Category: Piedmont

The legend of Peter Dromgoole and Fannie is a popular campus story at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dromgoole was a student at the University who supposedly died in a duel in 1832. It’s said that his body was buried under a stone known as Dromgoole Rock, located at a spot near campus known as Piney Point, near the ominous Gimgoul Castle.

The story goes that Peter Dromgoole and a young girl from town named Fannie were madly in love. They often met in secret at a large rock near campus. But another student also loved Fannie, and he was madly jealous of Peter Dromgoole and Fannie’s affection fro him. The man happened upon Dromgoole one night one campus. Harsh words were exchanged,and they agreed to meet at Piney Point the following day for a duel to settle the matter.

Dueling was, even then, strongly discouraged in the student handbook. But students being students, nobody was going to say no, and rumors of the illicit fight began spreading rapidly across the campus. By the time the duel was to take place, a small crowd had gathered to witness the event. Word of her suitors’ rivalrous foolishness reached Fannie early the next morning, just before the duel was to begin. She rushed to Piney Point only to to see Peter shot through the heart. Peter Dromgoole collapsed onto a boulder, which was permanently stained with his blood.

The witnesses and seconds hastily buried Peter’s body and moved the rock where he had died on top of his grave to cover the fresh dirt. Ironically, this had been the very rock where the two lovers had often met.

The bloodstains on the rock where Peter died never disappeared, and deep red blotches can still be seen on Dromgoole rock to this day.

Peter Dromgoole’s disappearance was immediately noticed. His rival and murderer spread the rumor that Dromgoole had run away to join the army. But, as can happen when you shoot someone in front of a large number of witnesses, the man’s part in Peter’s death was soon widely known. He abandoned his studies and disappeared from Chapel Hill, never to be heard from again.

Fannie, pining for Peter, died later that summer. Her last words were said to be that Peter was lonely and she was going to meet him. The shadowy figures of the two lovers meeting in the woods by Dromgoole Rock have been often seen since.

NC 49 is a narrow, winding two-lane road that curves through the low hills of the Uwharries between Asheboro and Charlotte. It’s not a very busy road, and miles may pass when you’re driving on this road when you never see another car. But don’t think you’re alone.

Back in the 1940s, when this road was even more lonely an isolated, one night a family was making its way home to Charlotte after spending the day visiting family. It was late at night, and the children were sleeping in the bak. The father drove his family slowly along the lonely road to avoid waking them. The night was clear and the drive was quiet and calm.

But soon they had company. The father saw lights approaching in his rear-view mirror. The other driver was coming up fast in a shiny new Ford, clearly someone in a great hurry, and seeming to pay little attention to anything else on the road. The other was nearly on top of the family’s sedan when he seemed to notice them. He slammed on the brakes and pulled back.

This other driver kept tailgating the family. He would drive up close behind them, then back off, blinking his high beams on and off. But they were both driving along a long stretch of road with a no passing line drawn down the middle. The father would have pulled off to let the other car pass, but there was no shoulder and thick trees right up to the edge of the road.

The other driver kept getting more aggressive. He started honking his horn, and pulling up to where he was just inches away from the family’s car. The father sped up to try and satisfy the angry driver, but nothing seemed to make him happy.

Suddenly, the other driver broke away. Ignoring the no passing sign, he pulled into the left lane and put the pedal all the way down to the floor. But the spot he chose to pass was at the base of of one the rolling Uwharrie hills, and what he couldn’t see was that on the other side of that hill there was a big panel truck coming up.

The angry driver must have been going close to eighty when that truck came over the hill. He was boxed in – the family was on one side of him, the speeding truck right in front of hum, and thick woods to his left. The panel truck leaned heavily on its horn. The wife in the family car screamed as she saw what was about to happen. The Ford swerved hard to the left, enough to avoid a head-on collision but not enough to avoid getting clipped by the truck as he was going off the road. The Ford spun wildly out of control and was soon just a twisted, burning hunk of metal wedged between two trees. The driver never walked out.

Soon after that night, drivers began saying that something strange was happening on that road. People say that when they’re driving along at night, they’ll see a pair of headlights coming up fast behind them on the road. This mysterious car will follow them closely, acting very aggressively, and eventually it will move into the left lane to pass. As it passes, the first thing the someone notices is usually that the car is an old 1940s Ford, the kind you don’t see much of outside of movies these days. But what’s more amazing is that there is no driver visible in the car. And when it pulls ahead, the phantom Ford vanishes into the night.

It seems that wherever that driver is going, he’s still in a hurry to get there, even though it seems that he will never arrive.

The North Carolina Executive Mansion, commonly called the Governor’s Mansion, is a stately Queen Anne style home sitting in Burke Square on Blount Street in downtown Raleigh. Construction on the building began in 1883, using materials that mostly originated in North Carolina. The lumber for the oak and pine frame came from across the state, the marble for the steps was mined in Cherokee County, and the sandstone trim originated in Anson County. The bricks that form the mansion were also molded from North Carolina clay, and made by prison labor. Many of the men whose forced labor helped build the mansion inscribed their names in these bricks, signatures which are still visible today. The mansion was completed in 1891, and the first governor to inhabit the building was Governor Daniel G. Fowle. And some say he never left the building.

