use”) is ok as long as sources are explicitly cited. Contact me at Meteo.Xavier@gmail.com for any permission inquiries regarding this or any other excerpt.

From South Carolina, we travel to its northern brother to find a town called Murphy in Cherokee County. The site of Murphy is no stranger to stories and legends of bizarre creatures, as they have been said to exist there since the days of the Cherokee Native Americans when they referred to it as Tlanusi-yi – the home of the giant leech Tlanusi that was said to live in the Hiwassee River near Murphy. Of the modern folklore, there are stories of clocks that growl at you, microwaves that cook without aid of electricity and several more, almost routine, stories of haunts you can find in most towns, but one house is said to have them all beat with a very strange visitor you can only find in Murphy: The House Of The Gnome.

Probably the best account of this elusive creature was a story said to take place in the 1950s when a family with two boys moved into a three story house that, previous to their entry, had no history of abnormal activity. Indeed, once it began, it began slowly… waiting almost a month for the family to get settled in their new house before the two boys started hearing strange laughter coming from the hallways. Then, in the following weeks, there were loud knocks on their bedroom doors from someone demanding their attention, yet the hallways would always be empty when they went to see who was keeping them awake. Then there were soft footsteps and shuffling heard on the staircase and third floor of the house. The boys went to their parents and told them all about the sounds they were hearing. The parents, as parents usually do, laughed and reassured them that there wasn’t anything weird going on in the house – it’s only making the same noises every other house in the country makes on a regular basis.

It was true, the boys had next to nothing to go on but noises, and there wasn’t any history of death, murder or ritual in the house, so it couldn’t be haunted. Yet the noises continued unabated. Something was in that house, but what?

Then one day, one of the boys was listening to a record player in his room when his brother and a visiting friend came tearing in, hyperventilating, saying they found the creature that had been making those noises and it was in the bathroom. He laughed at them and humored them as he made his way to the bathroom, but he wasn’t laughing when he opened the door and found a small humanoid figure, barely over 2ft. tall with a twisted-up face and arms so long that they just couldn’t be real, staring and laughing right back at him before bolting out between his legs and disappearing in one of its many hiding places.

From there on, the “Gnome”, as they called it for lack of a better word, would turn up at the oddest of times throughout the months and always scamper away before anyone could get their hands on it. They heard his little laughter in the hallways and his constant dashing and jumping in the walls and rooms they couldn’t see it in. Finally, when their father finally saw it for himself in the master bedroom, he decided enough was enough and the family moved out one week later.

Decades later, the house was said to be cursed by this gnome, or whatever it was, as no one would stay in it long enough to find out what it was… and what it wanted.

Not much more of this creature seems to be known, but there is a similar legend also coming out of Murphy, North Carolina that ties back in with the Native Americans that lived there before it was settled. The Cherokee used to tell stories of a race of small, bearded, humanoid men with pale skin they called The Moon-Eyed People. They were pale and nocturnal beings as the sunlight was too bright for their eyes. The Moon-Eyed people also came from Hiwassee before it was Murphy, and they were often in conflict with the Native Americans until a major skirmish with either the Creek or the Cherokee tribes forced them to retreat from their homeland up into the mountains. They dug themselves into the caverns and rock, and presumably still survive there today with mounds and small walls built throughout the Southern Appalachians.

Is there a connection between the two legends? Could this gnome be some sort of otherworldly “answer” to the persecution of the Moon-Eyed People? It is just a bit too coincidental that two different legends about similarly structured beings would exist in one town, but as there are further tales of little people and monstrous versions thereof existing throughout the state of North Carolina, there may be a whole untapped reservoir of history, folklore and crypto-anthropology/zoology that we’re missing out on.

Maybe instead of looking back at history for answers to our mysteries, we should start looking down?

Images used in this post do not belong to me or 23 House and are not part of the original manuscript. They were pulled from Google Images or Snappy Goat and only serve as graphical decoration. They are not being used for any monetizing purposes whatsoever.