Ghostly Tar Heels

Professional ghost-hunters have tales to tell and ghoulish haunts to wander

North Carolina has its share of ghosts and haunted places, so for this guide to the state's haunted hot spots, we checked in with two authors who are leading voices in all that's scary in the Tar Heel State -- Nancy Roberts and Joshua P. Warren.

For nearly five decades, Roberts has been documenting ghost stories. Her first book, "An Illustrated Guide to Ghosts of the Old North State," was published in 1959. Now called "North Carolina Ghosts & Legends," it remains the second-best selling of her 25 books. (Top seller for the Charlotte author is "Civil War Ghost Stories & Legends.")

Warren, an Asheville native, is known for his scientific approach. The author of "Haunted Asheville" and "How to Hunt Ghosts" has investigated the science behind the Brown Mountain Lights and has opened a free Paranormal Museum inside his sister's Classie Moon Thrift Boutique in Asheville. He also created a "Haunted Asheville Tour" (by foot or by bus) to correspond with the stories in his book.

Both writers started as journalists, Roberts for The Charlotte Observer and Warren for the Asheville Citizen-Times, and got great reader responses when they wrote about ghost stories.

"I just thought I would write one story, about a house in Fayetteville where a Presbyterian minister, a friend of my mother's, had seen a ghost," Roberts says. But she wound up writing several more. Author Carl Sandburg, then living in North Carolina, told one of Roberts' co-workers that he had been reading her ghost stories. "Take the message back to her that I like her stories and they should be a book," he advised.

At age 15, Warren wrote his first story for the newspaper, an article about haunted places in Asheville that came out around Halloween. "Afterward, I was just bombarded with letters and phone calls from people who said, 'Oh, this is wonderful that you are investigating this stuff; if you really want to see something spooky, you should come to my house,' " he says. "And so I started following up on those invitations."

Roberts says she believes in ghosts although she has never seen one herself. She has researched hundreds of sites, but only writes about a place after visiting personally, locating credible witnesses and finding a good story. "I want motivation," she says. "I want a reason for this ghost being."

Her definition of a ghost? "I think they're ... some sort of atmospheric condition that occurs again due to the walls of the house or (due) to an item of furniture, or something that, if we could understand scientifically, there would be quite a reasonable explanation for it."

That's what Josh Warren is all about, looking for that explanation.

In 17 years, he estimates he's visited more than 500 haunted houses. His writings about hauntings led him to found the League of Energy Materialization & Unexplained Phenomena Research ( L.E.M.U.R.) in search of the science to support the stories.

Warren describes a ghost as "some paranormal aspect of the physical form and/or mental presence that appears to exist apart from the original physical form."

This "tedious definition," Warren adds, is "necessary to cover the range of experiences." The word "appears" is "especially integral because it goes to show that a ghost in some cases may be something that we cannot scientifically differentiate from a subjective hallucination."

He finally saw his first ghost in the summer of 2001, when a frantic college student in Asheville kept seeing a mist or a dark figure of a man in her new place, once beside her in bed.

On his second visit, Warren and another researcher saw the ghost in the attic. They were about three feet apart, and between them was a "blue/gray mist swirling in the air." They both touched the swirling mist. "It had that classic, cold sensation and, also, it had this electrostatic element very much like if you would place your hand ... near a TV screen ... you get that tingling feeling."

After about 20 to 30 seconds, the mist "dimmed and vanished," he says.

Even if you visit the state's most haunted locations, there's no guarantee you'll run into a ghost. If you do, Roberts says there's no reason to fear them.

"If I'm speaking anywhere, I mention that I have never heard of anyone being pursued or attacked or murdered by a ghost," she says. "If you're going to be afraid of anything, it should be real people."

But Warren has a different take: "Yeah, I think people probably should be afraid of ghosts," he says. "I've certainly been startled a few times. I've been in a few houses where physical objects have flown off shelves and off walls. We've even videotaped some of this stuff. That's a bit unnerving when you're walking around and there's stuff flying at your head."

But the greater danger from ghosts is not physical, it's mental, he adds. "When these things just manifest out of nowhere, it is unsettling at very least in terms of your own privacy."

Warren hopes to pinpoint an answer to apparitions: "Based upon all of our scientific knowledge ... I feel like a lot of these things, whether it's ghosts or mothmen or aliens or even Bigfoot -- these may be examples of life forms that do exist just beyond this particular realm, and all it takes is a little tweaking here or there, the increase or the decrease of one frequency or another, so that we can converge and have this limited window of interactivity with each other."

Here's to an interactive Halloween.