Eerie sightings along North Main

            What would Halloween be without ghosts? Although there are ghosts in some of the area’s oldest homes, Wake Forest’s North Main Street, once Faculty Avenue, seems to have an unusually large number of the spirits.

            Beginning on the south end, there is the Indian who was apparently disturbed when Bill and Louise Howard began their extensive renovations that changed the old Reid house into an elegant bed and breakfast.

            Bill believes the Indian was buried on their property. The vision or apparition or ghost appeared to three men – Bill, his brother-in-law, and a man helping with the renovations – one day when they were working under the house. Everything became quite cold, they turned and they saw the ghost, who quickly vanished.

            He has not been seen since, and Bill believes he was relieved to see that they were carefully redoing the house and does not need to return.

A spirit with a wardrobe?

            The grounds of the Calvin Jones house may have two apparitions or just one with a change of clothes.

            Ed Morris, the executive director at the Wake Forest Birthplace Museum, said he has only seen the ghost, or whatever, once. “I was sitting in the garden having lunch and saw someone walking across the lawn along Walnut Street (the deadend dirt street that runs on the south side of the museum). He appeared dressed in heavy winter clothes that I later recognized as a sort of cape. He just seemed to walk into the underbrush and vanish,” Morris said.

            “It was at that point that I realized he was not ‘real.’ After thinking about it, I believe it was wearing the clothing that may have been worn by a Civil War soldier.”

            In the same time frame, but without speaking to each other about any apparition, Hugh Nourse had a similar experience with someone dressed differently. Nourse said his sighting was one of “mutual surprise. There was nothing threatening and nothing to fear. The apparition just disappeared (or disaparated for J.K. Rowling readers),” Nourse said.

            “The incident occurred as I walked along the north side of the house heading toward the back. As I neared the corner, our visitor appeared, walking towards the north along the back of the house. We glanced at each other and with that our visitor departed.” Nourse said his visitor was wearing what appeared to be a jacket.

The spirit in the bedroom

            Not all but some of the past owners of a North Main Street house have experienced spirits who walk, wear perfume, smoke cigars and even get in bed with them.

            A former owner who sent the Gazette his memories said he, his wife and their young daughter all felt the spirits’ presence, beginning with the first days when they were unpacking. Both the man and his wife saw figures out of the corners of their eyes, figures going up the stairs or standing in the upstairs hall when all the live occupants were found in another room.

            The wife began hearing muffled voices or an old radio at night though she never could find a source. “She was awakened in the middle of the night by the sound of what appeared to be a cup or glass being set down on the marble top surface of her nightstand on multiple occasions, and that’s when I started to think something was going on,” the husband wrote.

            “One summer night, I was awakened by the sound of footsteps coming up the stairs. I am a fairly light sleeper, so things that are not normal sounds of a home will awaken me out of a sound sleep,” the man wrote, adding his wife had been awakened by the same footsteps although he did not know it at the time.

            He started running through the reasons it could not be an intruder: the alarm was set and all the windows were closed. “By now I was wide awake and still hearing the footsteps. They seemed to stop right outside our bedroom door, which we always closed at night. There was silence for a brief time, and then I heard what I thought was the sound of rustling fabric moving across our room!

            “Do you know what the dresses worn by women at the turn of the century looked like, with all the layers of petticoats and heavy floor-length fabrics? As someone walks in such clothing, it makes a kind of rustling sound, and that’s exactly what I heard. By now my heart was thumping so loud I could actually hear it as the entity made its way across the room to the window.  Next to the window we had an antique chair. I sat on it occasionally to put my shoes on in the morning, and it had a very distinctive creaking sound when one sat in it.

            “As the sound of the rustling fabric moved toward the window, I then heard the creaking of that chair as if someone had just sat in it! Nothing further happened that night, and the couple compared notes the next morning. “Now I was convinced there was indeed something going on in that house.”

            They researched the history of the house and found that two of the daughters of the original family had lived there for years, one of them tending the other. Also, at least five people had died in the house.

            The wife, who was apparently more receptive, continued to hear voices and sounds, and both of them were often awakened about 3 a.m. by noises.

            “One night I was awakened by what I swear was the touch of a hand on my hip as I slept on my side,” he wrote, and his wife said she had had the same sensation at different times. Then, one night when the husband was on a business trip, the wife was awakened by a movement in the bed. Thinking it was their daughter who sometimes climbed into their bed at night, the wife sat up and found the daughter was not there. However, as she looked she felt the bed move again and she saw the mattress being depressed as though someone was lying down. But there was no one there.

            Others – his mother-in-law, their realtor when they sold the house – also heard voices, smelled cigar smoke or unfamiliar perfume, or, in the case of the realtor, saw one of the spirits standing in the master bedroom window.

            “I will also add that we never felt threatened by the spirits,” the man concluded.  “They were more annoying than anything else, mainly because we were constantly awakened in the middle of the night, usually at 3 a.m.”

             He was often away on business just before they moved and his wife “said that she felt comforted and even perhaps protected by the spirits. Maybe they sensed what we were going though as a family and remained around to help out a little.” 

And an update . . .

            Mourning Person Harris was buried more than 150 years ago, but a detail like that cannot keep a woman from checking on the fine addition to the house her husband built her in 1831 and the families who live there.

            When Mourning Person – she was part of the prominent and wealthy Person family in Franklin County – was alive and until recently the house was called Wakefields; new owners Jim and Gayle Adams and their daughter, Ashlee Adams, have renamed it The Sutherland to honor its original builder, Colonel Ransom Sutherland, and differentiate it from the upstart subdivision down the road. (The editor’s phrasing, not theirs.) They have made extensive improvements to the grounds and updated the interior to make it a beautiful and historic setting for everything from weddings and wedding receptions to private parties and formal galas.

            The Harris family sold Wakefields in 1946, and we do not know about their experiences with Mourning Person. Later owners, however, have found her a real presence in the house.

            Abner Nash, who bought the house from the Harris family, told many stories about her. One of the most striking was an evening when his wife and daughters had gone out and he was alone, he thought, in the house. “Where are the girls?” he heard Mourning Person call from the top of the stairs.

            Sherrill and Susan Brinkley owned the house for over 30 years, and Susan says Mourning Person used to bang on the steam pipes that heated the radiators in each room whenever their son practiced the piano. A ghost as music critic.

            Every owner has known Mourning Person wanted her rocking chair at the top of the stairs in her new, early Greek Revival addition. Ashlee has kept the rocking chair in its place although she has not seen Mourning Person.

            Two recent visitors have, though, at different times. Both started up the stairs and one, a teenager, refused to go up because he sensed something bad, he said. A man who started up turned to Ashlee and showed her the goose bumps all over his arms from the presence he sensed.

. . . and finally

            Ed Morris is very familiar with ghosts or spirits from his time working in the old Capitol Building in Raleigh. Ask him about the workman who was on a high scaffold repairing something in the dome when he felt someone tapping him on the shoulder. He turned, and of course there was no one there.

            Morris even has pictures of what could be, may be, one or two of the spirits who flit around that old building. One of those spirits, captured by a security camera, is apparently seated in the first desk in the fourth row from the back in the old House Chamber. Another photograph is of a misty haze in the library and careful examination reveals a bearded man dressed in 19^th-Century style.

            “The photos were examined by the Rochester Institute who could not explain the figures except to say they did not appear to be light reflections,” Morris said.

            BOO!

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