Haunted Marietta

INTRODUCTION

I moved from South Carolina to Marietta, Georgia, with my then husband and two children in 1993. For work-related reasons, we needed to be close to Atlanta, but I was a country girl, and I did not relish adjusting to a big city. I fell in love with Marietta right away, with its small-town charm and convenient location just fifteen miles from Atlanta and all of its many cultural, shopping and entertainment enticements. I love history, and to step into Marietta Square, the heart of downtown, is to immediately feel how close the past still lingers around here. Marietta was first established in 1834, and many of Marietta’s buildings remain largely unchanged since the early days of the 1900s, while a few still linger from Civil War days, like the historical and haunted Kennesaw House, the Root House and the railroad depot where the Welcome Center is located.

I now live in a neighborhood very near Kennesaw National Battlefield and within walking distance of the historical Kolb Farm location, where the original farmhouse still stands, restored to its former appearance. On the land where my neighborhood is located, soldiers in blue and gray fought a fierce and decisive battle nearly 150 years ago, as the Confederate army desperately and futilely tried to keep Sherman’s troops from claiming the railroad and reaching Atlanta. When I am out walking around, I can often feel them just out of my line of vision, flitting through the remaining trees that surround my neighborhood.

Indeed, there are very few areas in Marietta that did not see fighting during the War Between the States, and the entire town was occupied by the Union forces for months after the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain. Those memories are still very close to the surface here.

Today, Marietta is a growing, vibrant city, with new town homes and condominiums springing up that offer great urban living but do not change the friendly, small-town vibe of the square, with its great restaurants, pubs, antique shops and family-friendly Glover Park, where festivals and concerts occur frequently in the spring, summer and fall. When the weather is fair, people stroll in the evenings or sit at street-side tables and listen to the music from Hemingway’s or Cool Beans Coffee Shop or from whatever is going on in the park. The feeling is laid-back and friendly, both thoroughly modern and nostalgic at the same time.

And there is a hidden side to Marietta, created from all of the history and drama of the past.

For all of my life, I have had an interest in the supernatural. My parents were staunch Southern Baptists and officially did not believe in ghosts. Paradoxically, as happens throughout the South, we were living with ghostly activity every day, and whenever something unexplainable happened in our house, my parents matter-of-factly explained that it was just the ghost. Having the child’s ability to hold two opposing thoughts in my head with no problem, I accepted this.

And, in fact, southerners accept this kind of situation as routine all the time. Just because you don’t believe in ghosts doesn’t mean they aren’t there, seems to be the reasoning. So I grew up with the sounds of a phantom car that went around the house every day at the same time, even though we were over a mile from the nearest paved road, and I took a mischievous ghost with me when I went off to college. It used to hide my books under my bed while I was in the shower or move all of my record albums out in the hall through a closed door and perform other harmless but annoying antics. And I was never afraid of any of this, nor did I find it particularly strange. My daughter, as we shall see later in this book, has inherited both the ghosts and my attitude toward them.

Later, I became interested in such television programs as In Search Of and Haunted History and avidly read whatever ghost books came to hand, including the excellent Charleston Ghosts, which was written by a woman I have been told is a distant relative of mine, Margaret Rhett.

But it was not until I heard Patrick Burns and several other Ghost Hounds members discussing an investigation they did at the Kennesaw House here in Marietta at DragonCon, an enormous science fiction convention that takes place in Atlanta and also includes a large paranormal division, that I got interested in Marietta’s paranormal history and in paranormal investigation in general. I believe that this was about 2001 or 2002. Of course, now, with the success of such shows as Ghost Hunters and Paranormal State, many people are interested in paranormal investigation, but it was an almost unheard-of field a few years ago, and the subject was not so popular and well publicized at the time.

After I saw the Ghost Hounds presentation on the Kennesaw House, which provided some fascinating evidence that I will also discuss later in the book, I wanted to know more. But it was not until 2006 that my husband and I actually joined Ghost Hounds and became involved in paranormal investigation ourselves. (My husband is an interested skeptic who has not decided what he believes, except that there are more things in heaven and earth, as Shakespeare observed, than we currently understand.)

Shortly thereafter, I began writing about the paranormal, and naturally, one of my very first articles was about the Kennesaw House. Since then, I have written two guidebooks to paranormal travel, Ghost to Coast and Ghost to Coast Tours and Haunted Places; developed two paranormal websites, ghosttocoast.us and the Paranormal Directory at boomja.com; become the editor of a journal that features every kind of anomalous science; and written many articles about Marietta, both its paranormal and its non-paranormal history.

All of that brings me to this book, which is devoted to this city I love and its rich history of paranormal events. Through the experience of writing this book, I have learned so much about the colorful and dramatic past of this, my adopted, city, and I find myself constantly reminded of ghostly inhabitants and the events that spawned them everywhere I go. Come along with me to visit some of Marietta’s most haunted locations and to capture the essence of this area of Georgia. I believe you are going to enjoy the trip.

A FEW WORDS ABOUT LANGUAGE AND PARANORMAL INVESTIGATION

Like any other field, the paranormal has its own terms to describe various types of experiences or apparitions. The most important ones that I have used in this book may need a little explanation. In addition, it may be appropriate to explain a little about paranormal investigation in general, as it plays its part in this book.

There are generally considered to be three types of ghosts: residual, intelligent and demonic. You will not find demonic spirits in this book because I personally do not believe in demons (although I do believe in angry and possibly malevolent spirits: if a person was bad in life, he may well be bad, though much less powerful, in death). Indeed, I have not encountered any stories in Marietta that would be considered demonic, even by true believers.

Residual ghosts are those that do not represent a spirit or any sort of lingering intelligence. They are merely movies, or a sort of holographic image that is stamped on the air by great emotion or some traumatic happening. These are the ghosts that are always seen in the same place, doing the same thing, time after time. They are usually the ones that walk through walls, seem to float in the air or go through doorways that are no longer there. Because they are merely reenactments, changes in the location do not affect them. When visitors to battlefields see entire reenactments of scenes, these are residual hauntings. Also, when people see manifestations from the knees up, or only see legs and not whole bodies, these are generally residual. If the floor is higher than it used to be or the ground is not at the same height as it was, the scene will still replay, unchanged, but we will no longer see all of it. In some haunted places, such as the Theatre in the Square in Marietta, whole scenes from the past, including the former look of the location, materialize.

Paranormal investigators are people with a serious interest in trying to discover the truth behind ghost sightings and paranormal activity by capturing evidence on film or tape or by using other instruments to document such data as electromagnetic fields (EMF), which some people believe may indicate ghost activity if there seems to be no scientific reason for higher than normal EMF readings, and temperature drops and spikes. Cold spots, in particular, are sometimes believed to indicate spirit activity. There is a theory that spirits can use electromagnetic energy, energy from batteries and energy from the atmosphere to manifest, and that is the reason we take EMF readings and temperature readings and look for cold spots. It also explains why brand-new batteries are prone to drain in some places. The so-called Witch’s Graveyard in Marietta is a good example of a place that has both unexplained temperature drops and a tendency to drain batteries.

Some people make a distinction between paranormal investigators and ghost hunters in one of two ways. Some claim that ghost hunters are less interested in explaining paranormal phenomena than they are in just experiencing it. Others say that ghost hunters tend to investigate places that are already known to be haunted, while paranormal investigators tend to investigate less well-known places, where people are experiencing activity or sightings and have asked for help. Most people in the field probably do a little of both, and the terms are often used interchangeably.

There is a theory that some weather conditions may be more conducive to observing ghostly activity, such as during and immediately after a storm, probably because of the electricity in the air. Solar flares