OcraGhosts
This is Part One of a 4-Part Series of Ghost Stories that we'll post over the next two days. Happy Halloween!
Wine and Song
Paranormal investigators have done shows exploring some of the nation’s most infamously haunted locations ranging from Western mining towns to insane asylums to prisons to hotels. But they seem to have left out a key area to investigate: the Outer Banks. Hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of lives have been lost off the Outer Banks due to weather and war, and the people living along these tiny ribbons of sand have experienced terrible tragedy and scandal. There are a multitude of books detailing various hauntings along the Outer Banks, but I thought it would be fun to make a new collection of stories as told by Ocracoke residents who have experienced paranormal activity firsthand. To get this started, here’s one of the experiences I’ve had here.
Will and I moved into our house the day before Hurricane Sandy hit in 2012. We were full of excitement about living in a cute old Ocracoke home on a cute old Ocracoke street with Ocracoker neighbors, so when our landlord – an Ocracoker - told us to tell the ghosts he’s moved out, we didn’t think much of it. We didn’t think much of the noises we heard either, because houses – especially older ones - make weird sounds sometimes.
We did think a little more about it when electronics would come on every day at 4pm. We checked to be sure the timers were off (they were) and we made sure we powered down every single thing in the home that turned on at 4pm. We talked to our landlord about this and being that the electronics were his, he let us remove them from the house after we told him we no longer felt the need to use them.
Not long after, we’d hear thuds in the kitchen, only to find my boxed wine had somehow been propelled from the kitchen table to the floor. We learned that “back in the day,” Ocracokers used to make wine out of cornmeal in this house, so we figured the spirit(s) was either thirsty or disagreed with my taste in wine. Either way, I stopped buying boxed wine for a while. The noises continued and the lights would flicker and we’d hear random knocking, but nothing ever felt dangerous.
Our dog Harley, who is quite rambunctious, would stop and look at something in our little foyer, which was a bit alarming, but no harm was ever done to him. When Will listened to Pandora, the music would (and still does) abruptly change from music that will make your ears bleed to Bluegrass. An Ocracoker told us that a couple of “old timers” used to play music on this property, while partaking in drinks of meal wine, so to us there seemed to be explanations for what was happening, meaning the spirit (s) was (were) having some fun.
These events went on for months and months and I decided to tell my parents about it. Both my mom and dad are very fact-based, rational thinkers, and our topics of discussion weren’t often about ghosts, spirits, the afterlife, etc. I was thinking they’d be skeptical about what we were saying, but both were intrigued by the happenings and suggested we keep a diary of what happens in the house. We started logging everything that had already happened and added to the journal anything new. My favorite happening – and by favorite I mean the most dramatic – occurred with a friend in the house.
Our back deck sits just off the kitchen. When you walk inside from the deck, the sink is on the right and the L-shaped counter follows the wall around to the stove, where there is a small hallway. To the left of the hallway opening is the refrigerator, followed by some shelving units, the opening to the foyer, and the dining room table. The fridge is directly across the kitchen from sink and back door. This is important to the ghost story, I promise.
Kim O’Neal was over at the house and we were having a few drinks out on the back deck. We’d had a drink or two but definitely not enough to be drunk by any means. We chitchatted about how the week was going, how our families were, work, stuff like that. Then, we started talking about the television show The Voice. I for one don’t watch those shows; never have, never will. But Kim and her husband Reggie LOVE it, so she was telling me about the latest episode and that I should listen to some of these singers. So we’re sitting outside, having some drinks, and talking about The Voice when we hear a series of bangs coming from inside the kitchen. We look at each other, our eyes wide open – she was well aware of our previous experiences – and jump up to investigate.
When we opened the door to the kitchen we found a remote control on the floor. That in and of itself won’t make one get chills, but in this case the remote had been on top of the fridge and was thrown across the kitchen. That gave us chills. We did everything we could to prove gravity had played the sole role in getting that remote from the fridge top to the back door, but try as we might to re-create what happened, we couldn’t get the remote to slide more than a few inches when we pushed it from the fridge. When pushed with some force we sure did get it to move, but simply falling from the top didn’t create enough energy to propel it across the kitchen. We are convinced the spirit of a musician – maybe the same one who changes Will’s music – was responsible for throwing the remote.
Up next: A story of the well-known haunted cottage on Lighthouse Road.
