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Ghosts on a Roanoke Island road

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Evil Dead
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« on: October 16, 2009, 01:35:46 am »

Ghosts on a Roanoke Island road
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© October 28, 2007
Chris Hannant, right, describes in detail his experience with what he thought was a ghost on a pier to paranormal investigator Anne on Roanoke Island.

( Chris Curry | The Virginian-Pilot)

The Virginian-Pilot

The two young men are certain that something other-worldly exists on the road. Unexplainable sights and sounds once scared them so much, they ran to escape. The ting-ting of a bicycle bell has followed one of them. A screaming cat has visited the other, at once far away but chillingly close. Violent knocks on gates and docks had no apparent source. ? Listen to them for a while, these earnest men, and a person can't help but believe them. ? "It was the summer before last, out on a dock. We call it the ghost dock or the plankton dock," recalled Chris Hannant, a 19-year-old photography student at Savannah College of Art and Design, who lives in Manteo. "It was about midnight, but there was enough moonlight to clearly see. Out of the shadows, a darker shadow slid out. It was like a blob. It slid down the hill." ? Gesturing toward the north, Hannant pointed to the bulkhead and the field sloping up from the sound. That's where he saw it: a two-dimensional shape about 5 feet in diameter and fast moving. He related how he had turned to his friend, who was with him at that moment. "He looked me straight in the eye and said, 'I think that was a ghost.' "
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« Reply #1 on: October 16, 2009, 01:36:31 am »

 It all happened on Mother Vineyard Road, lush high ground, mysterious and old. Here, along the edges of Roanoke Sound on the eastern side of Roanoke Island, had tread Indians, English explorers, English colonists, freed slaves, Confederate and Union soldiers and ancestors of some of Manteo's finest families.

The oldest thriving grape vine in America grows here, its thick, gnarled stems subdued on a vineyard trellis. When the English explorers first arrived on Roanoke Island in the 16th century, the island was said to be covered with wild grapes. The Mother Vine is believed to be at least 400 years old.

Locals have long told tales of strange encounters on Mother Vineyard Road. Kids like Hannant and his friend Chris Ellison would hang out around there; they liked the quiet solitude, and the dock that stretches into the sound.

Ellison, an 18-year-old film student at New York University, grew up in the neighborhood. His experiences go back to when he was 9, and he and friends wandered around the road playing flashlight tag.

"The one night that I remember we were hiding in the bushes and we saw it," Ellison said, talking fast. "It was a man on a bike wearing raggedy clothes. But he had this glow.

"When we saw it, we just immediately said 'Dude, it's the ghost rider!' "
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« Reply #2 on: October 16, 2009, 01:37:06 am »

Years later, when he was in 11th grade, his friends insisted on going down Mother Vineyard to find what they called the "potato hut," where slaves are reputed to be buried.

"We were just walking, strolling, and then... " Ellison paused and took a breath. "We heard a bike bell! This is three or four in the morning. It was a very urgent sound. It sounded like it was getting closer. It was right on us.

"None of us turned. The reaction was just to run. So we ran down to my road, walked to my house and just sat there. Right then, I remembered the bike bell. I felt like nothing could protect me."

Ellison's stories rang true to Hannant after his experience a couple summers ago. It started with a screeching cat repeatedly flinging itself around a nearby hill, as if being attacked by an unseen enemy, while Hannant watched in stunned horror. The cat suddenly righted itself and bolted to the foot of the dock above the bulkhead. Then the blob slithered out.

A few months after the scare at the dock, Hannant and a group of friends returned on a night when the strange phosphorescence created by disturbing microscopic organisms made the water glow green. It was calm with a soft southeast wind. Walking to the end of the dock, Hannant leaned on the railings to see if the glowing organisms were washing onto the shoreline. At that instant, a powerful force slammed the under part of the railing, knocking Hannant's hands away. He scanned the water and the dock. Nothing. BAM! Again something hit. That was enough. Hannant ran back to his friends on the dock. The group fled.

Later that summer, Hannant was in his den researching the phenomenon on his computer when out of nowhere there was a piercing shriek from a cat. The creature sounded like it was directly outside the screen of the open window. But his house was miles from Mother Vineyard Road, and the window was 8 feet from the ground. Hannant bolted from the room. He felt like he was being warned to stay away from the dock.
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« Reply #3 on: October 16, 2009, 01:37:45 am »

 When Hannant and Ellison heard late last summer that professional ghost hunters were going to investigate Mother Vineyard Road, they wanted to see what it was all about.

Anne Poole, a 60-year-old paranormal with Carolina Ghost Hunters in Durham, has for three decades investigated unusual activity at places as varied as the North Carolina State Capitol and the residence neighboring the house in California where Sharon Tate was murdered.

Poole interviewed Hannant and Ellison as they stood next to the Mother Vine in Jack and Estelle Wilson's front yard.

With a resonant stage-actor voice, Hannant spoke in a deliberate clip. Tall and slender with striking true-blue eyes and straight brown hair, his appearance is of a surfer, but his demeanor is collected and steady.

In contrast, Ellison, a little shorter, wearing black-rimmed glasses and a "beanie" over his blond hair, related his story in intense bursts, arms waving, voice rising. The longer he talked to Poole, the more animated he became, as he revealed other things he and Hannant had seen on Mother Vineyard Road.
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« Reply #4 on: October 16, 2009, 01:38:10 am »

Poole walked up the road with Hannant and Ellison to get a closer look at the sites they were talking about, as the sun reddened the sky. She had brought with her a crew to help examine the scene: parapsychologist Christine Rodriguez, 53, with Washington, N.C.-based East Coast Hauntings Organization, assisted by Jack Rodriguez, her son, and Matt Abele of Greenville, N.C.

