A ghost story

by Dean Poling

VALDOSTA — Amazing stories abound in Valdosta and Lowndes County. An off-the-top-of-the-head inventory marks Valdosta as the childhood home of the Old West’s Doc Holliday; the place where the murderous elephant Gypsy met her end after killing her final circus hand and rampaging through the city’s streets; the site of the second Coca-Cola bottling company in the world ...

And these are just a few of the fascinating facts and lore of the Azalea City.

Yet, what Valdosta doesn’t have in the legend department is any legendary ghost stories. Not in the sense that they are well chronicled or widely told throughout the city, or passed from generation to generation, anyway. Like many places, there are those individual ghost stories based on an individual’s experience in a particular house or setting. These individual tales are the ones where someone often hears an inexplicable bump or creak working late, usually alone, in an office or store. These odd noises are usually the type that send a chill up the spine and usually occur in an older building. And usually, these incidents are recounted with a nervous chuckle and the noises are attributed to a “phantom,” but there are no stories, no tales, to explain a reason for these “phantoms.”

That is the difference between Valdosta’s scattered “phantoms” and the established ghosts and haunted houses chronicled in Georgia cities like Macon and Savannah. There really are no stories of Valdosta haunts. There are bits of phenomenon here and there but no real tales circulating as regional lore.

Folks at the Lowndes County Historical Society, who are steeped in both the facts and legends of the region, are unfamiliar with any outstanding Valdosta ghost stories. Flipping through the files of The Valdosta Daily Times recalls the most recent tale of a haunted house back in the 1990s. A Valdosta building, which is now the home of another business, reported numerous supernatural occurrences. The building’s past occupant went so far as to hire paranormal investigators, sort of like “Ghostbusters.” These investigators, however, found no evidence of paranormal activity in the house.

There was “Spook Bridge,” an abandoned bridge off Highway 84, near the Lowndes-Brooks county line. This structure was part of the testimony of an area murder trial. It was marked with spray-painted Satanic pentagrams in the 1980s and early 1990s. A bloody cross, demanding “Spook Bridge” visitors to turn away and repent, was erected on a nearby property; like the bridge’s red pentagrams, the cross’ “blood” was also red paint. There was, however, once courthouse testimony of youths enacting vampire rituals by drinking blood at the site. But mostly “Spook Bridge” was nothing more than a site for area youths to scare each other and drink beer.

On Valdosta’s Hickory Drive, a section of road appears to rise, especially at night. But if you place a vehicle in neutral, it will roll, giving the illusion that a car can roll up hill. There is an old tale that accompanies this phenomenon, though it is rarely told. Supposedly, the reason the cars roll, according to one old-timer tale, is that a train struck three youths after their car stalled on a nearby railroad track. Their ghosts push the cars up the incline, according to this tale, whenever a driver stops and puts the car in neutral. This tale rarely accompanies this phenomenon, which is really more of a trick of the eyes than anything else. Most people simply think it is cool.

Perhaps, Valdosta really doesn’t need official ghost stories. The city’s history and past residents are intriguing enough and given that many of the players from these tales and these events have passed a century or more ago, these histories have become ghost stories themselves.

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