Spooks, scares & tales galore
When October arrives and Halloween rolls around, tales of ghosts and ghouls abound.
Most towns have at least one spooky rumor of the unexplained. From a house where drinking glasses suddenly and mysteriously appear to a forested patch where the Devil itself is alleged to reside, a few of these killer tales originate within Chatham. Among the ghostly accounts of the paranormal and places of the unexplained, here are a few of the most haunting:
The Devil’s Tramping Ground
BEAR CREEK — It’s more formally known as State Road 1100, but the signposts on the winding, rural stretch of two-lane road hint it’s close by. Devil’s Tramping Ground Road, in fact, passes close enough to the actual place — one of N.C.’s spookiest destinations — that from the road you can almost hit the area known as the Devil’s Tramping Ground itself with a rock.
Behind red iron gates clad with a large “No Trespassing” sign, the Devil’s Tramping Ground is known statewide, and mentioned in countless books and publications, for its supernatural ties to the mysterious and devious.
The News + Record visited with its owner, Tamara Owens, last Halloween about the Devil’s Tramping Ground — and what may or may not reside in the foliage-free circle that’s been part of North Carolina lore for generations.
It’s been owned by Owens’ family for more than 100 years, and its legend is simple and spine-chilling: two adjacent paths into the nearby woods and a circle of dirt, about 40 feet in diameter, where nothing grows, and where any object placed at night is removed come morning.
“The real folklore of it is the devil comes up the one path, tramps around the circle and goes down the other path,” Owens told the News + Record last Halloween.
Even as the owner, Owens refuses to go up the Tramping Ground by herself at night.
“When night falls, it is really eerie,” she said.
Those who dare to visit the grounds after sundown report unexplained activities. Some people hear voices saying, “Follow me into the woods.” Others will see shadow figures among the trees. Some say they’ve heard footfalls behind them in the dark. Others see what they describe as “phantom animals,” while yet others see ghostly girls appearing in photos they take.
Soil studies have been conducted to determine why nothing grows within the circle, and they indicated an elevated salt level. But that doesn’t explain the supernatural experiences people like Dan Porter have had in those mysterious woods.
Porter works with a phone app called Necrophonic, which is used for spirit communication and electronic voice phenomena, or EVP, research.
On one occasion there, Porter told the News + Record last year that 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.”
The Devil’s Tramping Ground is NOT open to the public. The wooded area is private property owned by Owens, and if you wish to visit the grounds, you can contact her through the Devil’s Tramping Ground Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/pages/Devils-Tramping-Ground/138111772882955.
‘Mother’ on Roberson Creek Road
PITTSBORO — Just off of U.S. 64 is a house on Roberson Creek Road where, allegedly, the soul of a mother who killed her children continues to reside — haunting residents to this day.
Pittsboro-based realtor Eric Andrews of Realty World detailed a time where he was asked to help its owners, a couple who had two children, sell the house. He said the situation seemed peculiar, and the homeowners were keeping quiet about their reasons for their move.
It wasn’t until his employees were taking pictures of the inside of the home that he realized something supernatural could be at play.
“They started taking pictures in this one room, and we captured these circles,” Andrews says in a video posted to his YouTube channel. “If you looked in the circles, you could kind of see a smiling face, but there were these weird orbs in all the pictures.”
Andrews asked the sellers if there was an explanation for the mysterious orbs captured by the realtor’s photographer. The couple was unable to explain why the orbs were there, but they were able to share their own supernatural experiences.
Andrews said the couple’s children had an imaginary friend they called “Mother,” and they claimed she would watch the children play in the room where the photos of the orbs were taken.
Turns out this was the main motivation for selling the house. “When the kids would go to sleep at night, they would wake up and there would be an empty glass on their nightstand,” Andrews recounted. “The kids thought it was the parents, and the parents thought it was the kids.”
In addition to the mysterious moving drinking glasses, Andrews said the sellers also noticed a wooden chair in the playroom would move on its own until it reached the center of the room.
“They never saw it move,” he said, “but it would move inch by inch ‘til, by the time they were done playing, the wooden chair would be in the middle of the room.”
According to Andrews, the homeowners then talked to some of the neighbors about what happened in their house. That’s when they were told something terrifying.
“The woman that had owned the house before (allegedly) poisoned her kids with a glass of milk every night,” Andrews said. “And after the kids died, she (the woman) got the wooden chair, moved it to the middle of the room and hung herself.”
While the tale may answer who “Mother” is, it doesn’t explain why homeowners still feel her presence all these years later.
Two frightening farmhouses
As a realtor, Andrews said he’s not sold many houses reputed to be haunted. But near the Chatham and Alamance county line are two farmhouses, each more than 200 years old — both featuring similarly scary occurrences.
The seller of one home, located on T.C. Justice Rd., told Andrews he’d occasionally see an apparition staring at him from the top of a set of stairs.
“He saw a man on top of the stairs every now and then, clear as day like it didn’t even look like a ghost,” Andrews said. “It was just a man standing on top of the stairs.”
The second farmhouse, on Pete Thomas Rd., was sold to a man who’d moved from Ireland; his home across the ocean was even older.
“We were getting we were getting a lot of attention on the house ... it’s a 200-year-old farmhouse ... everybody really likes the old historical properties,” Andrews said. “The buyer said he grew up in a house that was 550 years old ... he’s from Ireland, and it was much different, but we just have a different perspective.”
The Irishman ended up hearing disembodied voices, as well as crashes and clanging in the house through the night.
“He said that they would hear things every now and then,” Andrews said. “He said that they would hear little things back in the night.”
The Mystery of the Hands
GULF — Andrews also has a ghost story based out of the unincorporated community of Gulf, just outside of Bear Creek and Goldston, where he sold a New York man a house located on 17 acres of land.
In the middle of the land is a family cemetery, complete with 4-foot-tall tombstones and an iron fence. The property, home and land, was estimated to be worth $200,000, but was sold for $125,000 over 15 years ago because of the cemetery on the land.
After the house was sold, Andrews and his staff followed up with the buyer to see how he was enjoying his new home. According to Andrews, the buyer said he was starting to have unexplained experiences.
“He said he would wake up the next morning and there was stuff moved around in his house that he doesn’t remember moving,” Andrews said.
The activity, however, escalated a year later. The buyer called Andrews to ask if there was any “history on the house.” When Andrews said he wasn’t sure, the buyer said he had started waking up to see his hands covered in cuts and lacerations with unknown origins.
Some time later, Andrews said he saw a news story involving the buyer — just not what he was expecting.
The buyer fell into a deep sleep, during which he started sleepwalking. He approached his neighbor’s house and knocked on the door. When his neighbor answered the door, he began to strangle her.
“When she started screaming, he woke up and he can’t believe he was sleepwalking or whatever,” Andrews said on YouTube.
According to Andrews, law enforcement and the neighbor dropped charges because of the sleepwalking. Shortly after the attack, Andrews was told by neighbors the buyer had fallen into a “weird head space” and started to do things out of the ordinary for him.
A few days went by and the homeowner was found dead in his woodshop — and with a grisly twist.
“He turned on the table saw, and cut off his hands and bleeds to death right there,” Andrews said. “There was a note that said, ‘I don’t know what’s going on, but I don’t feel like I have control over my hands, and it keeps on getting worse and worse.’”
According to Andrews, the buyer’s hands were never found after his body was located.
That’s because there was no body to begin with.
“I made it up,” Andrews laughed. “These are ghost stories, they’re supposed to be a little fun.”
Reporter Taylor Heeden can be reached at theeden@chathamnr.com or on Twitter at @HeedenTaylor.