It’s called the “House of a Thousand Voices” for a reason. Stick around to hear stories of investigating the Ferry Plantation in Virginia Beach, Virginia.

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Welcome to the PEEP Podcast! I’m your host Nicolle Morock, and I’m grateful you’re here! The two big ideas behind the PEEP Podcast are to show that the paranormal is more normal than most people think and to connect the science to the psi, including ESP, hauntings, and psychokinesis! In this episode, we’re taking a trip down memory lane to the Ferry Plantation.

But first, I want to say thank you for sticking with me through my spring break. It sounds fun, but even my trip to the beach on a cool and windy weekend was all about being productive. I wrote almost 5,000 words of my novel since the weather was not conducive to vegging out on the beach. And I’m not complaining. In fact, I really hoped to be done with the novel at the end of March, but life, as always, gets in the way, and instead, I’m about 16,000 words in and have about 64,000 words left to write.

If you know an author, give them a hug. I won’t say writing is hard, but I will say making time to get the words on the page can be a challenge.

Still, I promised I’d be back after a month-long break and here I am!

One thing I did accomplish over the break was finally adding the PEEP Podcast to my YouTube channel! So, PEEP and Positive Head Space are there now. I also took a month-long Shorts challenge, which just meant that almost every day in March, I posted at 15 to 45-second short video that I called “Sound up for Nature.”

Most of the videos are from my nature walks down past the duck hole near my neighborhood, but a few are from the windy weekend at the beach. My goal for them was to provide a moment with nature for anyone who needs a mental break while doom scrolling. The experience proved rewarding enough that I’m keeping up the habit. Any time I can walk in nature and get video, I’ll post it on YouTube.

One other thing I did in March – I had the chance to join a paranormal investigation of the Trivette Clinic in western North Carolina. It was my first time there, and while it’s alleged to have a dozen ghosts, I felt nothing and got no EVP. That doesn’t mean it’s not haunted, though. It only means there wasn’t anything happening the night I was there.

I’ve spoken with other investigators who have gotten EVP and had personal experiences in the place, so don’t let my let-down deter you from visiting.

Because I stayed busy through March, I don’t have any interviews lined up for this podcast, so I need your help!

If you’ve been listening a while, you know I’d love to hear your personal paranormal stories of any flavor – ghosts, UFOs, cryptids, near-death experiences – whatever! Just go to peeppodcast.com and use the Share Your Paranormal Experience button to get in touch and let me know you’d like to be on the show. I promise the process is painless and you can be as anonymous as you’d like!

One last announcement before I dive into tonight’s topic: If you’re local to the Triangle area of North Carolina, come see me and other local authors and makers at Five Points Fest on Saturday, April 25^th from noon to 4:00 in Youngsville. It’s a great annual outdoor market. I attended as a shopper last year and found lots of cool things and met even cooler people, which is why I’m participating as a vendor this year.

And speaking of books, we can now get back to tonight’s topic. Another chapter from “Please, don’t call me psychic: stories from my paranormal life.” This one is about Ferry Plantation – a historic location in Virginia Beach, Virginia that my team and I investigated several times. In fact, Ferry was my first investigation with the team, and you’ll hear all about it in this excerpt.

3 NSPIR Story: The Ferry Plantation

Geographical location: Virginia Beach, Virginia

Location type: Historic Site

Claims of activity: disembodied voices, full body apparition of Henry in the old kitchen area, EVP from many different spirits, ghost cat, presence of Sally in her room, ghosts on the grounds of three enslaved people hung on a tree in the yard, chains hanging near a window clanging of their own volition

Lessons learned: The house of a thousand voices is aptly named.

EVP available online: yes

It has been called “The House of a Thousand Voices” for good reason. One of the most famously haunted public places in Virginia Beach, the Ferry Plantation has never failed to yield electronic voice phenomena (EVP). Investigators have captured male and female and even feline voices on digital recorders. Some have been one syllable sounds that could be heard as “yes” or “no,” and others have been lengthy phrases such as our favorite “that flea-bagged whore.” (While it is a little more PG-13 than we like to present at our library talks, it always results in gasps and giggles between the clarity and the shock factor.)

The Ferry Plantation will always have a special place in my memory because it was my first investigation with NSPIR, and the one where I proved to the group, George in particular, that I really did have a knack for picking up on spirits.

On my first trip to the historic landmark, George had given me a little information about the place. It dated back centuries, it used to be the site of a ferry landing, and it was once used as a jail and courthouse. That was really all I needed to know. Any more detail and I feared it would taint my impressions of the energy there.

When we arrived, we were greeted by a very warm and friendly woman named Belinda, who was there to be our sitter for the night. George asked her not to say too much about the activity in the house until I had a chance to try a cold walk-through and get my bearings. She told me to feel free to look around and ask questions if I had any.

I didn’t feel much of anything unusual on the first floor, so I headed upstairs. In one bedroom, I immediately felt that familiar sensation in the middle of my spine letting me know there was a presence. It was strong and persistent. Belinda had followed me upstairs, and I turned to her and said, “There is something very strong in the room.” It wasn’t scary, but it wanted me to know it was there. Belinda just smiled and followed me through the rest of the house. There were a few other moments when I felt some different sensations, but that one really stood out.