The Daniel G. Fowle bedroom sits on the second floor of the building. Fowle was a widower with four children when he took office, and his youngest son had the habit of climbing into bed with him at night to sleep. Fowle, already a substantially-proportioned man, found the original bed in the room to be too small to accommodate himself and his child. Not wishing to lose his focus on the affairs of state because of a lack of sleep, Fowle ordered the construction of an oversized bed that would allow him to comfort his son and get some sleep. Unfortunately, he didn’t get to enjoy the bed for long. Fowle died before completing his term.

But a later inhabitant of the mansion found the bed that gave Fowle such comfort to be the source of a strange series of encounters. Governor Bob Scott, who served in the office from 1969 – 1973, spoke to North Carolina Folklorist Richard Walser for his delightful book North Carolina Legends about the strange experiences he had living in the mansion.

According to Governor Scott’s account, he he chose the Governor Fowle room as his bedroom when he moved into the mansion. But Scott was considerably taller than Fowle, and he found Governor Fowle’s bed to be uncomfortable to sleep in. There just wasn’t enough from for his feet. Scott insisted on purchasing another North Carolina made bed, this one from Craftique Furniture in Mebane, and being in age of less extravagant government expenditures, paid for it with his own money. He had the Governor Fowle bed moved to of the room.

Shortly after moving the bed, Governor Scott and his wife were reading in bed when around 10 O’clock they heard a strange knocking coming from the wall behind them. Scott and his wife thought little of it, assuming that it was just water running through what were almost century-old pipes. But the next night, the knocking returned at the same time. And the night after. And the night after that.

Scott asked for the maintenance staff to see if something could be done about the pipes. He was surprised to discover that there were no pipes running behind that section of the wall. And even if there were, there was no one running the water at the time the knocking occurred.

Governor Scott and his wife remained puzzled by the knocking, until the day when Governor Fowle’s daughter came calling. The late Governor’s elderly daughter had been living just down the street for many years, and it was her habit to pay a courtesy call on new Governors when they took office. And, according to Governor Scott, part of the social call involved her demanding an answer to the question “Is father’s bed still in his room?”

Did the late governor’s daughter know that her father’s spirit may still have been gliding around the mansion? Did she think that everyone, even a ghost, deserves a comfortable bed?

While insisting that he did not believe in ghosts, Governor Scott nevertheless confessed that he had named the knock which occurred every night at 10 O’clock as the ghost of Governor Fowle. He and his wife speculated that it was Fowle asking that his bed be moved back into his room.

For many years, something very strange has been happening in the small town of Fremont. At certain times, a strange light emerges from a graveyard and travels over to the nearby railroad tracks. The light will hover around the railroad tracks, sometimes moving back and forth, up and down. If someone approaches, the light will move closer, as if it has a question to ask. Before dawn, the light will travel back to the cemetery and disappear into one particular grave. The story of what this light is and how it came to be takes us back to a time when Fremont was a little more exciting than the quiet town that it is now.

Back more than a century ago, horse racing, cockfighting, and gambling were all common pastimes in North Carolina. Fremont, being right on the newly built railroad line and halfway between Wilson and Goldsboro, would throw festivities every summer. Tourists would take day trips from the cities to the little town to take part in the excitement, and to enjoy the whiskey that flowed freely all day.

In Fremont, one of the regulars at the events was a local man by the name of Bolton. Bolton was a giant of a man, massively built, a hulk of muscle and bone. He was also a very, very heavy drinker. Whenever there was racing and gambling going on, Bolton would work the crowd performing feats of strength in exchange for a drink. His signature trick was smashing a whiskey barrel to pieces using his giant head. He would celebrate his triumph by gulping down the whiskey that the appreciative onlookers passed his way.

On one of these festival days, the weather was good, the crowd was large and generous, and Bolton had drunk more than even his usual share. He began to boast, saying he could smash anything with his head. He was soon breaking bottles and two-by-fours on his head without seeming to feel any pain. As he became more and more drunk, Bolton’s boasting grew until he declared he could stop a train with his head.

By this time, the crowd was nearly as drunk as Bolton, and they cheered him on as he swaggered down to the railroad tracks and stood right in the middle of the line, sticking his big head out in the direction of the next arrival.

In those days, trains ran on time, and so before too long the crowd heard the whistle and the the rumble of the express rolling down the tracks. Now, the sound of an oncoming train was enough to sober up a few of the crowd, who tried to pull Bolton off of the tracks. But he refused, and as the train drew ever closer he loudly proclaimed that he was tougher than any train.

The train soon proved him to be very, very wrong about that.

The crowd gathered what remained of Bolton and carried him down to the graveyard. The found the local preacher and poured enough coffee into him so that he was sober enough to say a few words. After they had buried him, the drinking and carousing continued, but became a wake for Bolton. Folks figured he would have wanted it that way.

