Arts & Culture
(2009-10-29)
Listen Now:
RICHMOND
(WEKU) -
null
For many people, Halloween, like Christmas, is losing its true meaning. Which is to say the October observance these days is more fun than fright. The National Retail Federation reports, in 2008, consumer spending on Halloween-related candy, costumes, decorations, parties, and the like totaled more than 5.7 billion dollars. But enough unexplained events still take place to satisfy the appetites of Halloween purists.
Writer Thomas Freese is among the authors who plan to attend next weekend's Kentucky Book Fair in Frankfort.
Kentucky's White Hall mansion can be unnerving sight, even in the daytime. On this day, heavy gray clouds and cold rain add to the aura. The imposing three-story state shrine is anchored on a windswept hill in Madison County, and looks a little too much like one of those foreboding structures cast in horror films.
Its original owner provides fodder for speculation. Revolutionary War General Green Clay built the original two-story Georgian brick home in 1798. He died upstairs in 1828, on Halloween.
Accounts of the supernatural at White Hall first cropped up many years ago. And they continue to this day.
"One of the most startling experiences I ever had was winter before last and I was coming through the back of the house cause that's how we enter the house, and um, as I was coming around the corner I looked off to the staircase, and on the staircase was a man's hand."
Upon seeing the hand, Whitehall park manager Kathleen White backed up, screamed and turned away. When she looked back, the hand, and the man seemingly attached to it were gone. Over her eleven years at Whitehall, she and other staff members have experienced other mysterious goings on, sightings of a woman in a hoop skirt, the smell of burning candles, the sound of a music box, and perhaps most disturbing of all, the occasional cries of a baby.
Even though White sometimes works alone at the ornately appointed house, she says she's not afraid. But one place where she admits to being very uncomfortable is the third floor. So uncomfortable that she refuses to go there alone.
Seemed like good advice, so, with the support of White Hall Curator Lashay Mullins, together we trudged up the four levels of heavy wooden staircases.
"So this is the blue room, yes."
The much-talked about Blue room, source of faint muffled voices and furniture being moved about.
"We used to have a gentleman who was over parks, that passed by here one time, we were having an event, he walked by this room and it looked like there was a huge mess in this room. And he went to one of the back rooms to ask somebody what was going on in this room and they walked back just like it's always been, with the furniture the way that is, it wasn't messed up at all."
As you might imagine, especially in the case of spooky tales, what happens in Whitehall doesn't stay in Whitehall. The mansion's stories are told in numerous books and articles. Louisville author Thomas Freese includes White Hall in his fourth collection of ghost stories, "Ghosts, Spirits and Angels, True Tales from Kentucky and Beyond."
Freese started collecting stories in 1998, beginning with a few yarns he heard at Pleasant Hill, the restored Shaker community in Mercer County, Kentucky. He's literally heard thousands over the years. Freese has concluded connecting with ghosts or spirits or angels is not accidental, but a response to a prayer or a call for help.
"And in many cases it's a relative that's passed on and they want to help out, they want to let us know that they're present, so if there's a universal attribute, I think that's probably what I see happening in many, many cases."
Freese is not through with ghosts, or depending on how you look at it, the ghosts may not be through with him. He's already collecting stories for his next book. "Haunted Battlefields of the South" is due out in 2010.
Freese doesn't tell his readers what they should believe, although he insists he can tell the difference between fact and fiction. Likewise, Kathleen White at Whitehall is careful in the way she responds to the most frequent question she gets from visitors, "Is this place haunted?"
"Recently we had opened up the home to psychic groups and whether you believe in them or not is up to you, but three different incidences with three different psychic groups have made me somewhat of a believer there is something going on here that we can't explain."
Call it the spirit, or the spirits of Halloween.
© Copyright 2012, WEKU
