Ghost Town
GHOST TOWN
Ghost Town
Apparitions in the area
By Cynthia Adams
As Halloween approaches, stories of the paranormal pique our curiosity.
In 1876, British composer Henry Clay Work was inspired to write “My Grandfather’s Clock” by eerie events in a hotel where he stayed, where a tall clock stopped working at the death of one of the brothers who owned it.
The song’s popularity endured. Johnny Cash and Burl Ives recorded the ballad decades later, and countless schoolchildren learned the lyrics.
Yet, Sherri Raeford directly experienced this phenomenon.
“The backstory first,” begins Raeford, a playwright who stages the works of Shakespeare. She appreciates context.
Her mother received a one-of-a-kind Christmas gift 45 years ago from Raeford’s father, Marshall Weavil, who worked for Sovereign Limited, a grandfather clock company in High Point.
“He designed the machines that made the decorative trim, the curlicues on the clock,” Raeford explains.
“He gave my mom a clock — the first ever made by that company.” Inside, it was signed: To Lois with love, Marshall, Dec. 25, 1980.
At his death, his daughter received a grand example representing his life’s work.
“He gave me a bigger, better clock when he passed away,” Raeford says.
Shortly after, Raeford’s mother, suffering dementia, came to live with her. “It was a stressful time.”
Strangely, the clock her father bequeathed her developed a mystifying tendency. “The grandfather clock would stop and go,” Raeford says, seemingly “according to what was happening.”
“The last year of Mom’s life . . . when I would grow impatient with her, the clock would gong at me!” Raeford was incredulous, having never before heard these sounds.
“The last week of Mom’s life, it quit working. I restarted the pendulum, and said, ‘Daddy, she’s not ready.’” Raeford waited.
“The second time it quit, I realized, maybe I’m hanging on to her and she is ready.”
Raeford’s mother died two days later. The gonging stopped forevermore.
“It quit working.”
Raeford inherited her mother’s smaller clock and gave the larger one to a friend.
Aptly, she quotes Hamlet. “There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
The T. Austin Finch House
Thomasville’s Finch House is a Renaissance Revival mansion built in 1921 for T. Austin Finch, whose family founded Thomasville Furniture, and his wife, Ernestine Lambeth Finch.
With Thomasville Furniture’s factories shuttered, the mansion fell into decline. In the summer of 2017, Greensboro residents Andrew and Hilary Clement took on its restoration.
Andrew, a contractor, looked beyond the decades of mold and decay. With much of its grandeur intact, he envisioned wedding ceremonies occurring onsite.
The Clements transformed the house into a blushing beauty (Labor of Love: ohenrymag.com/labor-of-love). One too lovely to leave?
“Some of the local police and other residents swear the house is haunted,” Andrew replies.
Ernestine? Out of respect “for the family and their legacy,” Andrew hesitates before admitting to sensing a feminine energy in the primary bedroom and library.
“I have not seen anything, but I feel her presence in both of those spaces, especially at night when the house is empty. One of my construction guys lived upstairs for a period of time and he saw her in old-fashioned clothes several times in that room.”
Later, he sends a detail.
“She’s definitely a benevolent spirit and not scary. One of my girls has smelled her perfume several times in that bedroom.”
Thomasville Apparition
On June 26, 1970, Dana Holliday’s father was mortally injured in a tractor accident at age 70.
As his frantic son, Derek Kanoy, tried to resuscitate him, the father calmly reassured him. “He said, ‘Don’t worry about me, I’ll be fine.’”
But he slipped away before paramedics arrived.
“They used to call him Bucky Buddha,” Holliday says. “He was bigger than life.”
Afterward, the brokenhearted family held a reception to honor Bucky Buddha’s amazing vitality. “It was unbelievable, says Holliday. “Friends lined the road leading to the farm. He didn’t want a funeral. Instead, we danced and told stories.”
The family have since created a compound on the farm and live near one another.
One April day in 2020, Derek and his wife Kim snapped a photo while walking from the barn to their house. In the picture, taken at sunset, a small, glowing orb appears directly over the spot where the fatal accident occurred, almost 50 years later.
“Kim was stunned,” says Holliday. “She might have been taking a picture of the sunset.” Perhaps the sphere of light had appeared before, but this time it was documented. Holliday says the extraordinary sighting was as if Bucky Buddha was signaling all was, indeed, well. “I think it helped.”
Two years before Bucky’s death, Tomiko Smith, a consulting medium who once worked at the Rhyne Research Center at Duke University, told Holliday that she should be “intentional about the way I spent time with him.” Now, she understands.
A Haunting on Mendenhall Street
After years of admiring it, a 1914 Craftsman in a charming Greensboro neighborhood went up for sale. We spent months repairing plaster, painting and scrubbing, thoroughly excising the smell of cat urine and viscous nicotine residue coating each wall of the Westerwood house before finally spending a night.
After moving in, we were utterly exhausted that first night. Around 1:15 a.m., I was awakened by the unmistakable creaking of the stairs.
Heart hammering, I rose quietly. The stairs were flooded with moonlight by a large window at the top. I crept toward the landing and crouched, watching. The sound of footfalls upon each tread was distinct — but no one appeared.
I returned to bed when the steps stopped, but sleep eluded me. Had it been a lucid dream?
But the scenario repeated the following night. The disembodied footfalls on the stairs returned, at the same hour.
On the third night, again crouching at the top, I jumped when a hand touched my shoulder. “I hear it, too,” my husband said quietly.
I scoured old deeds and newspapers for clues. What had happened in our new home? Whose spirit mounted the stairs each night?
Nothing gave much insight, apart from the fact that records revealed the house had changed hands often, once resold mere months after being bought.
Was it due to what seemed to be a benign ghost?
During an overnight visit from my young nephew, I caught him racing upstairs, his child legs pumping. I chided him about running in the house. He turned to me, eyes wide. “That man’s watching me!”
He pointed back to the empty stairs. I hurriedly distracted him with a children’s book.
Gradually, we made peace with the restless spirit who walked the stairs. Ironically — a tale for another day — a paranormal experience awaited us in our next home.