A
Ghost Is Found
Posted:
26/10/04 - 19:33
• Hunting
The Pitty Pat Booger
By Kelley Walters and
Ruth Cartlidge
Banshees, haints, boogers, and ghosts: seems like every
old graveyard and house in East Tennessee has one. Up until World
War I, Chattanooga newspapers regularly carried stories
of supernatural beings that flitted through parking lots
and put on shows in the windows of downtown houses.
One 1903
Chattanooga Times article
wrote of a headless dog who haunted a schoolhouse at the
corner of Douglas and 8th Streets. In spite of
attempts by locals to chase it off with “shotguns and
brickbats,” the ghost hung around for nearly two months,
terrorizing local schoolchildren. It sat,
“headless and forlorn,” according to the reporter, and
cried like “a little child.”
Chattanooga
has its share of still active haunts: The Read House and
Chickamauga National Military Park, just to name a
couple.
But, what happened to the haints, the old, nearly
forgotten ghosts who prowled the back roads of Hamilton
County? The Pulse went
looking and found the Pitty Pat Booger, an impish and
sometimes murderous creature that has haunted Sale
Creek’s Shipley Hollow for 150 years.
The Ghost
“People
heard things,” says Curtis Coulter, a teacher and
historian who has written several books about Sale
Creek. When
folks rode horses through Shipley Hollow, they’d hear,
“pitty-pat, pitty-pat, pitty-pat,” like the sound of
feet or hooves running up behind them, and that meant
the Booger was on the prowl. Coulter says
that most of the old timers who lived near the
intersection of Shipley Hollow and Daugherty Ferry Roads
“were good sprinters.”
The first
Pitty Pat stories started in the mid-1800s. One of the first
told of a man who encountered a woman in a white dress
as he was driving his wagon home in the middle of the
night.
Though he thought it peculiar, he picked her up
and gave her a ride. They conversed
pleasantly for quite a while. Then, the man
turned his head away for a moment, and when he looked
back, the woman had disappeared.
The woman is
said to have been the victim of the Pitty Pat
Booger. She
and her two small children were coming home through the
hollow when a dark, four-legged creature ran in front of
their wagon, causing it to overturn. The woman was
killed instantly.
The creature ran off with the two children. Coulter writes:
“Possibly (and most likely), they were eaten by the
creature.”
Nobody ever saw the kids again.
Another
story tells of a man who was killed by being thrown from
his horse after it was startled by the Booger. Now, locals hear
the Pitty Pat on dark, foggy nights. Some say the
sounds are hooves; others say they are the two lost
children, their tiny feet still running from the
Booger. And
when the “pitty pats” come, the woman in white is sure
to follow.
The Booger
has been known to jump into a carriage or wagon, and
ride along until it felt like jumping off. Coulter’s great
grandfather tells of something that hopped onto the back
of his horse as he was riding through the hollow. Coulter thinks
that it’s most likely that people were seeing and
hearing mountain lions or bobcats, but unexplained
things still happened well into the 20th century. In two separate
incidents in the 1950s, John Iles and Glenn Francisco
told of a large creature that ran into the sides of
their cars.
When the men went out to inspect the damage, they
found no injured or dead animals and no scratches or
dents on their vehicles. The last
documented activity in the hollow was in 1967, when
someone reported seeing disembodied green eyes hovering
above the water under the Mill Dam Bridge.
The Hunter
We enlisted
the help of amateur ghost hunter, Patrick Burns, founder
of the Ghost Hounds and a self-professed “ghost geek”
from Atlanta. Burns has been hunting spooks for about
ten years.
He says he started “by accident in Northern
Wisconsin, when friends told me about something called a
‘spook light.’” The light was said to have haunted the
area for years.
After some investigation, Burns proved that the
light was nothing more than headlights on the highway
that were refracted through gases in a nearby marsh.
But over the
years, Burns has also had his share of what he believes
to be paranormal encounters. “I’ve had one ghost follow
me home, and on a couple of different occasions, I’ve
seen figures. About 90-95 percent of the time we pick up
something when we go on a hunt, whether it’s an orb on
the digital camera or a voice on the recorder.”
Burns’
Website, ghosthounds.com, has an EVP gallery of digital
recordings. Ghostly voices are caught on tape, from
places like Anthony’s Restaurant in Atlanta and the
Coffee Shop of Horrors in Gainesville, Georgia. He tells
stories of ghosts welcoming him back to sites he’s
visited or asking him to leave. He’s even been
threatened, like the time his group took a trip to the
Bell Witch cave in Adams, Tennessee, and one of the
spirits requested that the group “Kill the brunette.”