Ever since that night, that mysterious light has been seen rising out of the graveyard and traveling to the spot on the railroad tracks where Bolton met his end. Folks who have gotten close enough to the light to get a good look say that inside that eerie green glow seems to be the shape of particularly large human skull. And a few have even said they’ve heard a spectral voice coming from the glow. The voice is indistinct, as coming from another world, but it seems to be asking a question.

It wants to know if they can spare any whiskey.

In the low, rolling hills of southern Chatham County, south of Siler City in the woods near Harper’s Crossroads, lies one of the most famous haunted places in North Carolina.

The Devil’s Tramping Ground is a mysterious, perfectly round and absolutely barren circle about forty feet in diameter in the pine woods of Chatham County. Not a tree, not a flower, no lowly weed, not even a single blade of grass will grow in the limits of the circle. Seed sowed there refuses to sprout. Any vegetation transplanted there will wither and die.

And, what’s even more strange, any object left in the circle before dusk will have been violently moved outside its bounds by dawn.
Dogs tuck their tails between their legs and whimper when brought near. The frightened animals will dig their heels into the sand, refusing to be brought into the circle.

Men have tried to spend the night in the circle, but not one has succeeded and remained sane. Something they see on their vigils drives them out of their wits, never to recover. For The Devil’s Tramping Ground has earned it’s name. It’s said that there is where The Devil himself walks at night.

In his Tramping Ground, The Devil spends his nights pacing around and around in a circle and turning his bitter mind towards ways to bring human souls to damnation. It’s the scorching heat of his cloven hoofprints that kills the vegetation and has rendered the soil barren. He angrily brushes aside anything left in his path, his great strength easily able to toss aside even the heaviest objects. When he walks in his private spot on earth, The Devil drops the illusions with which he disguises himself when he appears to men. In his natural state the face of this fallen angel is so horrible that no man can see it and remain sane.

The mystery of The Devil’s Tramping Ground has been known since Chatham County was founded shortly before the War for Independence. From generation to generation, the story has been passed down, and despite efforts by scientists to explain this barren patch of land, no satisfying explanation has ever been given.

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The classic version of the Devil’s Tramping Ground story is the one you’ve just read. Other explanations have been given for the cause of this barren patch of woods over the years, including the story that the place was the site of a battle between two rival tribes of American Indians. Supposedly the blood of those killed soaked the ground so thoroughly that nothing would ever grow there again. The losing tribe then fled from the mainland entirely onto the Outer Banks and became the Croatan tribe that befriended the Lost Colonists. Others say that the site is the burial ground of a great Indian chief named Croatan, and that the gods keep the spot barren out of respect.

The idea has also been put forth that the soil in the Devil’s Tramping Ground is barren because the circle was the site of a UFO landing, and the strange radiation from its extraterrestrial engines has permanently exterminated the grass.

Most recently, a sign was posted at the site renaming the Devil’s Tramping Ground as “The Chatham County Vortex,” and claiming that the site is the anchor of a “Magdalene Crystal Column of energy”. Magdalene energy is an idea that has emerged out of England in the past decade. This theory proposes that the planet is surrounded by a web of divine “Ma-Ray” energy that is an expression of a divine feminine presence, bundling this idea with earlier English traditions of Jesus traveling to the British Isles at some point in his life, while also incorporating this into a mysticism based on Jungian psychology and feminist readings of Arthurian legend. So there’s a lot going on there, but what might be most interesting for the history of the Devil’s Tramping Ground in all of this is that for the first time the spot is being associated with positive supernatural forces instead of negative ones.

This sort of re-reading is one of the things that makes The Devil’s Tramping Ground such an interesting spot. It’s an example of how, once a place is identified as being supernatural or holy, that identification can persist even beyond the culture that created the original association. The idea of the sacred place persists, even as what that sacredness means is reinterpreted as new cultures and new contexts move into the area.

The original naming of the Devil’s Tramping Ground is part of a deep American folk tradition. The Devil seems to have come to Chatham County with the Scotch-Irish settlers who arrived in North Carolina during the Eighteenth Century, populating the course of the Cape Fear River, the Uwharries, and the Appalachians. The settlers were mainly immigrants from Ulster and the counties along the border between England and Scotland, and The Devil was very much part of the culture they brought along along with them.

Obsession with the supernatural had been running at a peak in parts of the United Kingdom for a long time even before the bulk of Scotch-Irish emigration to the New World. Scottish-born James I, who ascended to the unified throne of England and Scotland in 1603, was obsessed with witches and demons and even wrote a book on demonology. Knowing a crowd-pleaser when he saw it, and knowing who was the right crowd to please, William Shakespeare is said to have written the supernatural elements into Macbeth with an eye towards the superstitious king. Belief in witches, ghosts, and goblins was a genuine cultural fixation, and this demon-haunted world came with those settlers to America.

Much of Southern American folklore and folk music owes its shape to the Scotch-Irish, and The Devil was a central part of that story. The culture remains with us also in our place names. For the Scotch-Irish, any strange or dangerous place would often be named for The Devil. These names are all over North Carolina. Apart from The Devil’s Tramping Ground, North Carolina has a Devil’s Rock, a Devil’s Courthouse, Seven Devils, Kill Devil Hills, Devil’s Branch, Devil’s Chimney, Devil’s Nest, four Devil’s Elbows, two Devil’s Forks, a Devil’s Knob, the even The Devil’s Tater Patch.

