Your True Tales
November 2007 - Page 16
Ghosts in Grandma's Woods
by Michael
I was 15 years old when I found out about the ghost in my grandmother's woods. It was summertime 1989 and I was spending a month with her at her house in Augusta, Georgia. Some nights, when grandma was working the night shift at the hospital, my Uncle Vick would come stay the night with me. One one such night we were swinging on the porch. This house sat alone on about four or five acres and was all by itself in the woods, so it could get very quiet and dark late at night.
Well, this night all of a sudden was not so quiet or dark. At first we could barely hear the singing, then it got louder. It was a whole chorus of people singing (when I think back to it, it was actually very beautiful singing.) It was coming from not too far into the woods, maybe a 100 yards or so. Then the lights began to come up from the direction of the singing. This was a flickering orange glow dancing through the trees. My uncle figured it out very quickly at this point: It was teenagers having a bonfire party in grandma's woods. It made sense with the sound of the singing and the fire.
My uncle and I grabbed a couple of flashlights and headed to run them off of the property. We headed right into the woods down an old walking path leading to the bonfire. Sure enough, there were people having a good old time, but we were going to break it up. And just like that, it was all gone. The woods just went quiet... nothing and nobody making a sound. The glow of the fire just disappeared right in front of our eyes. How could this be? How could they get away so quickly and so quietly when we were right there?
I have never been so scared in my life. My uncle and I headed back to the the house right away and locked up everything and slept in the living room that night with all the lights on. We awoke in the morning just as confused as the night before. Soon grandma came home and we began to tell her the story. She began to laugh as she said, "Well, I guess you guys have have now been introduced to the resident ghosts." She took us for a walk down to our sighting and explained the whole story to us.
You see, grandma's house used to be part of a huge cotton plantation. Her house was actually the guest house for the plantation while the main house itself had long since burned to the ground. As we walked down the path, we came across a large opening in the woods. Here you could still make out the foundations of the slave cottages lined up in a big circle around the outline of what looked like a big firepit. This was where we heard the singing come from. This was the spot of the fire glow we saw. You see, said grandma, these ghosts are harmless. They are just the ghost of the slaves singing around the fire after a long hard day in the cotton fields.
|
Do you have a paranormal tale to tell? |
