Читать книгу Ghosthunting Kentucky - Patti Starr - Страница 13

GLASGOW, BARREN COUNTY

ON OUR WAY TO SCOTTSVILLE, to speak at the Allen County Public Library and complete a ghost investigation of The Haunted Hospital, Chuck and I arrived in Glasgow and checked into our place of lodging. David Dinwiddie, owner of The Haunted Hospital, had graciously booked us at Hall Place, which is about twenty miles from Scottsville. I told him I was looking for places to write about in my next book, and he felt that we would love this old historic and possibly haunted bed-and-breakfast.

Glasgow is located in and is the county seat of Barren County, Kentucky. It was established in 1799 and was named Glasgow by John Matthews, who was from Glasgow, Scotland. That is why the city is well known for its annual Scottish Highland Games. The Highland Games are a way of celebrating Scottish and Celtic culture and heritage. They hold competitions in piping, drumming, dancing, and Scottish heavy athletics. The games also include entertainment and exhibits related to other aspects of Scottish culture. The Kentucky Tourism Council named the Glasgow Highland Games as one of the “Top Ten Festival Events” for the summer.

Our trusty GPS brought us to our exact destination of Hall Place, located in the historic downtown district on Green Street. As we drove up to the front yard, we saw a tall wooden sign that read Hall Place at the top. Below that it said Theodosia’s Tea Room. I learned from Gary and Karin Carroll, the owners of Hall Place, that the house was built in 1852 as a dowry for Theodosia Tompkins, who married Dr. James Hall. The Carrolls named their bed-and-breakfast and tea room in honor of the Halls. We parked the car in back of the building, amidst a beautiful garden and seating area. Even though it was dreary and raining, I could imagine how romantic it would be to sit in the garden and enjoy a glass of wine and watch the fireflies on a warm summer eve.

We grabbed our bags out of the trunk of our car and headed for the entrance. As the door opened, a delicate ringing sound came from a small bell that was placed at the top of the door to alert the innkeepers of our arrival. A tall and slender lady wearing a blue floral blouse and a long, dark midi-skirt joined us at the front desk. She introduced herself as Karin Carroll and welcomed us to Hall Place. Seeing our ghosthunter vests, she realized that we were the ghosthunters she was expecting, and she seemed genuinely excited to finally meet us. She was quick to share some of her stories about weird and strange events that she and her husband had experienced in their inn.

After hearing a few of her stories, I looked at Chuck and said, “Honey, I think we need to book another night so we can investigate this place while we are here.” Chuck agreed and we signed in for two nights instead of one. We went up to our room, which is called the Theodosia Room. It was a large suite with a queen-sized, antique half-tester canopy bed, covered in a finely stitched quilt. The room was furnished with an antique armoire, fireplace, and an oversized private bath that used to serve as a treatment room for the doctor when he owned the home.

The next morning we woke up to the wonderful aroma of a home-cooked Southern breakfast, complete with fruit, yogurt, eggs, bacon, and waffles, served with a hot cup of coffee. When we got to the dining room, Gary asked us how we’d slept. I decided this would be a good time to share with him something that happened to me during the night. I was suffering with a sore back from a fall in a cemetery during another ghost investigation a few days before. While sound asleep, lying on my side and turned towards Chuck, the pressure of what felt like two hands pressing on the lower part of my back woke me. At first I thought it might be Chuck checking on me, but when I reached out, I could feel Chuck still beside me in bed. I lay still and noticed that my back started to warm up as if someone had held their hands against my back for a while, creating this heat. When I rolled over to take a look, I noticed that my back muscles didn’t seize up and cause me pain as they had been doing over the last few days. It was a relief. I rolled back over and within minutes I fell back to sleep.

Gary smiled and said, “Well, that doesn’t surprise me. You see, you are staying in the same bedroom where Dr. James Hall used to sleep. The other room beside your room is where he kept overnight patients. He was in the habit of getting up in the middle of the night to check on his patients. You may have experienced the good doctor’s concern for you and his checking to make sure your injury was being addressed.” I loved that explanation.

The rest of the day Chuck and I visited with Gary and Karin at different times because of their busy schedule and the fact that the inn was booked for the weekend. While Chuck was with Gary I would be with Karin and during that time, with recorder in hand, we would ask questions about the activity they had experienced. Karin’s first story was about the Victrola she had displayed in the parlor. It was a beautiful antique phonograph with a large, polished external horn in a deep rust color that amplified the playback sound.

The haunted Victrola that starts up on its own

Karin explained, “I was sitting in the parlor beside the fire-place one evening while working on some needlepoint when I heard the sound of the Victrola’s wheel spinning. I walked over to it, and it was spinning very fast without any logical reason. Usually when you start a Victrola it will start to spin slowly and then speed up, but this was not the case—it started up in a fast spin. I called out for Gary and when he came into the room he was shocked to see the wheel spinning. The Victrola has a broken spring and the wheel had seized so that it could not be moved, even if you tried to force it. Gary placed his hand on the moving wheel and it stopped. He tried to move it again to see if he could recreate the movement, but it wouldn’t budge. It has never moved again.” Gary laughed and added to her story, “After that happened I looked at my wife and said, ‘If the pump organ starts to play, I am out of here!’”

