Searcy is one of my favorite haunted places.   I did my internship here a very long time ago and I fell in love with it's history and it's white chipped walls.  Everything about this old hospital spoke to me.  It was even more remarkable because most of those who worked there and lived there every day were oblivious to it's history.  I found this hospital so fascinating that I wrote I book about it which will be coming out this April. 

Searcy State Hospital is located in Mt. Vernon Alabama. Prior to being a state hospital the old hospital has a long and dark history that is very difficult to find, but easy to see upon casual observation. The hospital is encased in long, chipped, white walls that seem as old as anything in the United States. From outside these walls, you can see a battered watchtower that gives testament to the fact that the hospital is in the same location as a 300 year old fort. The fort bears witness to American history and was originally a Spanish fort. It switched hands during the Louisiana Purchase and became a US fort. After the US took possession of the fort it was converted to a military arsenal and became known as the Mount Vernon Arsenal.

The Arsenal switched hands again several times and was taken by the Confederates during the civil war only to be passed back over the United States again in 1862. From 1887 to 1894, The Arsenal became a Barracks and was used as a prison for the captured Apache people. The most famous of the Apache people to be held in these barracks was Geronimo. The infamous Aaron Burr was also held at this secluded prison at some point.

In 1900 the Barracks were transformed once again and the prison became a mental hospital. Searcy hospital was built as the African American mental hospital in Alabama. Conditions in the hospital were beyond questionable and at one time there were over 2000 patients in the crowded hospital and all were seen by one psychiatrist. All patients were expected to work in the fields.

The hospital was desegregated in 1969, but it’s history is all around it. The hospital is still in used today, and although the residents live in new buildings, many tell stories of ghosts and devils that linger in the white walls and abandoned buildings that surround the new facilities. These stories are usually ignored, because the patients are crazy, but I’m not the only sane person who saw a few ghosts while they were working there.

Mary Jang Lawyer

You think it is Paul Maroon from The Walkmen?

From: Jang Wix
Subject: legal issues
Date: January 11, 2010 4:46:37 PM PST
To: undisclosed-recipients:;
Reply-To: Jangwix@hotmail.com

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plus legal fees. He has only paid me $95,000.
I am hereby seeking your firm to assist in collecting the balance from him.
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email:jangwix@hotmail.com
Tel: (82)-7076760213

Woodland Hospital

I thought this story deserved a revisit.  This little hospital in Cullman, Alabama has enough former employees telling stories to fill a book with.  Although I've never seen the hospital,  the rumors  conjour images of hospitals that resemble Arkham Asylum.  My husband has been talking to more nurses that used to work at Woodland Hospital and the plot has thickened.  This small hospital in Cullman, Alabama had always been haunted, but this never sufficiently concerned anyone to make them think of doing anything about it.   So when the hospital was closed, it was still haunted by "Homer" and all the ghosts that had always wandered the halls.  According to several nurses,   in the days leading up to this closure the haunting became more pronounced.   The nurses were some of the last staff left in the hospital.  The patients were gone and the doctors had left.   My sources report that during this time, call bells went off on their own.  Lights turned off and on.  Doors opened and closed and the hospital was filled with the noise of dead.  Ghosts were seen wandering the halls and the voices of these phantoms could be heard in the silence.  Needless to say, the nurses were more than happy to leave after that.

Roosevelt Island

Roosevelt Island is a narrow island in the East River of New York City.   The island, now filled with towering high rise housing complexes, was once largely secluded from the rest of the city.   Originally called Blackwell island, the island belonged to the Blackwell family for most of the 18th century and part of the 19th until it was bought by the state of New York as a location for charitable and corrective hospitals.   

The first such institution established on the island was a prison which was the source of much scandal.  It was built in 1825.  The second institution established on the island was The New York Lunatic Asylum that was used from 1837-1894 whose buildings included the Octagon which still stands today.  Over 1700 patients were housed in this asylum, twice the suggested occupancy, and these patients were supervised by convicts from the neighboring prison.  Charles Dickens was one of the more famous people to have visited this asylum and he described it as horrible and "very painful."  A famous reporter, Nellie Bly, disguised herself as an inpatient and spent time in the asylum as well and she described the asylum a  "human rat trap."

In addition to the horrible assylum and prison that marred blackwell island, the island was also the site of a Smallbox Hospital, which housed small pox patients from 1856 until 1886.   The intense suffering that went on in this building added to it's ruined state have built numerous rumors about it's ghostly activity.  The ruined hospital is now known as the Renwick Ruin and is brightly lit at night giving it a ghostly glow that only adds to stories.