Burns says,
“Ghost hunting is still poo-pooed by the scientific
community, because science wants repeatable results
under controlled conditions, but unfortunately, these
phenomena don’t perform on demand.”
Ghost
hunters are on a mission to prove to themselves that
paranormal activity exists, but even then, Burns says,
“The verdict is always inconclusive.”
The Hunt
On Saturday,
October 13th, writers Kelley Walters and Ruth Cartlidge,
tech guru Art Thompson, and Pulse publisher
Michael Kull joined Patrick Burns to see if the woman in
white still haunts Pitty Pat Hollow. Following the
advice of Curtis Coulter, we went to the Shipley
Cemetery, which sits right in the middle of what could
be called “Booger Central.”
Our first
look at the old family cemetery told us we were in the
right place. The small burial ground sits on top of a
hill, surrounded by woods and a few private homes. The well-tended
graves date back to the early 1800s. Some of the
gravestones are hand carved with flowers and vines, the
names of the dead misspelled, the dates of birth and
death telescoping into small print as the carver ran out
of space. The ground is soft, mossy and pocked with
sunken graves, some marked with only small granite
boulders.
We scouted
the cemetery in the daylight, then came back after dark
to begin our hunt.
The night was crisp and clear, with temperatures
in the low 50’s, and no moon. We located our
base of operations on a small, paved road at the edge of
the cemetery.
The sounds of the forest teased our wishful ears.
At one point, Ruthie thought she heard the Pitty Pat,
until Michael interpreted the low grunts as a horny cow
in a neighboring farmer’s pasture.
Patrick set
up his equipment in the back of Kelley’s car. We all
hovered in the circle of the dome light and listened to
his explanations of what each instrument would do. Periodically,
someone would wander a little ways toward the cemetery,
but no one was brave enough to venture too far
alone.
Within a
half an hour, a spider web of wires ran across the
cemetery road, leading to the Tri-field meter, Electro
Magnetic Field Detector, and an infrared camera, which
Patrick hooked up to his laptop monitor and aimed into
the cemetery.
The stark, white images of the headstones on a
grainy screen, illuminated by residual heat from the
day’s sun, sent our nerves over the edge.
Patrick
explained that any ghosts would appear as black
shadows. We
all stared, transfixed, fully expecting the cat-like
Booger to appear at any moment, just like a Hollywood
movie.
When Michael
snuck around to the front of the car and waved his hand
in front of the Electro Magnetic Detector, causing a
flurry of clicks and crackles, Kelley ran for the other
car and huddled inside. Michael followed
bravely to protect her from the Booger. “I’m the person
who stands off to the side and survives the carnage,”
Kelley said later. “It’s one thing to go out and take
pictures in a graveyard at night, but what if that
detector really does go off while I’m standing right
next to it?”
Patrick,
Art, and Ruthie grabbed a video camera, hand-held
digital thermometer and a voice recorder, and walked
into the cemetery.
Patrick says
the “most compelling evidence” for the existence of
ghosts comes in the form of electronic voice phenomena.
“When you get recordings of voices joining
conversations, joking, mocking, it’s a little more
believable for me,” he says. Human ears pick
up the air pressure of sound waves. Then, our inner
ears convert the waves into electrical impulses that our
brains interpret as sounds. When ghosts
speak, they don’t create sound waves, just the impulses,
which only the pickup in a microphone can detect.
Sudden
temperature drops of 20-30 degrees also indicate the
presence of a ghost. Burns talks of
ghost hunting in June and walking into cold spots so
sudden that he could see his breath.
As we walked
up the hill, I clasped the thermometer in my hand like a
talisman, waiting for the cold snap that would send me
running back to join Kelley. The temperature
dropped slowly . . .50, 49, 46 degrees . . .until we
reached the top of the cemetery hill. Patrick turned
on the sound recorder and started asking questions.
“Is there
anyone here?”
Silence.
“Is there
anyone here who would like to speak to us?”
More
silence. We
walked toward the woods at the back of the
graveyard.
The temperature dropped again . . .45, 44.8,
44.3.
“Would
you rather talk to a woman?” asked
Ruthie, hunting for the Politically Correct Booger.
