Spencer Mountain Haunted House
Spencer Mountain, North Carolina
Website : www. spencermountain. com/hh
How ironic! Used as a haunted fun house around Halloween to raise funds for the Spencer Mountain Volunteer Fire Department, this house, situated on a hillside overlooking the South Fork of the Catawba River, really is haunted. Tales of ghostly activities in this house have been well-documented. Significantly, many of the reported paranormal encounters occurred during the hours in which the haunted house was not open to admission-paying thrill seekers, eliminating the possibility that these paranormal encounters could be merely encounters with costumed actors.
The most dramatic report of a ghost sighting happened on October 11, 2002, as a fireman dressed as Freddy Krueger positioned himself in an upstairs corner shortly before the public was allowed inside that evening. The fireman states that he came face to face with a woman wearing a white lace garment, the type, said the fireman, that would have been fashionable in a bygone day. In addition to seeing the apparition, the fireman also noticed during the encounter that the strobe lights and fog machine had stopped working (Gaston Gazette, October 20, 2002, 1B). Too terrified even to scream, he bounded down the stairs and breathlessly told his colleagues on the front lawn what he had witnessed. That firefighter refused to re-enter the house. The volunteers preparing the house for the 2004 Halloween season claim that there has never been an actress attired to look like that apparition in the old, white lace dress.
A team from the North Carolina Piedmont Paranormal Research Society investigated the house on September 25, 2004. The firefighters graciously disconnected the electronic devices, such as strobe lights and simulated train whistle, which would have interfered with the equipment used in the investigation. Although no apparitions appeared that night, the team did photograph a white, string-like image in three pictures taken in an interior room. This string-like image cannot be dismissed as merely a decoration for the fundraiser, because in two pictures the string appears in front of an investigator standing in the middle of the room. The investigator who took these pictures did so because a pair of dowsing rods, previously calm, had begun to swing.
Writing in The Architectural History of Gaston County, Kim Withers Brengle states that the house was built in the late 19th century, although some of the volunteers assisting with the fundraiser believe that the part of the house referred to by Brengle as “a multi-sided bay” dates to the mid to late 1700s. The house has been vacant, except for the Halloween fundraiser, for more than 25 years. As for the woman in the white lace gown, although a few people have seen her and one man even spoke with her, no one knows who she is or why she has chosen to remain in the house.