These two facilities are the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Blackwell, later turned Welfare, later turned Roosevelt Island's dark history, but these facilities ruins are the most notoriously haunted.    The Octagon has been renovated and turned into an apartment building. The residents of the building have reported numerous unexplainable incidents.  Ghost hunters have taken pictures of ghosts lurking in the hallways of this building and even the pets refuse to walk up the stairs of this once "human rat-trap"

I was lucky enough to visit my aunt on this island last year.  She lives in one the large high rises that have consumed the once forlorn landscape of this island.  She reports that she felt ill at ease when she visited the octagon and that it's atmosphere conveyed a sense of old sorrow.  It is easy to forget, however, that the island was once filled with such mass suffering and sorrow.   The island's atmosphere has been completely changed, but the ruins of the old hospital remain, reminding visitors that it wasn't so long ago that the island belonged to the tortured souls of the dying, the mad, the forgotten, and the imprisoned.  To learn more about Roosevelt Island please visit:   http://nyc10044.com/timeln/timeline.html

Possessed Computer

I had plans for a brilliant story today.  I began work on it this afternoon and as I was uploading several stories I found a wonderful picture taken of a ghost.   Of course,  at that moment as I gazed at this amazing picture in slack-jawed awe, my computer crashed and I have spent the rest of my day trying to get it to work again.   It is my story that my computer was possessed by the ghost.  It is much more probable that it was possessed by some wretched hacker and infested by several worms.  However,  my story for tonight remains that my computer was possessed by a ghost.

The Catacombs of Paris

The Catacombs of Paris have always been a source of endless fascination for me.    The catacombs are a series of labrynthian tunnels that burrow beneath the city of Paris.   The walls of these tunnels, or this ossuary, are covered in the bones of Paris's dead.  Opened in the late 18th century, the underground cemetery became a tourist attraction on a small scale from the early 19th century, and has been open to the public on a regular basis from 1867.

The history of the catacombs starts with the booming population of Paris.  As more and more people flooded this populous city, there began to be serious problems with overcrowding cementeries.  Around the 12th century, this problem became more than serious.  The wealthy could still afford expensive cementery plots, but the bodies of the poor were flooding the streets.   As solution to this,  Saints-Innocents cementery was created for the poor.  The poor were buried here in less regal style that usually involved being dumped in a sack into a mass grave.   This solution worked for a while and other mass burial plots for the poor were established.

However, by the 17th century even the mass graves of Saints-Innocents were overflowing and the sanitary conditions around these poor cementeries was becoming intolerable, even by 17th century standards.  The bones of the older dead were exhumed and laid in piles to make room for fresh corpses.  So that the cementery was laden with the unburied remains of the dead.    Luckily, the government was also looking for a solution to dealing with a series of abadoned quary mines beneath the city.   The solutions to the two problems came in the form of the l'Ossuaire Municipal, the official name for the catacombs.  

Alexandre Lenoir first had the idea to use empty underground tunnels to the outskirts of the capital to use as the ossuary. His successor, Thiroux de Crosne, chose a place and the exhumation and transfer of all Paris' dead to the underground sepulture began in 1786.  At first the catacombs were merely a place to place the bones of the dead.  It wasn't until Louis-Étienne Héricart de Thury assumed responsibility for the ossuary that it became a work of art.   He rearranged the skulls and bones to create symbolism within the tunnel and also added old cementery decorations to the underground mortuary to turn it into what you see within the catacombs today.

I've spent quite a bit of time on youtube today viewing videos of ghosts visitors of the catacombs have caught on tape. The list is more than lengthy and several people have caught honestly scary images of the spirits of the dead on tape in the catacombs. The stories of ghosts here are more than prolific.  The place is considered to be one of the most haunted places in the world and according to http://www.hauntedamericatours.com/FRANCE.php  the most haunted place in France.   To learn more about the catacombs or to find out how to visit them  go to http://www.catacombes-de-paris.fr/english.htm.

The Haunting of The Sherrod House

A friend of mine who lives in a small town in South Alabama sent me the most wonderful pictures.  She moved into her century old home a few years ago and when she first moved into the house it was haunted by an irritating spirit. My friend sent me the story of her haunted house and since I don't think I could possibly tell the story as well as she does I have placed it in quotes and put it word for word here.

