This is a reprint from an earlier story that ran in 2016. There are no fewer ghosts stories today than there were then. We ran a special in the 2016 issue of Walton Living Magazine and there is a link to the original story here as well. As you get ready to put out the Halloween candy, make sure there are no ghosts on your doorstep – except maybe for those little ones in costumes looking for a treat!
Happy Halloween!
From 2016
Writing a story about some of the “hauntings” in Walton County for our 2016 Fall/Winter issue of Walton Living Magazine was amazing! You can read them on the digital issue by clicking or tapping on this link. From all corners of the county, everyone wanted to share their ghost with me. I loved their enthusiasm and wish I could have printed every one of their words but there is only so much room given to print. And not wanting to disappoint, here’s one last interesting tale, right here from Walton County as told by longtime resident, Mr. Mike Parham of Social Circle.
“After my wife, Vikki, and I bought our farm in 1991, that year deer season came in and it was just a wet miserable Saturday morning. So I was going hunting from the house and got myself a cup of coffee. I’d walked from the front door to the back door and back to the front hoping the rain would stop. On one of my ‘trips’, I see a man standing out there. He’s dressed in buckskin, he’s got really long hair, and looks like an Indian. And from his knees down, the buckskin looks really dark, almost black and looks like he’s been wading in water. Well, I turned around and slipped my boots on and thought somebody just got over the property line. He had no weapons or anything and as I started to go out the door, he turned and started to walk away back toward the woods. When I got out there where I last saw him at, there was nobody there. I looked up and down and in the trees. There was no way he could have gotten away so fast. I couldn’t figure out where he went to. And as I was coming back to the house, I saw my footprints in the mud where I had walked but mine were the only footprints there were. When I got back to the house, I didn’t say anything about it. I didn’t know what to do. (chuckle). I know I saw somebody out there.
“Well, after a few weeks later, my Uncle Charlie Peppers used to have a bus trip that went to Biloxi. Me and Vikki went on a weekend trip there and my daughter Mandi and a couple of her friends stayed at the house that weekend. We got back Sunday afternoon and there’s like three police cars at the house. My daughter and her friends had gone to get something to eat and when they got back to the house, they saw someone looking out the window at them from inside the house. So they called the police. The police went up in the attic looked all through the house, in the bedrooms, couldn’t find anyone, they said he either ran out or, you know, and one of the little girls said, ‘he looked like an Indian.’ When she said an Indian, boy, the hairs stood up on the back of my neck. Cause she said what I saw and I had already seen him. These things like this went on for years.
“Little things like this started happening all the time. We would leave and go somewhere and come back and every light in the house would be on. The house was locked, the TV was on, everything. And I’m jumping on my kids thinking they came by and turned everything on and left. My son Shane came back from his tour in the military and brought back one of those CD players. In the middle of the night, that thing would come on and he (the Indian) would be hitting buttons changing the different CD’s that were playing. I unplugged it. My son when he came back in would plug it up and listen to music, turn it off and go to bed, and the next thing I know that thing would start playing again.”
I asked Mike what Shane thought about all this. Mike just laughed and told me Shane moved in with his grandmother for a while! It scared him! It scared the dogs a little bit too.
“We had two little dachshunds, Lazy and Yogie, and one night they started barking like all get out and tried to dig a hole in the floor to get up under the couch. And it would get cold, you could have the heat on and all of a sudden the room would get really cold. I believe animals can see things that we can’t and whatever they saw scared them.
“There was one night that I went over to the hunting club, came in a little late, (chuckle) and my position in the house that night was going to bed on the couch cuz my wife was mad at me! I’d been playing poker and drinking and all that night. So I’m laying on the couch and we had a piano at that time and I was just dozing off when the piano went Boom Boom, Boom Boom, Boom Boom. It was like a little kid you know when they first get around a piano and make noise. Vikki came out of the bedroom and turned the light on saying “you drunk so and so” and then she gets silent cuz she looked over and those keys over there were moving and there wasn’t nobody there. I laughed so hard! She took off runnin’ but when my wife gets real excited and starts running, her feet are going 90 miles an hour but she ain’t going nowhere, she’s just running in place.
“Before then, I had told Vikki about the Indian I had seen. ‘I think we have a ghost here.’ Now, my grandaddy made me believe in ghosts because the bible says there are ghosts and described one as the Holy Ghost and there has to be more than one ghost. Made sense to me!
