Would you spend the night in a haunted house after watching video of the ghost that haunts it? I spent a whole weekend. Stick around to hear all about it.

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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 I’ll share a chapter from my book, Please, Don’t Call Me Psychic: Stories from my Paranormal Life, about a weekend in a very haunted location. But first, a quick personal update…

As this episode publishes on the 21^st, I have seven library presentations to go between tonight and Halloween Day. All the locations, dates, and times are posted on my blog, and the link is in the show notes. So far, the attendees have been wonderful and seemed to enjoy listening to my take on the Spookiest Places in North Carolina and listening to EVP at the end of the talk. If you’re in the Triangle area, please consider coming!

The events are linked from my professional page at https://www.facebook.com/AuthorNicolleMorock/events

I hate to admit it, but because I’ve started the presentations, been designing and sewing (yes, sewing) my Halloween costume, and preparing for Reader Nation in November, I have not had time to find any paranormal news worth sharing. I did just review the PURSUE release #6, but all the videos were of little dots on screens, and nothing was overly exciting there. Feel free to check those out for yourself, though. You may find something I missed.

Now on to this episode’s topic. I’m sharing a chapter from my 2019 book about a decade’s worth of paranormal investigations with the National Society of Paranormal Investigation and Research. We call it NSPIR, for short. In this one, you’ll hear me refer to George, our co-founder, and Tomie, a female in our group. The three of us drove down to North Georgia one weekend and spent the night in a very haunted house.

Without further ado, let’s dive in.

NSPIR Story #4: The House in North Georgia

Geographical location: northern Georgia

Location type: private residence

Claims of activity: video of an anomalous being walking through the house, things move on their own, two child spirits seen standing at the top of the stairs more than once, strong smells of cigar smoke at times, unexplained noises

Lessons learned: A weekend in a haunted house can end with amazing first-hand experiences and still disappointed with no hard evidence in the data.

EVP available online: no

There is an amazing video of a ghostly figure wondering around an old house in a small northern Georgia town. You won’t see it on the internet because we promised the family that let us have a copy that we would not share it with the world. As I’ve stated in my past writings, the confidentiality of our clients is of the utmost importance. So, we don’t say where or who unless they tell us it is okay. This family would like their privacy protected, and at the time, they were deciding whether to keep the house and turn it into a bed and breakfast or put it on the market.

The fact that they want no publicity despite capturing what might be the best video ever of a supernatural being only lends credence to the video. Add the fact that George, Tomie, and I spent an entire weekend in the house devoting a portion of that time trying to replicate the images and failing miserably, and you see why we are sold on the video. Even without the video, the story might prove interesting enough to keep listening…

One November weekend five years ago (as of the writing of the book, making it 2014), the three of us took a drive down to Georgia. I had to work that Friday, so we left Raleigh after 5:00 P.M., and the drive took almost six hours, so it was after 11:00 when we arrived at our destination. It was an older house – nearly a century old – on a main street in a small town. Tomie and George had been careful not to discuss the history of the house in front of me because I like to go into a location “cold” – meaning that I do not want to know what to expect before I do an initial walk through.

The couple who owned the home were there awaiting our arrival, as was a friend of theirs who had some medium/psychic abilities. It was their friend who had initially gotten in touch with us and asked for our assessment of the situation.

Of the three of us, I was the first through the front door. They greeted us warmly, and I carried my bags over the threshold and a few feet into the formal living room and turned to watch George and Tomie come in. Immediately, I felt the sensation of someone running up behind me to greet me. It was so intense that I turned around to say “hello” to whomever it was and found myself facing a wall. No one could have come running from that area. George must have seen the look on my face when he came through the doorway because he asked me “what?” All I could do was whisper, “I’ll tell you later,” but in my mind I was thinking “Wow! I like this place already!”

Once we were all inside with our luggage unloaded, George explained that I normally do a cold walk-through of the location before sitting down to find out what has been occurring there. They allowed that and followed us through the house. Due to how long ago this trip was, I don’t recall my exact impressions in each room, but I do recall that the entire house seemed to have very active energy.

When I finished my walk-through, we went back to the kitchen area where they had a love seat, some chairs, and a television set up for us.

While the house was still partially furnished, they explained that they were no longer living there. The home had a long history of activity associated with it, and the stories were intriguing. At one point, the second floor of the structure had been split into small apartments, and supposedly a man had died in one of them. The room in the front of the house to the right of the stairway had been turned into a little antique and gift shop for a time. Tourists with no clue as to the history of the home would ask the woman running the shop who the children at the top of the stairs were. They were seeing apparitions of a little boy and girl up there.

