I'll post one as soon as I get over that freaky photo you posted!!! But I have to be honest, nothing I could come up with can top THAT . . . that was enough to give me nightmares for a week, thank you very much (and I mean that literally . . . without Fringe or FI I've been missing that 'knot in the pit of your stomach after you turn out the lights and try to jump into bed from the doorway' feeling)

LOL OG!

I freaked out too when I saw that!

Now I have to recall some stuff myself!

Better leap high and far!

I'm digging your groove dude!

Come on guys...I need a good scare!

I have always loved tales of ghosts and haunted houses. I particularly love ones that are of real places. There are many that I have heard my whole life from my hometown and area. Here is one of them.

Happy Halloween everyone!!!!

“The Lady in White”

The house stands, dilapidated and unassuming, atop a hill on Long Run Road. It looks like any other abandoned house. But it’s more than that.

It has been a link for six generations of the Cocanougher family. It has also served as a link to something else, something more mysterious than a family bond.

Over its existence, which spans nearly two centuries, the two-story house has also been home to several ghosts. A lady in white, thought to be a family ancestor, a Civil War soldier, and various other ghosts and odd phenomena have made their presence known at the house.

Built in 1838 on land acquired by Jacob Cocanougher in 1797, the house has been abandoned for around half a century. The last family to live there, Bill and Ruby Cocanougher and their four children, have seen and heard the ghosts. Bill Cocanougher, now deceased, never tired of telling stories of the ghostly lady in white, according to relative Mike Crain. “Bill says, being alone in the house, he would hear a noise, go check and find a women dressed in white…standing at the top of the stairs or on the stairs,” Crain said.

Bill’s son Bruce also saw the ghost, according to sister Connie Johnson. “My Brother had just come home from school, and he heard a noise. He opened the door and saw a female going up the stes in a solid white dress,” Johnson said.

All the sightings confirm that the ghost was a young woman who wore a white dress. That much is clear. However, what is not clear is who the ghost is. “They have all commented on how pale she looked and that her white dress looked like a funeral shroud,” said Cocanougher. “Her vision only lasts a few moments and then she disappears.”

Many believe that the shost is Mattie “Matt” Cocanougher. Matt was Bill’s aunt. Her family lived in the home in the late 1800’s. Her grandfather had built it.

Matt grew ill with fever, and doctors could do nothing for her. She died nearly a year later at the age of seventeen. The year was 1878. Presumably, she died in the house, but it doesn’t end there.

According to Johnson, there was no shortage of odd occurrences in the house. “There were all kinds of things that went on,” she said. “All these years, that house was supposed to be haunted.”

The haunting may have begun when Jacob Cocanougher, the original landowner, began to sow his garden. “From the moment his plow point lay the first furrow in that chosen field, he realized he had disturbed the site of an ancient Indian settlemet and most likely their sacred burial ground,” Cocanougher said. There have been hundreds of Indian artifacts found on the land. Some also claim to have heard sounds like the beat of war drums off in the distance. Others have heard the sounds of heavy footsteps and dragging chains on the stairway. Cocanougher says this could be sounds of the ghosts of slaves. “It is said that slaves who disobeyed or misbehaved were severely punished in the north upstairs room.”

On October 7, 1862 a regiment of Confederate soldiers came to the Cocanougher house looking for water in the midst of a drought. They were directed to a limestone spring where they drank the water and filled their canteens. One soldier left a cup as a token of appreciation. The next day 7,500 soldiers died in the Battle of Perryville. Since then, the ghost of a Confederate soldier has been seen in the house. “A Confederate soldier has been seen in the Old house as recently as June 1954 when one of my sisters awoke and saw him at the foot of her bed,” Cocanougher said.

But not all of the supernatural goings-on at the house can be explained. In the later 1920’s, Bill Cocanougher and his brother Herman were working on the highway crew. They had to get up early enough to walk the four and a half mile trek to the work site. Awaking one morning to daylight and noting that the clock had apparently stopped at 3:00am, the two men rushed to get ready.

As they began walking down the road, they noticed a bright glow like a fire below the house. As they grew nearer, the glow began to fade until it was gone. It was now totally dark outside. The two stumbled back to the house, realizing that the clock was indeed right and that the glow had fooled them into thinking it was morning. The next day they investigated the area where the light was and found everything was completely burned and scorched black. Bill, Ruby, and their children moved out of the house in 1958 and into one just below it. NO one has lived there since.

Shortly after the move, daughter Scotty Cocanougher Clennery and a sibling returned to the old house to get some things left behind. They had left the front door open. The floor beneath it was swollen and the door could only close if it were forced.

While the two were upstairs, they heard the door closing, scraping the floor along the way. Because of the force required to close the door, Clenney knew that the wind could not have done it. Thinking it was the ghost, the two ran out of the house quickly. Their father returned and found nothing.

Johnson remembers a similar incident. “We were eating one evening and we had the door open,” she said. “The door just slammed shut. That just couldn’t happen.

The doorway, incidentally, stands adjacent to the stairway on which the lady in white was often seen.

The house has fallen in disrepair now. It is empty save for a few family relics, and appropriately enough, a small black cat.

The house is probably unsave to enter, Johnson said. Therefore it is likely that as the house slowly erodes, so will the leend of the lady in white and the other ghosts in the Cocanougher home.

“We intend to keep the farm in our family throughout our lifetimes and will probably put it in a family trust and at our deaths, allow it to return to the wilderness iw was when Jacob Cocanougher first saw it in the late 1700’s,” Cocanougher said.