Hangin’ With the Haints
Thursday afternoon I took the house tour with a small group and docent. I took jillions of photos on my ipad. That evening I relaxed to look at them. Suddenly, the pictures stopped. Panicked, I scrolled down and down to discover they are all still there, not altered. But what was this void? A strange phenomenon. The images rain on my screen. They aren’t photos, no photo boxes, they can’t be deleted or moved or adjusted. They are all lavender. Not a color, more like an absence of color. They are pants. The first are the tiniest, they get larger and darker with only slight differences. They are period trousers seen by the cut and the outline of a vest or waistcoat. No top, only pants and shoes. Sometimes one leg seems empty. Sometimes it looks like a peg leg, no foot just a knob. When the shoe is defined it’s a square-toed period shoe. Other times the foot dangles oddly misshapen, twisted, dangling. With the pants is the window shutter on the galley porch. Between photos my ipad was off. I carried it with the cover closed. It never left my hand.
I showed this to my hosts on Friday morning. Oops, they forgot to tell me, there are spirits around. Ghost Hunters hold meetings on the property. In fact, they have an event here tonight!
The auditorium is full; a lot of interest in paranormal activities. After an introduction and demonstration of the equipment we’d use, we left in small groups with a hunter, to an assigned area.
The Southern Paranormal & Anomaly Research Society was interested in my ipad. They tried different ways to capture some image. They were able to collect it all onto a thumb drive and project it on their big screen to share with everyone, but are unable to do anything to it, not move, change, or delete.
The other unusual thing happened in the cottage Thursday night before I learned the spirit of Winnie is often in the cottage. Winnie is the youngest daughter of Jefferson Davis. She is the only one of the children to have actually stayed there during the parents’ tenure. Winnie never married, but when there’s a wedding she often shows up in the photographs. There are photographers in Biloxi who won’t work weddings at Beauvoir because it’s so difficult to get her image out of their photographs. There was going to be a wedding Saturday evening. The bride would move in after my departure on Saturday, and Winnie apparently plans to attend.
During the event Friday night, three female ghost hunters came to my cottage. Their echo box caught Winnie’s voice explaining our problem last night was the light. I’d left the bathroom light on overnight. Friday night I turned the light off. She and I slept well.
There have been three extensive paranormal research investigations of the Beauvoir property. Following the Davises, the home had barracks as veterans’ home for vets and their families. Many are buried on the property. The fields where small spirits are heard and seen abuts the current Coliseum, former location of the orphanage. In August there is a big national convention here.
My education as a book seller continues.