i ain't 'fraid of no ghost.

Octagon Hall

Friday night I toured a 'real' haunted house with a couple of friends.  The house is located about 20 miles south in the town of Franklin, KY.  The residence is dubbed Octagon (Oc-te-gen as Southerners say) Hall because, well, it is an eight-sided house.  It's an old house with a big history.  Before going on the tour, we were given a brief history of the home and the family that lived there, and heard some paranormal investigative stories.  I'll share a little history with you because I know you're as curious as a cat.

The Caldwell family built and lived in the home.  It took 12 years to build and was finally completed in 1859.  During the Civil War, Mr. Caldwell offered food and shelter to many Confederate soldiers.  As many as 12,000 soldiers camped on the property at one time.  Presently, the home is said to be haunted by the family members (specifically the little 7 year old girl, Mary Elizabeth) and many slaves that lived on the property.  Mary Elizabeth was burned very badly in the downstairs winter kitchen.  A spark caught her dress on fire.  She died in the home and is also buried on the property.  Okay.  Enough history.  

The property and presence of the house itself was a little creepy.  It seemed like we had to wait outside in the cold for 55 million years before our group was called up for our tour of the house.  We passed some time by taking pictures outside on the property until I got my hand smacked by a 14 year old girl.  She told me that I couldn't take pictures but she didn't want me to be mad at her.  Oh, little girl drama.  Yes, I will be mad at you, so mad.

Me, Kelly, and Temi. Ready for our ghost adventure!

One of my few pictures that I took before I got mad at the 14 year old, is a shot pointing toward the house.  After I took the picture, I noticed a glowing orb in the basement window of the house.  A light was not on in that portion of the house, so I knew I wasn't catching light off a lamp or anything.  After zooming in and cropping, below is what it looked like.  A little creepy looking, if you ask me.  It's blurry and grainy, but it kinda looks like a little facey-face.  Okay, so it looks more like a head with a lion mane, but...possibly Mary Elizabeth...?  "Jeepers" and "Zoinks" as the Scooby-Doo crew would say!

So, inside the house, well, it was creepy and old.  We met the owner of the home, Billy.  He gave us a little more history and told us that the house was going to be featured on The Travel Channel on Friday night, October 22nd.  As he was talking to us, I turned around to look behind me along with Kelly, Temi, and two other guys that were standing beside us.  I don't know what made us all turn our heads simultaneously, but it felt like something was behind us.  Billy even stopped talking and asked us what we were looking at.  We then heard an almost disembodied scream--there were no other tour groups in the house along with us.  So, already it started off kinda creepy.  Many of the rooms in the house were shut off.  We toured three rooms upstairs and a couple rooms in the basement.  I was glad that we didn't have to go through more rooms than that.  That was all I needed.  All the lights were off in the house, so that made it even creepier.
Temi, Kelly, and I agreed that there was a little too much movement and sounds going on in that place for them all to be authentic haunts.  The workers said that nothing was rigged up, but we're thinking some of the stuff had to have been staged.  I'm a super jumpy person anyway, and when things started moving in this house or making noise, my screaming was on.  We all screamed.  A lot.  It was some scary stuff, regardless of if it was staged or not.
I felt uncomfortable during that moment when we first walked in the house, then again in an upstairs bedroom.  The floorboards behind Temi, Kelly, and I creaked and we felt actual movement behind us on the floor.  There were no other people behind us though.  We were the only girls in the group and the men would always run out of the rooms and leave us behind.  The other point in the house when I felt really freaked out was at the very end of the tour.  We were in the basement and about to exit the house.  I was overcome with sadness and almost felt the urge to cry.  I just wanted to get the heck out of that house.  Again, all the men ran ahead of us, so we were the last ones to walk up the back steps to exit the house.  As we were about to exit, I felt a light pressure on my right shoulder, like a hand touching me.  I automatically turned around, because I thought maybe one of the guys was behind me and I was ready to tell him to back on off of me, but there was no one there.  I don't know.  It was weird.  I just don't know how I felt about the experience.  Not all of it was believable and some of the things could be explained away, but those few instances were just strange.  I was a little freaked out and unsure though, that's for sure.
When we got out of the house, Kelly discovered that her clutch was no longer hanging from her arm. There was no way that it had dropped because she had not let go of my or Temi's arm the entire time we were in the house.  A worker had later found her clutch (we don't know if it was lost inside or directly outside of the house), but the strap was ripped, as in, completely ripped off.  Bizarr-o.
So, there you go.  That was my ghost adventure.  Go check it out if you dare and let me know what your experience was like at The Octagon Hall.