When we rejoined George downstairs, he asked what I thought. I told him the house was beautiful and obviously full of old things that could have affected some of what I felt, but there was one room that really stood out. Belinda eagerly told him that I had picked up on Sally, who had been quite active all day up there. I think that impressed George a little, and Belinda’s validation made me happy.

The Ferry Plantation is another one of those locations that we visited often, and I hate to admit it, but many of those visits run together in my memory. I’m afraid this particular chapter may come across as a bit more rambling in the mode of “one time at the Ferry…”

We often took our Meetup group there. We probably had a few too many people with us, but everyone was so excited for an opportunity in the House of a Thousand Voices that it was hard to say “no.” Among the group were artists, school teachers, a professed curious skeptic, a few people who claimed mediumistic tendencies, and just some who were generally curious about how NSPIR conducted investigations.

When we had a large group, we would split up into two smaller groups, and each would take the opposite side of the house. For example, one would take the downstairs, far right room while the other went to the top floor, far left room. We were attempting to alleviate as much potential interference from each other as possible. Two-way radios were our method of communication, and we alerted each other to any sounds we heard in other rooms in an effort to make sure they weren’t being created by the other group. It was a little complicated, but it worked well enough.

So, what happened on our many trips to the Ferry Plantation?

Cat-called:

A group I was leading was sitting in the dining room on the first floor. We were spaced apart, sitting around the large table with a couple people standing in opposite corners. One lady who was sitting across the table from me said she felt something brush against her leg. A few seconds later, another lady a few seats down said, “I just felt it, too!” By the end of our fifteen-minute EVP session, several had experienced the sensation of an animal brushing by them. During a snack break immediately afterward, one of those ladies decided to listen to her audio recording of that session. Excitement spread quickly as she announced she had captured a cat’s meow! We listened to it and heard for ourselves, the ghost cat had paid us a visit!

Phantom food poisoning:

During one EVP session, we were in an upstairs bedroom known as Sally’s or Stella’s room. I was standing in the middle of the room focusing on the darkness while others asked questions when a sharp pain started in my stomach. My first thought was, “what did I eat to cause this?” Then I took a deep breath and let it go, realizing it wasn’t my own pain. As an empath, I can feel other people’s physical ailments. I interrupted the session to announce that I had a sharp pain in my stomach, but it wasn’t mine and asked if anyone else had a similar sensation. That’s when one of the guys with us who studied the history of the house announced what Sally was said to have died from – mistakenly eating poisonous mushrooms. Once I acknowledged the feeling and how horrible her death must have been, the pain was gone.

Potentially explained sounds:

Often groups would be in one room and hear sounds coming from adjacent rooms or hallways. For example, one night we were in a room next to the gift shop when we heard the sound of something rolling across the floor inside it. We all asked each other what the sound was and confirmed the direction from which it came. When we went into the gift shop for our next EVP session, we saw nothing out of place. During that session, one of our group members found a small marble-sized ball and rolled it across the floor. The sound it made seemed like an exact match to what we all heard coming from a then empty room.

Clicks and taps:

Another regular occurrence during our Ferry investigations was random sounds claimed by no one in the group. As a general rule, any noise created by an investigator has to be tagged by that person, so we know it isn’t paranormal when we go back and listen to the recordings. When reviewing audio, you hear people announce, “That was me,” and “I shifted my weight,” and “My stomach just growled.” It’s amazing how much noise people make when they’re trying to be quiet! Sometimes the sounds aren’t claimed. I have many recordings of various clicks and taps followed by us questioning each other, “Did you do that?” “It wasn’t me.” “I thought it was you.” And so on. Our next step would be to try to duplicate the sound by tapping on various surfaces in the room, but to no avail. The sounds may have been totally mundane, but then again, maybe they weren’t.

Full phrases and single syllables:

The EVP we’ve recorded at the Ferry Plantation included the aforementioned “That flea-bagged whore,” which seemed to be an answer to the question asked by an investigator as to how many children lived in the house. If it was an answer, the male voice certainly didn’t have much respect for the lady of the house. 

The EVPs I personally captured are one syllable whispers that sound like “no,” and “what.” It’s interesting when you record a male voice seemingly responding to a question asked in a room supposedly haunted by a male spirit. For example, in Henry’s room, which is on the third floor of the house over the old kitchen, I captured a male voice whispering, “What?” In the “cat room” we caught a meow. In Sally’s room, we caught a female saying, “no.” The recordings seem to match the spirits said to haunt each part of the house.

I will always have a deep appreciation for the Ferry Plantation, and I encourage other investigative groups to go. The cost of investigating overnight helps keep the place running, and it’s a small price to pay for the chance to experience the haunted side of a wonderfully historic location.

Thank you for listening. If you’re interested in buying “Please, don’t call me psychic,” it’s available on Amazon. I’ll have a link in the show notes.

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