Are There Ghosts at Twiggtown?
“From ghoulies and ghosties, long leggity beasties
and other things that go bump in the night,
Good Lord, deliver us.”
Ask different people and you will get different answers. Homer Lee Twigg, Jr. says he has never seen or felt them. Homer Lee Twigg, Sr., planning to spend a weekend night alone in the house where he was born and raised, left about eleven o'clock in the evening, and stayed at a hotel in Cumberland.
Guests and residents frequently report strange incidents. A male visitor who had been regaled with the usual ghost stories about the otherworldly occupants of the house, was assigned the nursery as his sleeping room. At breakfast next morning he was asked how he slept. He said fine, except that the grandfather clock in the hall kept awakening him when it tolled the hours. This created some consternation, since said clock has not been working for more than thirty years!
The most common phenomenon is the sound of voices in other rooms throughout the house. The voices are muffled, a man and a woman having a pleasant conversation. No words are distinguishable, just the voices interspersed with gentle laughter. Residents often respond to what seems to be someone calling their name from another part of the house.
None of the phenomena is threatening, if you don't include having Mary Ann Stallings follow you down the hall at night. When the house was restored by the current family members, the walls were stripped down to the original papers and paint colors, and then redone to match the original materials. Evidently the process disturbed Mary Ann, because she began to follow the workers around. That caused a few problems. About two o'clock one morning a hallway discussion meeting between the current matriarch and the first matriarch resulted in a truce after it was explained that the goal was to restore Twiggtown to Mary Ann's version.
The house has a “cold spot” where a feeling of some past terror involving a longhaired blonde woman, a child and an Indian, remains caught in time. The location of the spot is known only to a few, and yet sensitive people who know nothing of the history of the house often complain of a chill in the area. No one stays near it for long.
There are other stories, electric tools that run backwards, “someone” in the Colonial Room, and the handsome man dressed in black that appeared in the library one sunny afternoon. He was looking pensively out the window, and seemed perfectly normal, except for the fact that his knee was embedded in a bookcase that obviously did not exist during his lifetime. His face wore an expression of puzzlement, perhaps wondering when the wrap-around porch had turned into a patio, then he faded back into that strange place where the past still lives.
Of course Twiggtown has ghosts. The house has been the Twigg family home for 239 years. It was filled with domestic life and every degree of emotion that the human condition entails. After being occupied continuously for such a long period, it would be strange indeed if there were no traces of the past remaining, and no ghosts to remind us of the long light of yesterday.
The granery and garden fence at Twigg town...