“Along about that time, it started getting more often, mainly when my daughter was at home and her bedroom stayed cold all the time. I checked the vents and everything. And the handles on her dresser was like someone was trying to open the drawers but they couldn’t pull the handles to open them. And if you took a knife, like a butter knife laying on the counter, in the morning it would be turned up on end with the sharp edge looking up. You could put it back down and the next morning it would be turned right back up again.”
I asked Mike how often that happened and he said anytime you left a knife on the counter.
“I know it couldn’t be people just pulling pranks cuz you know I’d be there sometimes by myself all night long and in the morning the knife would be standing up and there was no one there but me.
“There was one night I had gone somewhere, I think it was on a hunting trip, and my wife and daughter were laying in bed watching TV and both of them dozed off. All that was on was the TV, all the lights were off when something grabbed my wife and was trying to pull her out of the bed. She started screaming and carrying on and woke Mandi and told her to turn the light back on and when she did, nobody was there. Yet something had pulled her just about completely out of the bed. About that time the phone rang. It was our neighbor saying our horses were out and in the road. We believe he was trying to tell her the horses were out and you better get up. And that’s when I realized that he wasn’t here to hurt us, he’s accepted us for some reason but then more and more things started happening.
“My wife was watching TV one evening and my daughter did puzzles on a small table in the living room. My daddy had a little wood shop and he would frame them. Well, we were watching TV and that table came off the floor and turned ‘boom’ upside down. I jumped up and said ‘all right now, that’s enough’! And that’s when I felt the coldest and I went over there and picked the table and the puzzle was on the floor still intact, didn’t lose a piece.
“Mandy, my daughter, had a good friend that would come over all the time and stay with her and there was one night this blood-curdling scream came from her bedroom. I jumped up, took off in there, turned on the light to see what was wrong and this girl was terrified. She was scared to death. She said she woke up and there was a man leaning over her, she said what woke her up was his long hair that was tickling her cheek and we had to take her home but she never came back to our house. Not ever.
“A friend of mine from New York knew a psychic that had a TV program, wrote articles, radio, knew about paranormal activity. He wanted to come down here and I told him I didn’t want anyone coming to my house trying to call up some ghost. He also suggested that our house was built on an Indian burial mound. But he said that ghosts are attached to different people and this ghost was attached to Mandi. That’s why her room stayed cold and that probably this ’Casper’ (friendly) ghost wasn’t there to hurt anybody and would most likely defend her. It always seemed that when she wasn’t there, that’s when all the lights came on like he was looking for her. When my daughter grew up and got married and moved out, it all but quit. Every now and then we’ll have an incident.”
I spoke to Mikes daughter, Mandi, and she added a few little things to Mikes story. Mandy mentioned that “he hated Garth Brooks! Every time Garth’s music came on the radio, the static and screeching started. He hated his singing. And many times when I was doing homework if I turned to talk to a friend for a minute, our books would close. And, I could always tell when something was about to happen or if he was near, it always got really cold.”
Mandi also mentioned that one time she was in the shower and he turned the water off.
“I actually stood there and watched the knobs turn the water off,” she said. “I think this guy was protecting me and I even came to miss him when I wasn’t around.”
Mandi told me that one day “me, my dad and Shane were walking along the property and we saw a camp file in the distance and heard voices that were inaudible. We could see the fire and hear them talking but couldn’t understand what they were saying. Every time we tried to get closer to the fire, it moved away from us. The fire and the voices moved away from us as we got closer! Shane never left the ground running to the house! It scared him to death!”
Mandi also told me that other people have seen the Indian but, the only ones that have, have been friends of hers who actually turned out to be untrustworthy.
“I think that he was letting me know who was and who wasn’t my friend and I appreciated that.”
Mike, Vikki, Mandi, Shane and his wife Wendy and a few others have all had experiences connected to this ghost. A ghost of an Indian who wanders around the Parham property. Mike and Vikki still live in the house. Shane and Mandi now live in their own homes with there own families. The things they have experienced have not reoccurred for more than 20 years but they will continue to live in the minds and the hearts of this family. And I’m sure that, every now and again, they wonder if he is still there.
I want to thank Mike and his family for sharing this story with Your Local News. I hope you all enjoyed it!
Do you have a Ghost story to share this Halloween?
Melanie Ann
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