BEAR CREEK — It’s more formally known as State Road 1100, but the signposts on the winding, rural stretch of two-lane road hint that it must be close by. Devil’s Tramping Ground Road, in fact, passes close enough to the actual place — one of N.C.’s spookiest destinations — that someone with a good arm could chuck a rock from the road onto Devil’s Tramping Ground itself.
The question: would it still be there the next morning? And if not, who moved it?
Behind the “No Trespassing” signs and a locked red gate is the ground in question. It’s been owned by Tamara Owens’ family for more than 100 years, and its legend is both simple and spine-chilling: two paths into the nearby woods and a circle of dirt, about 40 feet in diameter, where nothing grows.
“The real folklore of it is the devil comes up the one path, tramps around the circle and goes down the other path,” she said.
Owens said even as the owner, she refuses to go up the Tramping Ground by herself at night.
“When night falls, it is really eerie,” she said.
According to those who have visited after sundown, mysterious things happen without explanation. Some people hear voices saying, “Follow me into the woods.” Others will see shadow figures among the trees. Some say they’ve heard footsteps following behind them. Others see what they describe as “phantom animals,” while yet others see ghostly girls appearing in photos they take.
Other theories explaining the barren circle exist, including one tale of a Native American battle taking place on that land; as a result of the bloodshed, nothing will grow in the circle.
Owens said her father had found arrowheads on the grounds and throughout the woods, but there’s no written record of a battle occurring.
“We did have the scientists from N.C. State come out and they did some soil samples and found elevated salt levels,” Owens said. “No one really knows how that came to be, and then there’s the theories of the Indian burial ground, or it’s where there was the battle between two Indian tribes.”
Rachel Kirchner is a paranormal investigator from Virginia. Her team, Operation Spirit Seekers, held an investigation at the grounds on Saturday evening — a night, she said, filled with unexplained activity, ranging from mysterious shadows showing up in photographs to team members swearing they saw dark figures running through the woods nearby.
“Investigators on Saturday night actually captured a picture and you can see a silhouetted face through there,” Kirchner said. “Me and my husband were up on a trail, and we were watching shadow figures because you’ll actually see shadow people, some of which were actually like Indians.”
Another investigator, Dan Porter, has lived in North Carolina for four years and has been to the grounds multiple times. He said every time he goes to the grounds, he experiences something different.
“I mean, everybody’s got different story theory; everybody sees different things,” he said.
Porter has mostly tried to establish some type of verbal connection to the entities he believes inhabit the Devil’s Tramping Ground. Porter works with an app called Necrophonic, which is used for spirit communication and electronic voice phenomena, or EVP, research.
On one occasion, Porter said a young woman visiting the spot came up to him and his crew while they were trying to establish communication with a potential spirit.
“The Necrophonic app was pretty quiet until she came up, and when she came up, she’s asked ‘What’s my name?’” he said. “And it said her (the girls’) name clearly.”
After the app said the girl’s name, Porter asked whether the spirit could identify what the young woman was drinking.
“I asked what kind of beer was she drinking, to be specific, and it told me Modelo,” he said. “There were like six or seven of us there and everybody heard it. It was pretty cool.”
However, not all of the energy at the grounds may be friendly.
Porter has seen individuals come to do ritualistic activities at the grounds.
“I was there with my friends camping out, and some guy came with like a black cloak,” Porter said. “He walked out into the pasture that was trimmed down onto the trail, and we didn’t see him for like another half an hour.”
Porter said the man came back from the woods and went to the gate by the circle.
“He like knelt down on one knee, was saying some stuff, and then left,” he said.
Owens said she broke up what appeared to be a ritual once when she went to patrol the area on her family’s utility vehicle. But vandalism, she said, is the main issue she encounters on the land there, which remains private. She says visitors spray-paint and remove bark from the trees and leave trash around the grounds.
“I’ve had to paint over the trees because people had painted them with ‘666’ and all sorts of stuff,” she said. “It was infuriating.”
Despite the vandalism, Owens and her family have worked to keep the property preserved for the future generations. She intends to keep the land in her family so the tale of The Devil’s Tramping Ground can continue to haunt and frighten.
“Everybody has a different experience, and you just get to come here and really appreciate it,” she said. “That’s kind of what me and my dad and my grandfather and my great grandfather have said. I just really want to try to preserve it the best that we can.”
Reporter Taylor Heeden can be reached at theeden@chathamnr.com.