After the family moved out of the house to a farm, they would return every so often and find things very out of place. It had gotten so bad that they actually thought they might have squatters. So, the couple’s grown sons installed 4 security cameras inside the home in hopes of catching the culprits. What they caught was a good fifteen to twenty minutes of some sort of entity that we have generically named the ghost boy walking in a sort of circuit through the living room, dining room, and master bathroom. They showed us this video, and it was incredible! By then, it was after midnight, and they left us there – just the three of us – to spend the night in the house.

Scientifically speaking, watching that video at the beginning of our time there was not a good idea. It set us up with expectations that the house would not let us down, so we had to try to remind ourselves not to dwell on what we had just viewed. We set cameras up in the two bedrooms upstairs, the dining room, and the front room. Then we got ready for bed.

George and I took the two rooms upstairs that still had furniture in them. I called mine the presidential suite since there was a quilt on the bed with images of the first presidents of the United States on it. George took the room with the waterbed directly across the hall.

Sounds luxurious, right? Well, it was November in an old house and the owners had forgotten to turn the water bed’s heater on. George gave it his best college try, but eventually ended up downstairs on the floor in front of a lit fire in a double fireplace. Tomie took the master bedroom downstairs, which could only be accessed through the master bath which was off the dining room. She apparently chose more poorly than George.

As we settled into our beds upstairs, George and I decided to leave our doors open and we were talking to each other across the hallway. Both of us were hearing noises that sounded like they were coming from each other’s room or in the hallway. The noises consisted of knocks, pops, and sometimes whispers. We’d ask, “was that you,” and answer in the negative. Eventually, exhaustion took over and I fell asleep despite the noises. At some point later, George moved downstairs to escape the freezing cold waterbed.

In the meantime, Tomie had a sleepless night. Despite her being a total skeptic and denying any sensitivity at all up until that weekend, she had the strong sensation that someone was walking around in her room, bumping the bed, and even pushing on the covers over her. She also thought she heard whispers and smelled the distinct smell of cigarette smoke off and on. She toughed it out, but looked pretty rough the next morning for lack of sleep.

The family’s sensitive friend arrived for breakfast with us the next morning, and asked how our night went. We shared our experiences, and tried to convince ourselves that much of it might have been the power of suggestion taking over our senses. She wasn’t surprised at all. We discussed some nearby places to go sightseeing for the day and our plan for a full investigation with her and her daughter that night.

We took a drive around the countryside that day to get a feel for the rest of the town and the outlying areas. There was a spot where ley lines were reported to intersect nearby. Places like that are said to have strong magnetic energy and have been associated with UFOs, haunting, and sacred places such as Stonehenge. I won’t say much more about our outing for fear that someone might recognize the town, but suffice it to say, it was an interesting day of exploration.

When we returned to the house late that afternoon, we set about trying to replicate the images we saw on the video the night before. There was a crystal chandelier in the front room. Could that have created some perfect combination of reflections? What about when cars drove past both before dark and after dark? Maybe it was a trick of the light through the windows in the dining room. Try as we did, we could not debunk that video. Nothing added up to the look of a real, ghostly figure walking around that room and back and forth between the bathroom and the front room. It was a real mystery.

Later that evening, the sensitive and her young adult daughter arrived to join us in our investigation of the home. The plan was to do an EVP session in every room, and there were many rooms to cover. We started in the presidential suite, and it didn’t take long before all of us were hearing sounds out in the hallway that seemed like footsteps. The night quickly took a creepy turn. It seemed like no matter what room we were in, the noises were out in the hallway or the room just across the hall.

I’m sure some readers might think that all investigations are creepy, but that simply isn’t true. In our investigations, we have been to places that we expected to by phenomenally creepy, and felt nothing all night, and we’ve been to places with low expectations and left sure that something was there with us the whole time.

The fourth bedroom we sat in upstairs was the most active while we were actually inside the room. There was no furniture and no curtains on the windows. The streetlight poured in from outside, so we were not in complete darkness like we were in the first two rooms in the back of the house. We had set a small rocking horse in the middle of the room, the kind on the curved wooden bottom that rocks easily. We were hoping if there were spirits of children present that they would want to play with the only toy in the room.

We were all scattered around the room with all of our focus on this little horse when Tomie, in a corner close to a window said, “y’all, there is someone pressing up against my back.” She described the sensation of being hugged by a man from behind, so I quickly snapped a photo. Nothing appeared but her with a nervous grin, looking as if someone really were giving her a hug. Tomie is not the type to hallucinate or exaggerate, so the moment was pretty surprising. She also smelled cigarette smoke again. The sensation passed, but left a long-lasting impression on her. Everything changed for Tomie that night with regards to her ability to sense things.

You could say that she really opened up that weekend.

