By: By Tom Yancey/Staff Writer
Source: The Greeneville Sun
Stacey Allen McGee, a self-described “certified ghost hunter” who operates a company he calls Appalachian Ghostwalks, visited the Dickson-Williams Mansion Thursday night.
By the time he gathered his gear and left several hours later, McGee claimed to have found considerable evidence that the almost-190-year-old mansion is . . . haunted.
For two years now, McGee has conducted what he calls “hauntingly historic” guided, lantern-lit walking tours, or “ghost walks,” that now include historic Jonesborough and Erwin, Buffalo Mountain and the campus of East Tennessee State University in Johnson City, and Abingdon, Va.
He is in the process of developing a similar walk in Greeneville, and hopes to start June 1, he said.
That “ghost walk,” he says, will be called “Haunted Historic Greeneville.” The cost of a walking tour will be $7 per person in groups of five or more.
Appalachian Ghostwalks, based in the small community of Unicoi, a few miles from Erwin, is a member of the Unicoi County Chamber of Commerce and the Northeast Tennessee Tourism Association (NETTA).
The business has a great deal of information, much of it historical in nature, on its Internet site, www.appalachianGhostWalks.com.
Limestone Native
McGee, a Limestone native who has spent most of his adult life in the hospitality industry, said in an interview that he believes “ghost walks” can be an important tourism draw for the entire East Tennessee region, based on responses to the tours his group has conducted so far.
Sarah Webster, chairman of the Dickson-Williams Historical Association, said that when McGee approached that organization about conducting “scientific sweeps” of the historic house museum, the association was willing to cooperate.
Webster, along with Nancy McNeese, director of Main Street: Greeneville, and McNeese’s daughter-in-law, Anna Jeffers, who has experience with walking tours in historic Charleston, S.C., helped McGee conduct five “sweeps” of the building Thursday evening.
As a gesture of good faith, McGee presented the mansion association with an electronic page-scanned copy of Tennessee: A History, written by Dr. Philip Hamer, former chairman of the University of Tennessee’s department of history.
Webster said the copy would be placed in the T. Elmer Cox Historical and Genealogical Library, where the public can have access to it.
In exchange, McGee was loaned a copy of Greeneville: 100 Year Portrait, 1775-1875, by the late local historian Richard H. Doughty, the driving force in the restoration of the 1820s-era brick mansion at the corner of N. Irish and W. Church streets.
The structure was the showplace residence of Dr. and Mrs. Alexander Williams from the early 1820s until after the Civil War. Famed Confederate Gen. John Hunt Morgan spent the last night of his life as a guest in the house in September 1864.
Later used as an inn, and even a factory, it was converted to use as the major part of the former Greeneville Hospital during most of the last century.
McGee said historical information from Doughty’s book will be invaluable in preparing the “script” for the “ghost walk” tour.
Webster said people visit historic sites like the Dickson-Williams mansion for a variety of reasons, some of them very speculative, such as stories about unsolved mysteries.
She said the association is hopeful that people who learn about the house-museum from taking a “ghost walk” will be intrigued enough to want to take a separate tour of the mansion itself, and perhaps visit other historic sites in and around Greeneville as well.
Methods Explained
McGee explained the methods he uses to a Greeneville Sun reporter early Thursday evening, but he was unwilling to have the reporter present while the sweeps through the mansion were made.
The sweeps, he said, “are difficult to do when you also have to think about your public image.”
The first sweep, he said, involved taking numerous digital photographs, using four different cameras.
The second sweep, he said, involved taking infrared photos. Infrared photos are expensive, he said, and thus are used sparingly.
For the third sweep he used a hand-held meter that indicates the presence of high electro-magnetic interference, which he said “we find typically in haunted locations.”
Electromagnetic interference usually does not mean very much when it’s in a wall, McGee said, but when it’s in the middle of a room, and is stationary, “We call it, for lack of a better word, a vortex.”
In this context, he maintained, a vortex indicates where “people from other times” may be able to enter the present.
27 Ghosts Or Spirits
McGee carefully avoids using words such as “dead” or “dead people.”
But he was willing to state after visiting the mansion that his “sweeps” found evidence of “27 different ghosts or spirits that haunt there on a regular basis.”
McGee said he intentionally did not investigate the history of the mansion in depth before Thursday evening’s “sweeps,” in order to be able to approach the site with an open mind.
He said a scan by him of the house museum’s exterior during a preliminary tour of historic structures in Greeneville showed considerable supernatural activity at the Dickson-Williams mansion.
He emphasized that he did not trespass to make the initial observation, but also said that he is willing to perform the same type of “sweeps” at no charge in any historic home or structure in Greeneville or nearby.
McNeese said McGee was not surprised when told that the mansion was for many years part of a hospital. He told her that hospitals are often haunted.
The same is true of some college campuses, he added.
Peculiar Happenings?
The fourth sweep he conducted was an audio recording, which will later be subjected to acoustic analysis, McGee said.
During this sweep, McNeese and Webster said everyone present heard what sounded like footsteps on an upper floor, although no one was present there.
At another point, after McGee invited ghosts to “make themselves known,” McNeese said window blinds on an upper floor began to rattle as if the window were open, though an investigation showed it was not, and no wind could be felt.
The fifth sweep, and the one that McGee said he believes is the most indicative of the presence of ghosts, is “dowsing,” a very old method typically used to find underground water, but also used to find any number of other buried objects.
About Dowsing
Dowsing has both its advocates and its skeptics, as a quick Internet search will reveal.
Dowsing is a method, at least several thousand years old, in which a dowsing rod, dowsing stick or even a forked tree limb is used by the “dowser” holding it to try to locate an object.
McGee uses two narrow, metal, L-shaped rods to ask a series of yes-or-no questions, mostly about ghosts.
“Dowsing is not necessarily scientific,” McGee acknowledged. But he also stated that between 85 and 90 percent of the ghost presences he says he has been able to identify in the region using that method have been verified from what history also says about structures where the method has been used.
McGee also said the University of Tennessee forensic medicine unit “employs dowsing to locate lost gravesites,” with similar success.
McNeese said that, although the sweeps took several hours and the process was tiring, “It was an experience I won’t forget, and I’m really glad I got to be a part of it.”
Webster had similar comments. “This was not somewhere I normally go, but it was very interesting,” she said in an interview Friday.
She said that McGee “found interesting activity that needs further study, and he will let us know how he interprets what we did.”
Webster also said McGee wants to come back to the Dickson-Williams Mansion to finish “sweeping” the uppermost floor, and also wants to visit the historic stone “Greene County Gaol”: a onetime county jail whose earliest section dates from 1882 but which uses some materials from a still-earlier jail located at the same site.
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