Rodriguez and her assistants held electro-magnetic field detectors that measure electric energy and magnetism that are believed to be emitted by spirits. They also took photographs with a digital camera that they said would reveal white orbs in the presence of a spirit.

In the woods to the side of the grassy hill, Poole communicated with a spirit she characterized as a grandmotherly woman who was leader of a group. Rodriguez said she had picked up energy from several women, and her son had earlier seen four Civil War soldiers walking in single file along the road near the Mother Vine.

Nothing could explain the phenomenon that Hannant and Ellison had experienced. But Poole said that has more to do with the difficulty of picking up paranormal activity in an outdoor area.

"I did not get a sense of them being anything but truthful," she said of the young men. "These guys have a repeated history. My gut level is, yeah, what they say, happened to them."

Marybruce Dowd, who lives elsewhere on Roanoke Island, used to visit her grandparents' house on Mother Vineyard Road when they were running a vineyard there. She's now 69 but remembers summers as a girl exploring the woods, walking the shoreline, taking the steps down to the sound to go swimming.
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« Reply #5 on: October 16, 2009, 01:38:30 am »

In the 1930s, Dowd's grandfather, Robert Bruce "Tull" Lennon, through the family's corporation, Mother Vineyard Inc., built the cottage that Dowd inherited on Mother Vineyard. To the north of her property her neighbors, Angel and Daniel Khoury, live in a house that was once part of her great-great grandfather Van Buren Etheridge's property. Behind them is the Etheridge family cemetery.

Legend has it that Webb Etheridge, Van Buren's son who died at sea, is haunting the property.

Although Dowd said she's never seen or heard anything supernatural on Mother Vineyard, she has heard talk from others about strange occurrences.

"I don't discount things like that," she said.

Nor does Norman "Terrapin" Ward, 81, a lifelong resident of the neighborhood. A merchant marine from 1943 to 1971, he lives now off Scuppernong Road, at the head of Dough's Creek, or Black Gum Swamp as the Indians called it.

With his white T-shirt, weathered face and still muscular arms, Ward looks like he should be eating spinach and smoking a pipe. But instead, he smokes cigars. In his younger day, he chewed the "rabbit tobacco" that grew wild there.

The Mother Vineyard of his youth was even more remote and undisturbed than it was when Dowd visited her grandparents. He and his buddies were out all day and at times all night.

"There weren't nobody lived up there then," Ward said in his thick Outer Banks brogue. "There weren't nobody here but us."
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« Reply #6 on: October 16, 2009, 01:39:01 am »

He's got an old piece of shipwreck, made with trunnels, or wooden nails. He's gathered ballast rocks off Ballast Point. No way of telling what their origins are. Smiling slyly, he said they could be from the Lost Colony, the English settlement that disappeared from Roanoke Island some time after late 1587.

Ward assumes, like a number of others of his generation from Manteo, that the colony settled at Mother Vineyard, not on the north end of the island.

"I always heard they did," he said. "Old people I talked to, they never paid no attention to Fort Raleigh."

Ward knows lots of stories about the road. One that old-timers told was that during the Civil War, a paymaster with a big container of gold coins came ashore off Mother Vineyard. Someone proceeded to hit him over the head and kill him, the story goes, and then bury him with the coins near an old oak tree. No one ever found the coins, but Ward said he's looked.

Then there's the story of ol' man Meekins, who let a black man named Moses use his boat. Meekins got angry at him and shot him to death. Ward showed a picture of the house off Mother Vineyard where Moses was killed.

"Then we boys wouldn't go back 'round there no more," he remembered. "We'd hear the bushes moving - we were really scared around there."

He's never heard about the "hoodoos," the boys' term for the bike rider. But whatever it is, he said, something is around.

"There's all kinds of strange noise right here," he said. "I used to go back in the woods by myself, but I don't go anymore. Always felt like someone's watching."
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« Reply #7 on: October 16, 2009, 01:39:19 am »

On her trip to Mother Vineyard, Rodriguez decided that her crew would stay behind after everyone else left to do some work with dowsing rods along the road where the cedar trees arch over it and form a sort of tunnel. It's a spot where she said she had felt a lot of energy. One of her assistants had also seen a black shadow like Hannant had described skitter across the road. It was just to the south of the docks.

Paranormals believe that "yes" or "no" answers are provided by the spirit's energy, directing the dowsing rods in or out in response. Digital photography flashes also can reveal infrared energy that standard cameras cannot, and that is not visible to the naked eye. Orbs that are visible in digital photographs are usually used to confirm the presence of spirits indicated by other detection equipment.

Holding the slender metal rods in her hands, Rodriguez stood with her back to the water, and she started asking questions. It was very quiet and dark.

Suddenly, the group started hearing clicking sounds coming from the woods. They walked along the hedge and could hear the brush shuffling, following them. Then, Rodriguez said she had one of the most intense experiences she ever had in a paranormal investigation.

"This humongous energy came rolling out from those woods - it was all over me," she said in a later interview. " This energy seemed to fill the whole road. It was weird. It felt old, really old."

The energy kept building and building, getting stronger and stronger. Rodriguez was convinced she was about to experience a manifestation.

Then a car came, apparently breaking the electro-magnetic field. It was gone.

A digital infrared photograph taken during those moments revealed a bright orb hovering above the side of the road.

Catherine Kozak, (252) 441-1711, cate.kozak@pilotonline.com

http://hamptonroads.com/node/374551
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« Reply #8 on: May 01, 2011, 07:12:00 am »

Haven't seen anything on Roanoke Island road for years.
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