For whatever reason, this small barren patch in the woods was at some point identified as being in some way supernatural. And as the cultural context around the spot has shifted, that idea has persisted even as the stories around it have changed.

In the Scotch-Irish tradition that originally named the spot, The Devil is a complicated character who is seen as often as a comic figure as he is as an existential threat to human existence. There are numerous stories of The Devil being outsmarted by mortals who trick him into using his powers against himself. This complexity has, perhaps sadly, diminished quite a bit since The Devil’s Tramping Ground was first named. Our expectations for The Devil have changed, and the convergence of popular culture and folklore has played a large role in this. After forty years of movies like “The Exorcist”, when The Devil bothers to make the trip to the surface we’re counting on him to do something more impressive than just walk around in a circle. This may be part of the reason why the stories around the spot have shifted so much in recent years.

And so the threat of The Devil in the woods has been replaced with other threats. The interpretation of the site had been seen through the lens of dark powers associated with Native Americans in much of white American folklore, where the complexities of guilt and a need to establish a psychological legitimacy to the taking of Native lands often casts the first inhabitants of the country as a supernatural force that needed to be eliminated, stories which give a sense of legitimization to European possession of the land.

Similarly, the story of the Devil’s Tramping Ground as a site for a UFO landing may be a way of dealing with Cold War anxieties and the rapid changes in technology and social structure in the later half of the 20th Century. The threat of uncontrolable forces that could completely disrupt someone’s life shifted as the cultural context through which life was experienced shifted. The threat went from being demons to being aliens, the unseen forces changed from magic to radiation.

Through it all, the mystical spot in the woods of Chatham County remained. Whether or not the latest incarnation of The Devil’s Tramping Ground as a source of Magdalene Crystal Energy will persist, and whether the culture has shifted enough so that once-feared ideas of supernatural forces are now embraced, remains to be seen.

As for what’s happening with the Devil’s Tramping Ground itself, most visitors going to the spot expecting a spectacle of supernatural horrors or Ma-Ray enlightenment will find the spot slightly disappointing.

The barrenness of the soil seems to result from the place being a naturally occurring salt lick, a phenomenon not at all uncommon in the pine forests of the Carolinas. The site has also shrunk significantly this century, its diameter now measuring around twenty feet. The salt content of the soil seems to be naturally fading enough so that grass now grows freely in the circle.

The chief thing keeping the clearing free of other vegetation is the constant tramping it receives not from the Devil, but from vistors and local kids who use the place as a party spot. It also seems that the Devil, the aliens, or whoever else was keeping the spot clean has moved on, as objects left in the circle invariably remain there. The site frequently abounds with with empty Slim Jim wrappers and beer cans. A rusted refrigerator sat in the circle for a number of years, which was eventually hauled away by human hands on the back of a very mundane truck. It may just be that The Devil has given up, the proliferation of modern litter being just too much for the Prince of Darkness to cope with.

Crybaby Lane is a creepy little stretch of deserted grass off Western Boulevard in Raleigh with a sad, scary story tied to it. The story begins in the middle of the last century, when what’s now called Crybaby Lane was the site of a Roman Catholic orphanage. The orphanage was the home to a few dozen young boys and girls, who were raised by the priests, as had been happening there since the orphanage had been founded in the early 1900s. We can assume these orphans lived as orphans did in those days, going to school to learn a useful trade, and once a week during the summers being taken down to swim in the pool at nearby Pullen Park. Since this was a Catholic home, some of the older boys would be studying for the priesthood. For those children without parents there weren’t many options back then. It may not have been a completely happy life, but it was more than it could have been.

This all came to a tragic end one night in 1958 when a fire broke out in the orphanage dormitory. The fire spread quickly through the building, and by the time the sleeping children were aware of the smoke and the heat filling the hallways of their only home it was too late. When the fire department arrived, the building had already been gutted, reduced to burnt beams and flame-broken bricks. Many of the children burned to death in the flames.

Months after the fire, when after what remained of the burned orphanage had been torn down and hauled away, the city began receiving complaints from the neighbors that the smell of smoke was still strong in the air, as if the fire was still burning. The smell was so strong that some people would choke when they walked into the field, as if their own lungs were filling up with smoke. This happened even though the new grass had already covered up where the building once stood.

But the smell of smoke was only part of it — there were also the voices.

The voices came out of the air, quietly at first, then growing louder. They were the voices of children. Children crying, wailing in fear, sadness, and pain. The screams of the orphaned children who had died in the fire could still be heard.

Now, some of the neighbors thought it was just their minds playing tricks on then. They had been there the night of the fire, and seen and heard these horrible things. They thought that they just couldn’t get the awful memories out of their heads. But time passed, and the people who had been there that night all died or moved away, but still the acrid smell of smoke lingered. And the cries of the children could still be heard.

