The next day I phoned a relative of Jon’s on some pretext. I had not spoken to her in months, but almost immediately the conversation turned to Jon.
“You knew he had died, didn’t you, Karen?”
“No! I’ve been out of town.”
“It happened last Friday while he was in South Carolina, and we buried him Sunday in the family plot. He had suddenly become ill, and actually was quite delirious toward the end. For the last hour before he died, he kept saying over and over, ‘Dead or alive! Will I get there?’ I wish I could say he had a peaceful death. But poor Jon must have had some terrible fear about reaching the hereafter that none of us ever suspected. How I wish I had known it, so I could have led him to the Lord.”
I hung up the phone in a state of shock. Jon had been true to his promise to meet me. He had come even from beyond the grave.
White Oaks, at 400 Hermitage Road, in Charlotte, North Carolina, was built by James Buchanan Duke and is also known as the Duke Mansion. This elegant house is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is maintained and preserved by the nonprofit Lynnwood Foundation. For information please visit www.dukemansion.com or call (704) 714-4400.
THE PHANTOM LADY
MORDECAI HOUSE AND THE ANDREW JOHNSON HOME, RALEIGH, NORTH CAROLINA
President Andrew Johnson’s birthplace, where lighted candles have been seen in the windows
Who was the phantom lady seen recently in the historic Mordecai House at Raleigh, North Carolina? Will she reappear?
Surely a city that has no ghosts is a dull place. Was Raleigh, North Carolina, such a city? It seemed, for a while, that it might be. No one at the Cameron Village Branch of the Raleigh Library knew of any ghosts in the capital city. Its files held no clippings of recent newspaper stories reporting a local apparition. From the standpoint of ghostly presences, everything was all right in Fayetteville, Asheville, Wilmington, and even Charlotte. But not in Raleigh.
Raleigh had politics but no ghosts . . . unless you counted the bed in the Governor’s Mansion, from which a mysterious rapping sound was once rumored to emanate. As this occurred while a Democrat was in office, however, Republicans were not inclined to regard it too seriously.
Nor are ghostly presences enough; you also need a haunted house. North Carolina was understandably miffed by being one of the few states not included in a United States Tourist Bureau list of those with haunted houses. On one side was South Carolina, with Alice of the Hermitage; to the west was Tennessee, with the Bell Witch; and most humiliating of all, on its northern border was Virginia, with an entire register of haunted houses!
Such a situation could make a proud state, full of colorful history and mountain scenery, seem almost prosaic. Of course, it had a beautiful ghost hitchhiker, the famed Brown Mountain Lights, and Joe Baldwin’s ghost at Maco. There was surprisingly little else, though, that was noteworthy.
But now new specters have come to the rescue.
Not far from the heart of Raleigh is the small historic Mordecai Park. Its most impressive building is the large Mordecai Manor itself, with its many wings. Also on the square is a quaint building once used as a law office; a village chapel; a tiny house in which our seventeenth president, Andrew Johnson, was born; and a small, early building used for an office by the Raleigh Historic Properties Commission.
On the afternoon that I called Historic Properties, good fortune was heaped up and spilling over. Terry Myers was there, and I asked her my question: Did she know of any ghost stories in connection with any of the historic properties? Indeed, she did! But not so fast. What sort of person was Ms. Myers? Was she reliable? It was reassuring to learn that she was a knowledgeable, charming lady full of enthusiasm about North Carolina history. A former schoolteacher from Arizona who inspired her students to do special history and folklore projects, she had moved to Raleigh and begun working for Historic Properties. This next ghost-story account is her own experience.
“One November afternoon I wanted to complete a project at work, and, without noticing it, I worked on well after everyone else had left. When I realized that it was time to leave, it was dark outside, but I’ve never been afraid here.”
Outside, the lanterns on the tall posts along the street cast their warm, yellow light on the buildings and gave the restoration life. One could imagine women in these houses engaged in meal preparation, and the lawyers had doubtless just left their offices and were somewhere sipping a glass of sherry before supper. Just as autumn is a time between summer and winter to pause and reflect, so, too, dusk is a time of day to pause and ruminate by the hearthside upon the day’s events.
Inside the Historic Properties office, Terry put the papers she had been working on to rest. Arising from her desk somewhat stiffly, for she had been sitting there for a long time, she slipped into her dark blue coat and was ready to leave. Standing on the porch outside, she could smell the woodsmoke from someone’s fireplace, and then her sensible, low-heeled navy pumps were crunching along on fallen leaves, noisy as tissue wrappings. The sound was a satisfying one, nature shedding its garment from the previous season.
Terry approached the lamppost in front of the tiny, gambrel-roofed house in which President Andrew Johnson was born in 1808. This early-nineteenth-century environment had become so real to her that sometimes modern street-lights could be jarring. She had left late like this before, but tonight, at the edges of her mind, she was aware that something was different.
What could it be?
Then Terry became aware of a light. Had a lamp been left on that should have been turned off in one of the buildings, or was