Karin and Gary also discovered a trap door in the floor of the porch that is now the front room where guests check in. Beneath the trap door they found a cave that went under the house. They discovered that the house had been used as a stop on the Underground Railroad. The cave under the house extends twelve miles out and opens onto a spring on the other side of town; it was a perfect passage for conducting escaped slaves to freedom. Karin said that she had met African-American travelers who had heard about her inn being used as part of the Underground Railroad from stories that had been passed down to them from family members. Karin told me that she had found records revealing that Dr. Hall also had slaves and that he gave each one of them his surname. He treated them with kindness, and when he gave them away to his relatives, he made them promise to always take care of the slaves.

“Did you know that Vicki Lawrence, the comedian who played Mama on The Carol Burnett Show, and her husband, Al Schultz, stayed here a few months ago?” Karin asked. “Vicki was in Glasgow doing a performance, and she and Al stayed here while they were in town. When they came down for breakfast we asked them how they’d slept, and Al said that in the middle of the night he was awakened by a woman standing at the foot of his bed. She had on a blue dress, and he thought she was a black woman. He said that she looked at him and begged him to hide her, that they were coming to get her. Then she started to crawl in bed with them, and Al told her she couldn’t do that and asked her to leave. She disappeared and then two men, dressed in uniforms, appeared standing at the foot of the bed. He thought that maybe the woman was a slave and was being chased by these two soldiers. Al looked at the men and noticed that they were tall, and he told them that even though they were bigger than he was, they couldn’t hurt him because they were ghosts. Within a few seconds the two men disappeared and things were quiet again, so Al went back to sleep.”

The trap door that leads to the old Underground Railroad tunnels

I asked Karin if there were any unexplained sounds that they have heard in the inn. She told me that they constantly hear someone walking upstairs. She added that even the previous owners warned them about the footsteps. The former owners said that once they called the police, thinking there was an intruder in the house. The policemen also heard the footsteps on the second floor, but there was no one there. Karen told me that she thought the footsteps are the most common ghostly sound they hear. Karin remembered: “A female guest was watching TV one evening, and she heard someone walking outside her door, talking loudly. She turned the volume on the TV to mute so she could hear what they were saying, but then the voices stopped. Later the next morning, the guest commented to me that the people who came in late last night were really noisy. I had to tell her that no one else had come into the inn at that time, and there were no other rooms rented.”

In between our interviews I decided to take a break and go up to my room to relax. I love to work Sudoku puzzles so I grabbed an apple, propped myself up on my bed, and started my game. A wooden chair with a burgundy seat cushion stood across the room from me. While my eyes were focused on my Sudoku book, I could see a man sitting in the chair. I would raise my head to look at the chair, and, for a split second, I saw a man in a dark suit sitting with his legs crossed before he would disappear. I lowered my head and started my game, and, again, I could see a man sitting in the chair. As before, when I would raise my head, he would disappear. I had already learned that this used to be Dr. Hall’s bedroom. I thought it might be Dr. Hall, but I expected to see him in a white doctor’s jacket instead of a black suit.

When Chuck came back into the room I told him that I had seen a man sitting in the chair but was puzzled why he would be in a black suit. Chuck told me that Gary had just given him a tour of the inn, and while in one of the rooms, he saw a group picture of the doctors, and they were all dressed in black suits. “Okay, that works for me,” I said. When we came down for breakfast on the second day of our stay, we joined a mother and daughter who were traveling from Alabama. They had come to Glasgow to join a scrapbooking seminar. When the daughter, Shannon Gibson, saw my T-shirt, she commented on the ghosthunter.com that she observed on the back. I told her that I was a professional ghosthunter, and we were here in Glasgow to investigate haunted locations. Shannon looked at her mom, Lisa Sweet, and said, “Oh my gosh, I so totally believe in ghosts. Do you think this place is haunted?” I glanced over at Gary, and he gave me a wink and a nod, so I answered, “Well it might be, but I don’t think you have anything to fear.”

Shannon said, “Last night while in my room, I felt as if I were being watched, and once I fell asleep I kept waking up from bad dreams. Since we are in adjoining rooms, I would go and look around the corner to see if Mom was okay. When I told her about my restless night, she said she had experienced the same thing and would come around to check on me. How weird is that?”

I asked them to tell me about their dreams. “I dreamt I was in a car,” Shannon said, “driving with someone in the back seat who was complaining and making me angry, so I said to them, ‘Stop your complaining and do something about it.’ At that moment the person took a gun and held it under his chin and shot himself, which woke me up immediately.” Lisa said, “In my dream I kept seeing injured animals, and I remember there was lots of blood all around me.”

I mentioned to them that it was interesting to note how their dreams related to physical injuries. I told them that the house once belonged to a doctor, and the house served as a place where the injured would come for treatment. At times they would have to remain overnight. Once we finished visiting with our new friends, we left the second floor and met with Gary and Karin one more time in the parlor. They told us that they had purchased another historic home not too far from Hall Place. It has been labeled by the community as an old haunted house, and Chuck and I are already making plans to go back and investigate the Carrolls’ newly acquired property that they will convert into another bed-and-breakfast, which they hope to have finished by 2012. They have named the future bed-and-breakfast “1854 Bryan House.” They plan to have ghosthunter tours and overnight ghosthunts while the home is being renovated. Maybe we’ll find even more Glasgow ghosts.