If you go to find this place yourself, you’ll see that most of the houses around the field where the orphanage once stood have been abandoned. The place where the orphanage stood is now an empty field. If you hunt through the grass you’ll be able to find the cornerstone, all that’s left of the old orphanage.

And after you’ve stood in the field for a few minutes, you’ll start to notice that the place has a strange, distinct smell. It’s the odor of smoke and burning wood.

And if you stay a few minutes more, you’ll begin to hear something strange in the air — awful, unearthly sounds — the cries of children in fear and in pain. Children who are lost, but still never able to leave the only place on earth that they ever knew as a home.

And not many people will stay much longer than that in the empty field that’s come to be called Crybaby Lane.

But there’s more to this story than just the story. Learn the scary truth about Crybaby Lane.

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The story of Crybaby Lane is an interesting one, and a good example of how some local memories can get wrapped up in a good story and become a folk tale. Let’s dig in a little and see how history and folklore come together.

There was a Catholic Orphanage in Raleigh for a good portion of the 20th century. The orphanage was part of Nazareth, a Catholic Community founded a few miles outside the borders of Raleigh in 1899 by Father Frederick Price. Price was the first native-born North Carolinian to be ordained a Catholic priest. The site was four miles outside of what were then the Raleigh City Limits, stretching along a good chunk of Western Boulevard.

That orphanage founded by Father Pierce did, indeed, burn down. It burned down several times. In 1905, in 1912, and in 1961. But did any of these fires happen in a way similar to the details of the story?

All the versions of the Crybaby Lane story say the fire happened either sometime in the late 1950s or specifically in 1958. None of the dates of recorded fires at the orphanage match that exactly, so we’ll take 1961 as being close enough.

The fire at the Nazareth Orphanage in 1961 was started accidentally by a priest, the Reverend Raymond J. Donohue. Donohue was displaying some questionable judgement by attempting to clear some wasps’ nests form the eaves of one of the orphanage’s several buildings by setting those nests on fire.

Father Donohue’s flaming vengeance on those wasps quickly got out of control and burned that building to the ground. But unlike the fire in the story, the building destroyed in the fire wasn’t a dormitory, it was the rectory. Where there were no children. What’s more, the fire happened in the middle of the day and everyone escaped without harm. The only injury was to a fireman, who sprained his back running a remarkable 4,500 feet of hose from the nearest hydrant out on Western Boulevard.

But there was another, earlier, fire that did result in a death. This was the fire in 1905.

This fire did happen at night, at around 2 a.m. on October 29th, 1905. However, this fire also wasn’t in the dormitory, it was in what was called “The Priest’s Building,” a home for the priests who ran the orphanage and for the older boys who were studying to take the cloth.

The fire broke out in the kitchen, which was on the first floor, trapping five young men on the upper stories of the building. One of these young men, whom the News and Observer write-up from the day after the fire describes as “a Bohemian,” was named John Gladdish, or Gladdesh, or Glavish. The N&O astoundingly uses all thee spellings in the one 500 word article.

Gladdish was a hero, going back into the burning building to help his fellow seminarians onto the roof, and giving them the courage to jump from the third story where they were trapped onto the ground below. But when it came time for Gladdish himself to make the leap, he landed very badly and was taken to the hospital. Gladdish died that night from his injuries.

None of this matches the story. If we assume, as ghost stories tell us we should, that tortured souls are tied to the place where they perished, Gladdish doesn’t seem a likely contender being the mysterious presence haunting Crybaby Lane. He died in the hospital, not on the Nazareth property. And he wasn’t multiple orphans.

The only time a dormitory burned at Nazareth was in the fire of 1912. This fire also destroyed the school room, the stables, and a barn, and kicked off a wildfire in the nearby fields. But no one was injured in this fire.

So three fires, one death, and nothing that fits the details of our story. But none of this really matters if we’re hunting for ghosts. Because Crybaby Lane isn’t Crybaby Lane. The Nazareth community ended about a mile west of where what’s now called Crybaby Lane is located. There was never an orphanage on the spot off of Bilyeu. And what’s more, what’s left of the old Nazareth Orphanage is still there.

At its largest, the Catholic Community at Nazareth occupied several hundred acres. As Raleigh expanded, The Church gradually began selling off or donating its property. A large chunk of land was granted in 1962 to build a new facility for Raleigh’s only Catholic School, Cathedral Latin High School, which later became Cardinal Gibbons High.

The remaining building of the orphanage remained in use as an orphanage until 1975, when Bishop F. Joseph Gossman made the facility into the Catholic Center of the Diocese. This building stood on Nazareth Street, off of Avent Ferry Road, about a mile west of Crybaby Lane. The building was demolished as part of North Carolina State’s Centennial Campus expansion, removing the last piece of this part of Raleigh’s history.