"The house was built in 1906, and is known as "the Warren House," although there is some dispute over who built the house. The Coles or the Warrens. Because of this dispute, we decided to put the name "Sherrod House" on our historical register sign.  Next door is the McCleod house, built in 1903. When we moved here, 2 elderly McCleod sisters remained. Their story varied at times, but this is the best we could come up with from them.

In 1906 the Cole family (allegedly) built the house. Sadly, they died while their children were still young, perhaps in the flu epidemic of 1918. Naomi Cole, and perhaps some of her siblings, went next door and were raised by the McCleods. When she was old enough, Naomi married a man, Mr. Warren, and moved back into her family home. When her husband passed, and her children moved, she turned the house into a boarding house, and many of the people in our town have memories of living here, or visiting their grandparents here, etc. Naomi left (died?) sometime in the early 1970's. Incredibly, the house stood vacant until we bought it in 2003.

When we first bought the house, we loved it. It needed a lot of work- but we could see it's potential. My great grandmother was just moving into a nursing home, and we were blessed enough to get her old furniture. We visited the house at least once a month, while still living in Huntsville.

Almost immediately, we felt a presence, but weren't too threatened by it. We would hear things in the middle of the night. Footsteps in the hallway, that sounded like a man's boots, slow and steady. We would groggily awaken, think to ourselves, "oh, he's just checking up on things," and fall back asleep. I don't know why we were so sure that it was ok, but we were. At other times we would hear the back door open. We would go to check it, and it would still be dead bolted.

The activity began to become more common, to the point of where Michael and I were almost too spooked to stay in the house alone. A photo frame in the living room lifted itself from the mantle and flew across the room. One night, while MIchael and I were asleep, we heard very heavy determined foot stomping, across the length of the foot of our bed. It felt strongly like the spirit was trying to wake us up. Not knowing what else to do, Michael sat up in bed, said "Stop that! You'll wake the children!" The stomping stopped, and never happened again. But on another night, Michael woke up to someone pressing down on his chest. It took him a minute or two of struggling to sit up and breathe. It felt like something was trying to get our attention.

On one night we allowed Chloe to have a friend spend the night. All 4 older children slept in the boys room, which has a closet that connects it to Lily's room. The children woke us in the middle of the night. "The ghosts are bothering us." Not wanting to scare them, we assured them that there was "no such thing as ghosts," and sought to calm them down. We all went back to bed. Early in the morning, I woke to find the kids terrified in the room. I tried to settle them down again. I looked into the mirror above the fireplace, directly beside the closet, which was latched shut with a hook and eye closure. I told them "There is no such thing as ghosts!" The minute I said that, the hook very slowly released itself from the eye, as if by an unseen hand. Then the closet door swung open and and a burst of icy air came rushing out. I looked at the kids, there was no denying ghosts now I supposed!

Soon after this incident, we moved into the house full time. Lily was 3 years old at the time. At night, before going to bed, Lily would complain that there was a "grey lady" watching her. She always pointed to the same corner of the room, and told us that the grey lady would stand there when she was trying to sleep. Finally, in an effort to calm her, we began talking to the grey lady at bedtime. We asked her to please let Lily sleep in peace. After a week or so, this seemed to work, and that was the end of all the activity.

We feel now, that whatever was haunting the house is not here anymore. The "presence" is gone. We never felt threatened, only a little spooked, and for some reason, we always felt like the spirits (one man, one woman, is what we felt) were just checking up on things. They seemed to want to know that the house would be taken care of. They seemed attracted to the children. I feel like they have accepted us here, and have moved on. We haven't seen any activity since the fall of 2005.

What we have seen is a supposed granddaughter of Naomi. She showed up unannounced at our house while I was out of town on a business trip, and Michael spoke to her. She wanted to know if we had found anything that had belonged to her family in the house. She asked Michael if he had found a box of some sort. She kept pressing the point again and again, and asked Michael if he would be willing to sell the house to her. When he declined, she left. The McCleod sisters next door got very upset over this visit. They told Michael "whatever you find in that house is yours, and she has no business coming around here and bothering you!"

We don't know why the McCleods would be so upset over Naomi's granddaughter coming for a visit. We have been all over the house, including the attic, which is almost as big as the 1st floor, and have not found any boxes. The fireplaces seem to have stopped being used at some point, there are gas lines near most of them. We don't know if there is maybe something in a chimney. We also don't know the identity of the ghosts that were here, though it seems to make sense that it would be the original owners of the house."

Although the Sherrod's say their house is no longer haunted,  the picture they sent me of a lonely ghost staring out the window still sends chills down my spin