First posted 2010
On what is now Pine Shadows Drive from Hwy. 61, keep going through, and you’ll come to two lakes on either side of the road. My grandmothers (both White and Hix) used to love to go there and fish. Somebody had put some gold fish in the lake and koi, so while Grandmother sat, in her later years, in her wheelchair under a shade tree, casting her line into the water, I’d play around the bank and poke sticks in the water to play with the “fun fish” that would wouldn’t venture too far out in the deeper water.
I asked Grandmother about the white house at the top of the hill just above the lake. We called it “the old Lindsay place.” I asked Grandmother if she knew anything about that house. It looked like it’d been there a long time. She said there was a story about that house and that it was haunted. Of course, that got my interest, so I scooted a little closer to her wheelchair and begged her to tell me.
She said that it happened back in the 1800′s when the house was first built. There was a man and his wife living there (I don’t remember their surname) who took in a boarder from England. Grandma said he hadn’t been there too long when people realized he had very large sum of money with him. So there was a lot of speculation about him.
One of the neighbors went over there one day and the wife came to the door covered in blood. The neighbor told later that she wouldn’t invite him in, wiping her hands on her apron trying to get the blood off. The neighbor looked in and saw blood all over the floor but the wife waved it off saying that they had just killed a chicken for supper and it had gotten loose (where do you think the saying came from, “Like a chicken with its head cut off?”). So the neighbor left.
Funny thing was…. no one ever saw the Englishman again. Grandmother said she’d heard that the man and his wife who lived in that house had killed him for his money and choppped him up and buried the pieces around the yard.
I got a really eerie feeling about that thinking that I might be sitting on his arm or something.
Note: It very well could have been Grandmother Hix’ mother or daddy who had been the neighbor who dropped by. Anyone living back then in New Georgia would probably remember the old fireplace that stood there for at least fifty years on the other side of that lake at the top of the hill. That was my Great Grandma Kitchens’ home place but they’d lost their home in a fire. So it is possible that it would have been my great grandmother or grandpa who went calling and learned about the blood on the wife and the chicken story.
Anyway, because there was no evidence of foul play (no pun intended) and it really could have been fowl-play, no investigation was done as to the missing Englishman because he had told folks he wasn’t going to be boarding for long.
People just thought it was kind of strange that he hadn’t said goodbye to anyone or told anyone he was leaving so suddenly. They never could prove anything, but Grandmother Hix now was telling me that she believed that the Englishman was haunting the place looking for his body parts.
She said I’d have to get Grandpa to tell me the story of when he was young and, on a dare, spent the night there alone.
So, I did.
Grandpa was born November 25, 1887, so this must have been around 1904 when he said he was about 17 or so and some friends of his dared him to spend the night in the haunted house. He couldn’t pass that bet, so he went there right before dark and made plans to stay the night.
He had a cotton quilt pallet laid out in the living room and a lantern for light. He said when it got closer to dark, he began hearing strange noises around the house, and he got a little scared. So he’d brought a chain to go across the front door so he could make sure it was securely locked and secured the rest of the house.
Not only was he worried about somebody else coming in, he didn’t want his friends playing a prank and trying to scare him in the middle of the night.
He said it wasn’t easy for him to go to sleep but he did it taking a lot of satisfaction that he would prove to his friends that he wasn’t a scardie-cat.
The next morning, after a fitful night, waking up to strange noises, he finally got up to go home. He gathered all his stuff he’d brought in and headed for the front door.
He stopped dead in his tracks unable to move for a minute while it sank in what he was seeing:
The door that he’d put a chain through and thoroughly secured against anyone outside getting in before he went to bed was wide open and the chains were laying across the room in a neat pile.
He swore that this is a true story and made him believe in ghosts for the rest of his life