So, while there was an orphanage near Crybaby Lane, there was never an orphanage on that spot and no orphans ever died there. The Crybaby Lane off of Bilyeu is just a sheltered little piece of undeveloped land, which was close enough to where people remembered the orphanage to be to become confused with memories of the actual orphanage and it’s fires. That’s the way it is with ghost stories, sometimes if you dig around you can find some real history that played a part in forming the story. Memories get confused and elaborated on when they’re retold, truth and fiction get mixed in together, and throwing a ghost just makes for a good story. So think about the people and lives that were lived in a vanished part of Raleigh when you go down to stand where the orphanage wasn’t at a place called Crybaby Lane.

Bladenboro is a small community surrounded by pine forests and swamps at the southeastern edge of the North Carolina piedmont. It was also the setting for the greatest monster flap North carolina has ever seen.

The story begins in Bladen County in the town of Clarkton. On Decmeber 29, 1953 a local woman heard her neighbors’ dogs barking and whimpering. When she went out to investigate, she saw a large, cat-like creature skulk off into the darkness. That was the first sighting of The Beast of Bladenboro. Two days later, the creature would strike.

On New Year’s Eve, Bladenboro Police Chief Roy Fores was called out to the farm of Woody Storm. Two of Storm’s dogs had been killed by something large and powerful. The poor dog’s bodies had been completely drained of blood.

More reports started coming in. D.G. Pait said he watched from his service station as a dog was attacked by a large creature and dragged into the woods. Chief Fores was inundated with reports of dogs being attacked from across the county. People said they saw an animal “like a bear or a panther” that was “three feet long, twenty inches high, with a long tail and a cat’s face.” Others reported hearing the creature’s scream coming from the swamps near the town, saying it sounded “like a woman with a knife stuck in her back.”

On January 1, the bodies of two more dogs were discovered. These, too, had been drained of blood. Chief Fores decided it was time to call for help.

A team of professional hunters was brought in from Wilmington to track down the animal. Chief Fores accompanied the tracking party and said he saw footprints “the size of a silver dollar.”

Then, on January 5, the Beast of Bladenboro attacked a human.

That evening, Mrs. C.E. Kinslaw heard the sound of whimpering dogs outside of her house. She went outside to investigate. She saw a large, cat-like creature rush towards her. Mrs. Kinslaw screamed and her husband rushed outside. The beast was frightened off and fled back into the woods.

Newspapers picked up the story, and soon Bladenboro was overwhelmed with a flurry of hunters coming in, eager to bag the beast. Over 600 men from as far away as Tennessee descended on the town. A fully armed pack of fraternity brothers from UNC Chapel Hill made its way down to the town to see about putting the beast’s head on their wall.

But nobody knew exactly what they were hunting. Speculation began running rampant. Some thought that it was a Carolina Panther, a species of large cat that had lived in the area until the early 20th Century, but was now thought to be extinct. Others said they were dealing with a coyote or stray dog. Most of those who had descended on Bladen County thought that the only way to find out for sure what the beast was would be by by killing it.

The town was terrified. Ev Butler, who was a young man in Bladenboro at the time, recalled “Night time was the feared time around these parts. As the sun set, the entire community on the west side of town went indoors and didn’t come out unless necessary.”

The fear of the beast had a very real effect on Mr. Butler and his family, “We didn’t live in the town limits at that time and almost everyone had an outdoor privy… To supplement the outside convenience, most houses had a ‘thunder jug’, a big jug that could be used at night and emptied into the privy during the day. That jug got plenty of use during the scare.”

Deciding that things were getting too dangerous, Bladenboro Mayor Bob Fussell and Chief Fores called an end to the hunt. On January 13th, taking an unusually large bobcat that had been trapped by a local farmer, the two men hung it up a flagpole in the center of town. They posted a sign underneath stating “This is the Beast of Bladenboro.”

After a week or so, things settled back to normal. The hunters left town, and the reports of killings stopped coming in. Whatever the Beast of Bladenboro was, it had vanished back into the night and the swamps from where it had first emerged.

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So what was the Beast of Bladenboro?

There was certainly something that killed some dogs in the woods of Bladen County in the early days of 1954. But what exactly that something was and whether it warranted the hype that went around it remains unknown.

And there was a lot of hype. But hype was something that Bladenboro knew well. For a small North Carolina town, Bladenboro was home to an unusually high number of showmen in prominent positions. Among these was the mayor, Woodrow “Bob” Fussell, who also happened to be the owner of the local movie theater.

It was Mayor Fussell who first called the newspapers and organized the party of professional hunters to come in from Wilmington. It was also Fussell who booked a horror movie called “The Big Cat” into his theater at the peak of the excitement, advertising “Now you can see the Cat! We’ve got him on our screen! And in Technicolor!”

The early 1950s were the height of the craze for gimmicks promoting films, with producers like William Castle installing buzzers in the seats of movie houses and having ambulances waiting outside in case anyone was overcome with terror during a show. Fussell can’t be blamed for knowing a good gimmick when he saw one.

The was also another Bladenboro resident, Dick “The Half-Man” Hilburn, who, despite being born with no legs and only one arm, had a genuinely remarkable career. Hilburn had traveled with the circus for some years, working as a tattoo artist and running a sideshow with his partner Carl “The Frog Boy” Norwood. Hilburn had returned to his hometown of Bladenboro after tiring of constantly traveling with the sideshow. Hilburn was a much-loved member of the Bladenboro community. This remarkable man was known for endlessly entertaining children, doing tricks on a skateboard, and causing people to marvel at the seemingly endless number of feats he could accomplish despite his disability.

