Day Trips as Night Falls

Over the weekend, a few of us decided to go on a little day trip. Located about two hours from here is the Myrtles Plantation . This house has been made famous by many cable programs involving America’s most haunted places.

We arrived at sunset. Just in time to see the bats begin their night flights and hear the crickets strike up their hypnotic tunes. The grounds were beautiful, covered with lush, winter grass and small statues here and there which lent the surroundings that quiet, graveyard feel.

On the back porch of the house there were black cats lying around as if used for live decoration. So far, it wasn’t hard to get in the mood for this experience. We were all anxious to see if anything would happen.

The tour began at 6 p.m. The crowd gathered in the foyer and within a few minutes of the tour guide’s speech, I noticed a mist-like smoke float through the air, right in front of my sister’s face.

My first thought was to blink and make sure my eyes weren’t playing tricks on me. Then I thought someone had the audacity to light a cigarette. But it wasn’t cigarette smoke, and it was still there. I kept my eye on it until it quickly rose and vanished into the crystal chandelier.

I kept my cool about what I just saw and looked around to see anyone else’s reaction. Nothing. My excitement grew, although I figured that would be my only experience for the night. I couldn’t wait to share that story.

We moved from room to room, and listened to the history of the violent deaths that occurred there: mainly, a slave girl that had been hanged, a wife and two children who were poisoned, and a confederate soldier who was shot.

As I stepped into the dining room, my heart suddenly felt heavy and I had a hard time getting a deep breath. As though I had reached a high altitude for the first time, or just landed at the New Orleans airport in June after having been in a non-humid area. Anyone who has experienced that knows what I mean.

As I stood next to the long, dining table and waited for the guide to begin, I had a chance to tell my sister what happened earlier and that now I had that heavy feeling. We both wondered if it was real because she didn’t see or feel anything at all.

Then a section of my head started to tingle. And my hair felt like it was rising, as though I took speed and my scalp was beginning to crawl. Attempting to dismiss this, I ran my fingers through my hair to see if it would go away, but it only got stronger.

I stood directly next to the table so I could get a look at myself in the large mirror that hung over the fire place at the opposite end of the room, in hopes to see something standing next to me.

I didn’t see any ghosts, but when I saw my own reflection it looked as though my hair was flared out on that side, like I had just brushed it and created static cling. I quickly turned to my sister and asked her if I had any static, but she said no and that I looked fine. When I looked back in the mirror my hair was normal.

What the hell?? Let it be known that I was not wearing a sweater, the temperatures were in the high 60s, and the floors were made of wood. There was no reason to have static at all. Hmm.

By the time we reached the last room, my chest still had that pressed feeling and my hands began to get hot, as well. Another note, I’m famous for having cold hands. I didn’t have them in my pockets and they were getting hotter and hotter by the minute, to the point of being clammy.

Nerves may have caused that reaction, or maybe not. All I can say is, as soon as I stepped out onto the back porch again after the tour was over, my body temperature and breathing were back to normal.

Judge for yourself, did I have a supernatural experience or not? Some might say you make yourself see things if you want to badly enough. But I believe if that were the case, there’d be a rise in my bank account as opposed to the volume of my hair.

To top the magical evening off, once we got back into the truck for the ride home, a rock station had Alice Cooper as a guest DJ. The song he chose to play as we headed down the driveway? "I Put a Spell on You," by Screamin' Jay Hawkins.