Downstairs in the room at the front of the house that used to be the antique shop, we were sitting in the dark because there were still heavy curtains on the windows. At one point, I was seated in a metal chair with my camera in my lap and I felt like someone was right in front of me. None of our investigators were close enough to touch me, and yet, I felt my camera turn in my lap as if someone had given a little tug on the strap. As dark as it was, I asked “did one of you just move my camera?” George replied with his own question: where is your camera? I told them it was in my lap and they all said, “no,” in voices plainly several feet away on multiple sides of me.

Each room had something in store for us downstairs: cold spots, footsteps, strange odors that came and went. It was a long night full of personal experiences, and when we were done with all of our EVP sessions, it was about 3:00 A.M., and we were dead tired. The sensitive and her daughter took their leave, and we discussed our sleeping options. George decided to stay downstairs on the loveseat in the kitchen area, Tomie took the same bedroom she had the night before with some comfort knowing that George would be nearby, and I returned back to my presidential bedroom.

I changed for bed outside of the view of the camera just in case someone other than myself ended up reviewing that video. The camera was on a tripod near the nightstand on the right side of the bed pointing across the foot of the bed to the far corner of the room. I said aloud, “Look, I need my sleep since I have to drive them safely home tomorrow, so leave my bed alone, but if you want to do something tonight, do it in that corner,” and I pointed to the corner the camera was facing.

I fell asleep pretty quickly that early morning, but just a few hours later, while it was still quite dark out, I was awakened by a scratching sound in my room. It was coming from that corner. I sat up in bed and grabbed my flashlight knowing that the camera was infrared and turning on an overhead light would mess up any video we collected at that moment. Surprisingly, the sound continued, so I got up and walked over to that corner. Later, I would watch myself on video standing in that corner, pointing the flashlight at the floor directly below me, staring stupidly at where the sound was coming from. The sound did not stop while I stood there, and I could see nothing that should have been making it, so I decided to go downstairs for help in figuring it out.

Being a woman in my late 30’s awoken from sleep, I had to make a pit stop in the bathroom, and when I opened the door to the bedroom, Tomie was standing there waiting for me. She whispered, “what is that noise?” She had heard it, too, and listening quietly, we could still hear it. We crept back upstairs to my bedroom, but by the time we arrived at that corner, the sound had finally ceased. We whispered about what it might have been so as to not wake George, and then we decided to go back downstairs. As we walked down the steps, George rounded the corner and said loudly, “what’s going on?” The two of us jumped! He startled the heck out of us! We had a good, stress-relieving laugh and then told him what we had heard and how long it had lasted. All we could do was shrug, and make our way back to bed.

Nothing else happened that night/morning. A few hours later we got up and were preparing to leave. I was the last to go into the shower in that downstairs bathroom, and I clearly remember checking the lock on the door to the bedroom and the door out to the dining room before getting undressed. You see, George can be a bit of a prankster when he wants to be, and I wanted no pranking or accidental entry for that matter. When I got out of the shower, my clothes, which had been stacked neatly next to the sink on the large, stone, wrap-around counter on the other side of the room, were stacked almost as neatly, upside down in the sink! I checked the locks on the doors again, and they were still locked.

It was as if the spirits wanted to make sure I had no doubt before I left.

We departed the house around 11:00 am and started the drive back to Raleigh. About an hour north of the town, we were driving through another small town, and I got the distinct smell of moth balls. Normally, I would associate that smell with the spirit of my great-grandmother, but the feeling was not loving at all. It was weird and creepy. We realized that we had not told the spirits that they could not follow us home, so we took that opportunity to say “you can’t come with us,” and go away. It was an odd incident, and I’m not really sure it had anything to do with that house, but it was like the perfectly creepy ending to a strange and wonderfully creepy weekend.

With all of the personal experiences we had and all the audio and video we needed to review, we were sure that we would have some sort of anomalous data to show for our efforts. Amazingly, we found nothing! No EVP, no video, NOTHING! But we did come back with a copy of the 15+ minutes worth of video that the family had captured prior to our arrival and their blessing to show it to the rest of our team as long as we promised not to expose it to the masses and put it online. We still have that video and I get chills when we watch it. It is fascinating to say the least.

One of our NSPIR members who did not come with us observed that the shape of the head and the body looked more like a gray alien than a human being, and that idea really freaked me out. Spending the weekend with ghosts didn’t bother me, but spending the weekend with an alien? That would not be cool. I know what I’m dealing with when spirits are involved. I have no idea what I might be dealing with in regard to aliens.

In case you’re wondering, we eventually lost touch with the family who asked us down for the weekend, and we don’t know if they sold the home or kept it. All we know is that we had a great weekend that we will always remember.

Thanks again for listening.

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