We stood
still, careful not to whisper or make small noises that
could throw the voice recording off. When we walked
down the hill toward the oldest part of the cemetery,
the temperature dropped another two degrees. All three of us
tingled with fear.
“We mean
you no harm,” Patrick
assured the woman in white. “Will you
please show yourself to us?”
A cricket
chirped. We
heard the distant road sounds from Highway 27.
We cajoled
and begged the Pitty Pat to come out, not quite sure
what we would do if a spectre actually appeared. (Patrick’s
advice: “Run!”)
But the woman in white remained hidden.
We ended our
walk by standing quietly in the midst of the oldest
headstones, listening to the digital sound recording of
our walk.
Tinny voices sliced through the night. Then, in the
midst of amplified rustles and footsteps, we heard a
faint whisper.
Patrick stopped the playback and we listened
again. The
sound could have been a ghostly voice or a rustling
leaf, but Patrick wouldn’t know for sure until he played
it back with the proper equipment.
We sat in
the deep quiet of the cemetery, excited that we might
have recorded a real ghost. A Barred Owl
hooted, then squalled as it descended on some prey. The spell was
broken. We
returned with Patrick to the car. It was 2:00
a.m. We
were tired, ready to go home and let the dead rest.
As Patrick
packed up his equipment, we all agreed that Shipley
Cemetery was a peaceful, beautiful place to spend
eternity.
However, none of us was willing to step into the
darkness and tempt the Pitty Pat one more time.
Do Ghosts Really
Exist?
Patrick
Burns is 99 percent sure that ghosts exist. “When you record
enough phenomena on electronic devices,” he says, “you
have to conclude that there’s something going on.”
What if,
when we die, we just exist on another dimension? That isn’t so
far-fetched if you consider that string theory physics
requires the universe to operate on at least 10
dimensions, only four of which we can sense.
Or the
concept that says we’re all living in parallel
universes, like millions of soap bubbles floating around
a room.
Every once and a while, two bubbles run into each
other, making a connection between each universe.
Scientists
also speculate that paranormal activity is actually the
result of low-range sound or electro-magnetic shifts
that cause your body to vibrate, your vision to blur,
and the hair stand up on your body like ours did in
Shipley Hollow.
As Burns
says, “A lot of us still wonder, is this just our
imaginations, or is it undiscovered phenomena? A certain
amount of skepticism is healthy.” But while ghost
hunters like Patrick Burns spend their time trying to
move science forward, they also find reassurance “that
there’s something beyond this life.”
Ghost
hunting is a hobby for only the most patient of people.
“Some people are so dead set on finding proof of the
afterlife that they leave disappointed if it doesn’t
show up right away. Keep it up,” Burns says, “You’ll
find your evidence.”
Boogers Can
Haunt More Than Your Nose
Most of
East Tennessee’s early white settlers came from the
British Isles and Western Europe. They brought the
language of spooks with them.
Booger
A
southern-ism of bogeyman or
boggart, which was
a sprite or goblin supposed to haunt particularly gloomy
places in the bogs of northern England. The
English-speaking Eastern Mountain Cherokee adopted the
word to describe ghosts or frightening animals. Their “Booger
Dance,” which started as a ritual masked dance in winter
festivals, became a way to ridicule and revile European
white invaders, as well as repel the diseases they
brought with them.
(Sources: Random House Dictionary of the
English Language, 2nd Ed. & salempress.com)
Banshee
Means,
literally, “bean woman” in Gaelic and Irish. A supernatural
being that wailed under the windows of a peasant’s
house, warning the family of an impending death.
(Source: Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary,
1996,1998.)
Ghost
A very old
English word, which literally means, “breath” or
“spirit,” especially one who appears in human form or
haunts former habitats.
Haint
Sometimes,
ha’nt. A Southern
derivation of haunt, which
comes from the Middle English word,
haunten, meaning
“to frequent.”
Southerners use it as another word for ghost.
Hobgoblin or
Goblin
An ugly,
mischievous, elfin creature that taunts humans. Gobelin
was the
Middle English name for a ghost that haunted a French
town in the 12th century. The word came to
England during the Norman invasion.
Poltergeist
A ghost that
manifests itself by making a lot of noise, such as
rapping and banging on walls. From the German
words, poltern “to make
noises” and giest “ghost.”
Spectre
The French
spelling of the ancient Latin word
spectrum, which
means “appearance” or “apparition.”
Spook
From the
Middle Dutch word, spooc, meaning
spectre.
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