By Lynn Hightower
Le mysteré.
A dark mysterious story, something that cannot be real . . . but is real. This is what compels me to write.
There is an openness about Southern hauntings. People like to talk. Beneath the stories are secrets. Dark secrets. Terrible things have happened here. And that has presence. But the truth is that terrible things happen everywhere.
Kentucky has more paranormal events than New Orleans and people come here for the bourbon, the horses, and the hauntings. Maybe it’s a southern thing. The oppressive heat and humidity. Tornados that bring catastrophic winds and sudden death. Hurricane gales and waters where you evacuate or get handed a toe tag so they’ll know who you were later on.
In Kentucky your bourbon distillery tour can include spirits in a glass, and spirits of the paranormal kind that are close enough to be felt, heard and sometimes seen. They keep a Ouijaboard in the bar in case you have specific questions.
Octagon Hall in Simpson County is a house so haunted that you don’t have to get worked up hoping something spooky will happen. They warn you that it absolutely will.
This three story, eight sided brick house was a sanctuary on the Underground Railroad. A Masonic meeting house. A Confederate Field Hospital. A little girl named Mary died of severe burns when her dress caught fire in the kitchen. Underground tunnels run beneath the house.
Some visitors are thrilled. Some are angry. When something you can’t see shoves you on a staircase, it’s not fun anymore.
Octagon Hall is a magnet for ghost hunters and paranormal podcasters from all over the world, who do overnight broadcasts of strange footsteps, dragging sounds, a shadowy woman in a blue dress, and Confederate soldiers dead but still walking. Some nights you can hear singing when no one is there. Trip Advisor calls it a must for ghosthunters, offering History &Hauntings.
Another very haunted place? Go to the Perryville Civil War battlefield. Go at dusk and roam the fields like I did. You won’t be alone.
During an interview with Art Bell from COAST TO COAST on my Noah Archer Enlightenment Project series, he asked me if I would spend the night in what I think of as the house from hell, that I wrote about in THE HUNTING DARK.
I said no.
I am wary when doing research. Curious, skeptical, and bold until I have enough material and then I run like hell.
The afternoon I was on my way to interview a couple who had lived in that house — normal, happy, good jobs and kids — my Mini Cooper started making horrible noises about twenty minutes out. Even though I had it serviced the day before.
I pulled off at the next exit, an ominous place, poorly lit and deserted.
The noises stopped as soon as I was headed down the two lane road just off the Interstate. There was nothing there at the exit, no place to find a mechanic, not even a McDonalds to give me a sense that I was in the normal world. I parked in the worn down asphalt lot of an abandoned rusted out gas station. Things felt odd. I looked under the hood of the Mini, could see nothing wrong with the car. I called the people I was interviewing, told them I’d be late but was on my way. That the car was making noises but it turned out to be nothing.
Once I got there they asked me if it happened at a certain exit. Speaking softly. Not meeting my eyes. I said yes. That I’d had the odd urge to keep going down that two lane road that wound through the woods but figured I’d be late to meet them and had better get going.
“Oh honey,” they said. “You did the right thing. Don’t take that exit again. That’s where the house is.”
I asked why they rented a house with satanic symbols on the wall — I saw the pictures, before and after. They said they were just going to paint over them. The house was out in the Amish countryside, a beautiful place. They were broke and the rent was cheap, and the were a couple of acres for the kids to run around in.
What they didn’t expect was that the local Amish refused to go near the property, and told them outright to leave. That their dog kept trying to run away. That outside the house it was always silent. No birds. No insects. No nothing. That there were thumps and voices coming up from the crawl space under the house. And the symbols? They kept fading back in after beingpainted over.
Six weeks later they got the hell out.
Also on my research list, located one town over, was a school so haunted, there is a stampede of late working teachers heading to the parking lot at dusk. They know better than to be there after dark.
The teacher I interviewed said she and the kids smell smoke sometimes but there’s never any fire. That something slams hard into the classroom door regularly, but there’s never anybody there. She keeps the door locked when she and the kids are inside.
When you walk into the school it feels fine. Normal. But turn a sharp corner to the left inthe older part of the building, and you’ll be uneasy walking down those narrow sloping corridors that are dank and dark and oddly worrisome. I went to the front desk, and studied the bank of screens fed by cameras all over the school. A small school without a big budget, but they had cameras to watch every space.
Something was moving in the deserted cafeteria that had been locked up for the night. It was hard to make out what it was.
The teacher and I stood side by side, puzzling at the screen.
“Should we go look?” she asked me.
“I’ve seen enough.”
“Let’s go then?”
“Let’s run.”
That’s the thing about the paranormal in Kentucky. You don’t have to make things up.
But it is the science of death that inspired my latest Noah Archer novel, MIRROR TWIN, set in Lexington Kentucky, where there is a brewery with the very same name. I was wrapped up in the shock of finding out that people do not die when their hearts stop.
The brain is on fire with intense activity and frantic cell regeneration. What happens in those moments between life and death? To people pronounced legally dead and taken to hospital morgues or funeral homes who wake up. Hours later. With mysterious things happening in their brain that baffles physicians and scientists. Things that don’t seem real . . . but are. What if something malevolent is growing?
Three times I have left the south swearing never to come back. But I always do. We don’t hold on to our culture and our history so much as it holds on to us.
So here I am. Yet again.
With redacted police reports regarding two strange deaths, and sightings of something . . . odd. I’ll be heading out to research this with my fearless ninety pound German Shepherd. I know the patterns of this thing and you won’t find me anywhere in the vicinity between eight PM and two AM.
Because I have another story to tell, a strange history to explore, and the need to figure out the dark secrets beneath. And the feeling, just once in a while, at off and unexpected moments . . . that something is looking over my shoulder. Because most likely? It is.
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