In addition to his many other skills, Hilburn was a talented artist who had set up shop as a sign painter when he returned home. When the monster madness began going around, Hilburn saw opportunity. He began to produce license plates and other memorabilia with the vampire beast painted on it. He had no trouble selling them to the scores of hunters who had descend on the town.

Describing the incident years later, Mayor Fussell confessed “A Little publicity never hurt a small town,” and stated that the beast was “10% real, 90% imagination.”

Fussell definitely had a hand in stoking that imagination, but he never anticipated how out of control the situation would get. The story had hit the papers in an otherwise slow news week, getting a great deal more attention and trouble than expected. The only other big item of regional interest that week was a local-boy-makes-good story about a little-known comedian named Andy Griffith making his first appearance on The Tonight Show.

National news was slow that week as well, and newspapers from across the nation picked up the sensational story. As a result, far more people than could be managed by Bladen County’s very small police force flocked into the town. With that much overexcitement and that many guns, Chief Fores was afraid that there could be consequences. The decision to call an end to the hunt came about because of the very real danger that an overanxious hunter would shoot someone thinking he was killing the beast.

What was the beast? What exactly it was that killed those dogs will never be known. But dogs disappearing or being killed in a rural community isn’t all that rare of an occurrence. A fabulous story about a vampire killing dogs that thousands of people across the nation become engrossed with definitely happens much less often.

But the excitement that started the whole affair may have been helped along from within the town.

To some people, seeing a bunch of fools chase through the woods looking for an imaginary monster can be a good for a laugh. There have been persistent rumors that a group of men in Bladenboro fanned the flames of the story, spreading more and more exaggerated tales of the beast to the news media, just to see who would believe them. The Beast of Bladenboro incident mat have been the largest snipe hunt in history.

Today, the fuss in 1954 is a source of pride for Bladenboro and the town even hosts a yearly Beast Fest to commemorate the event.

Seven Hearths is a beautiful historic home located on King Street in the historic district of Hillsborough. The house dates from sometime in the earlier half of the Eighteenth Century. The site was originally built as a tavern, William Reed’s Ordinary. This tavern distilled and served spirits to the public from Colonial times into the early days of the Republic. The tavern shut down sometime before the beginning of the Nineteenth Century, when the house became a private residence and began being called Seven Hearths.

According to legend, it was also sometime in the Nineteenth Century that the house acquired its first ghost. According to a family tradition, the ghost of a girl named Jane Hayes haunts the property.

The Hayes family lived in the home from the early Nineteenth Century into the middle of the Twentieth. Jane was a beloved daughter who died of consumption in the home in 1854, when she was only sixteen. Ever since then, residents in the house have reported seeing the transparent figure of a girl with long, flowing, blonde hair, wearing a wispy nightgown, wandering from room to room. Passers-by on the street have also reported seeing the figure of a young girl staring out of an upstairs window.

The second ghost is a much more odd apparition. Said to be another member of the Hayes family, this one a Dr. William Hayes, who practiced out of the building in the 1920s.

William Hayes was a devoted spiritualist, who believed that humans were reincarnated as animals after death. Hayes seems to have gotten halfway there, as his spirit has been seen roaming the halls of Seven Hearths in the form of a large tabby cat with the head of a man.

When they sold the house, the Hayes family let the new owners know about the ghosts. Both apparitions kept appearing occasionally to the new residents for decades, and came to be thought of as member of a slightly odd extended family.

Seven Hearths has recently changed hands again, and the new owners have lovingly restored the exterior of the home to something closer to what it looked like when it was William Reed’s Ordinary. While the new owners haven’t yet said whether or not they’ve seen the ghosts, they have done a wonderful job capturing the spirit of this lovely historic building.

The Single Brother’s House, or just Brother’s House, is located in the historic Old Salem Village and Gardens in Winston-Salem. This home in the reconstructed old Moravian village was once home to one of North Carolina’s most beloved ghosts.

Salem was originally settled by members of the Moravian Church, a Protestant denomination that first began in 1457 in the Kingdoms of Bohemia and Moravia, which are now part of the Czech Republic. Persecuted for their unorthodox beliefs, the Moravians sought refuge in the New World, first settling in Savannah, Georgia in 1735. The congregation moved to Pennsylvania in 1740, where they grew and founded several towns with the biblical names of Bethlehem, Nazareth, and Lititz. Still growing and facing increasing pressure from the growing communities of Pennsylvania, they searched for a new community to call home.

The Moravians purchased the site of Salem from Lord Proprietor and Earl of Granville John Carteret in 1753. Members of the community moved from Pennsylvania to begin construction on their new home. Founded as a religious community, the town was strictly controlled by the church and any members who were found disobeying the rules would face exile. As the nation around them grew, the community gradually drifted away from its strict observance and the Moravians became assimilated into the mainstream culture. The original settlement of Old Salem is now a living history museum, where visitors can see and experience the life as lived by 18th and 19th Century Moravians, and taste the crispy delight of the distinctive Moravian sugar cookies.

Now part of the museum, Brother’s House was originally used as a communal home for unmarried men in the Moravian settlement. Moravians have a strong tradition of keeping excellent records, so we have an unusually detailed account of how this ghost came in to being. The late, great North Carolina folklorist Richard Walser quotes the record at length in his invaluable and highly recommended book North Carolina Legends.

On March 25, 1786 a shoemaker named Andreas Kresmer was killed while excavating a new foundation for an addition to The Brother’s House. Working late into the night, around midnight Brother Kresmer was caught beneath a falling bank of earth. He passed away a few hours later. This kind man and playful was much mourned by his fellow Brethren.

For years afterwards, strange sounds that resembled the tap of a shoemaker’s hammer were heard throughout the house. A small man wearing a red cap like the one Brother Kresmer had been wearing when he died was also seen scurrying through the halls.

The figure was seen for years, even after the Brother’s House had been converted into a home for Moravian widows. One of the most famous encounters with the Little Red Man happened then. Little Betsy, the granddaughter of a widow who lived in the house, is said to have met the ghost and gotten along splendidly with him. Little Betsy had been left deaf from an early childhood illness, but could still speak. She knew nothing of the ghost or the accident, but one day while visiting her grandmother rushed excitedly in from the garden and told of a small man wearing a red cap who had beckoned her to come and play.

According to legend, the Little Red Man’s appearances were brought to rest when he made an ill-advised appearance before a prominent member of the community showing an important visitor around the cellar. The visitor was shocked to discover such disreputable supernatural goings-on in a respectable Moravian home. It’s never good to show up the boss, and a minister was called in to lay the ghost to rest, which apparently worked. The Little Red Man has not been seen since.

Mordecai House is one of Raleigh’s finest historic buildings. The original portion of the house dates from around 1785 and was built by Joel Lane for his son, Henry. Joel Lane was one of the instrumental figures in the establishment of Raleigh as the first planned state capitol in the US. The Capitol building and a substantial portion of downtown Raleigh all stand on what was once Lane’s Wakefield Plantation.

Why Raleigh was built where it was, instead of closer to the Neusse River and its access to transportation and the sea, has always been something of a historical puzzle. There’s a legend that Lane was the one behind the location. The story goes that Lane persuaded the Capitol planning committee to purchase a large chunk of his unwanted land during a night of very heavy drinking at a local tavern, with Lane picking up the tab.

Mordecai House acquired its name when Moses Mordecai married into the Lane family in 1817. Mordecai not only married into the Lane family, he married in to the family twice. When his first wife, Margaret Lane, died in 1824, he married her younger sister, Ann.

Moses Mordecai was a member of one of the most prominent and fascinating Ashkenazi Jewish Families in early American history. His father, Jacob Mordecai, was a progressive, intelligent leader who was the first director of the Female Seminary in Warrenton, North Carolina. This seminary provided an unusual multi-faith teaching environment for young ladies of the town. Moses Mordecai’s older sister, Rachel Mordecai Lazarus, was an extremely intellectually gifted woman whose correspondence with the best-selling novelist Maria Edgeworth persuaded the author to amend the anti-semitic prejudice that unfortunately permeated much of her early work. Rachel Mordecai Lazarus was an early feminist and an early voice in the call for what would become the Reform Movement in American Judaism.

The Mordecai family’s story is a complex one of change and assimilation that many Jews faced when moving to America. While in this country they were ostensibly free to practice their faith and live as they chose, there was still constant pressure to lose their distinct identity in order to become “fully American”. Moses Mordecai apparently deferred to the wishes of his Episcopalian wives, as his branch of the family were thereafter Christian, and by the time Moses Mordecai’s granddaughter Elen Mordecai wrote her memoir Gleanings of Long Ago, the family’s Jewish origins were only a vague memory. But Moses’ son Henry did play an important role in Raleigh’s Jewish history, donating a portion of the Mordecai lands to found the first Jewish cemetery in Raleigh.

It was also sometime in Moses Mordecai’s lifetime that the pronunciation of the family name Mordecai shifted from the traditional long I ending to a long E. This unique pronunciation is still used for the name of the house to this day.

The descendants of Moses Mordecai inhabited the house for five more generations, until the house was willed to the city in 1964, and it’s now part of a public park.

The ghost that inhabits the house is said to be the spirit of Mary Willis Mordecai Turk, who lived from 1858 to 1937. She appears sporadically as an apparition in a grey Nineteenth Century dress. She can occasionally be heard playing the piano in the downstairs drawing room, and visitors to the house have occasionally seen a grey mist hovering near that piano.

Mordecai House was featured on an episode of the Sci-Fi Channel’s Ghost Hunters, where the band of supernatural investigators and sometime plumbers displayed their usual degree of scientific and intellectual rigor by completely confusing the house with the birthplace of President Andrew Johnson, also located in the park, and then all coming down with food poisoning.