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Today in Mississippi
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November / December 2015
How not to be
Haunted McRaven Tour Home in Vicksburg is open again after being closed for several years. Among other things, McRaven is supposed to be Mississippi's most haunted house. However, I have never seen anything there myself. But I also know what to say as soon as I get inside the door! Photo: Walt Grayson
arly November is an awkward time for me to write a timely article. Looking ahead, Thanksgiving is still a couple of weeks off and Christmas even farther, although some years time flies so quickly it seems as if Christmas is the next week. But the holidays are still far enough distant that I don’t know whether to try to write something about them this early or not. And we have just passed Halloween. Although it is a lot closer, Halloween is still behind us. So I’m not sure whether to delve into ghost stories and haunted houses now, because we are past all of that. But Halloween is still pretty near. So, I’ll do what a wise person advised me to do a long time ago: When faced with the choice between two evils, chose the one that’s the most fun! I wouldn’t consider the holidays or haunted houses as an evil, but it’s the only “making a decision” advice I could come up with off the top of my head. All of that said, I think I will strike off toward haunted houses. I have been in my share of haunted houses in Mississippi, doing TV stories mostly. I have yet to see a ghost. I partly attribute that to what my mama told me was the truth: “There ain’t no such
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thing as a ghost.” And I partly attribute it to something a friend told me a long time ago. We ate Sunday dinner at Pete’s house a good bit back in my college days when I was at a small rural church way back in the country in extreme northern Madison County. Usually Pete and I would gravitate toward ghost stories as we sat around drinking coffee. Pete had so many experiences and had seen and heard so many things that after a while I started thinking of him as Mississippi’s most haunted man. Pete gave me some sage advice one time. It was just an Mississippi offhand remark Seen for him, but I by Walt Grayson remembered it very well after I started doing television feature stories. If you ever go into a haunted house expecting to see something, Pete said, you never will. It’s always when you don’t expect it that something happens. So now, every time I go to a haunted
house the first thing I do is ask, “Well, where’s the ghost?” Knowing that if I do, the ghost will never appear. So far it has worked every time. That’s not to say I haven’t had experiences that raised the hair on the back of my neck. And I have had impossible tricks played on my camera in some instances. But after I’ve had some time to reflect, either my memory dims or more rational explanations pop up that would also fit the circumstance. At any rate, I’ve never experienced anything scary enough to keep me from doing more ghost stories. That’s not to say it hasn’t happened to others. I won’t use his name since I haven’t checked with him, but a promi-
nent historian associated with a respected south Mississippi community college used to chase and document ghosts all the time. But he suddenly quit. I asked him why. He simply said he had had a bad experience at a certain place. He never told me what the experience was. Hope I never find out first hand. My hair is already white as it is. Are ghosts real? I won’t rule it out. But if I always ask where they are when I first get there, maybe I’ll never have to find out for myself! Walt Grayson is the host of “Mississippi Roads” on Mississippi Public Broadcasting television, and the author of two “Looking Around Mississippi” books and “Oh! That Reminds Me: More Mississippi Homegrown Stories.” Contact Grayson at walt@waltgrayson.com.
Journaling along toward Christmas ver the years you, my readers, and I visited via my columns during the holiday season. I have written about my memories, both good and sad. As I thought about this, I decided to pull out one of my journals written back in the 1960s when the kids were young. When a family has young children many memories are made during the Thanksgiving and Christmas seasons. I have a stack of journals I have written over many years, so I soon found a Christmas dating back to 1967. This was a different time for our young family. After Mr. Roy had completed his military service, he got a job at Brookley AFB in Mobile. We built a house in a nice subdivision in Mobile, made numerous friends with other young couples, found a great
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church and decided this was where we wanted to spend the rest of our lives. Living was great. Soon we learned one of life’s lessons: Life does not stay the same forever. A shocking announcement was made that Brookley AFB would close in three years and all 17,500 employees moved to other locations around the country. Our job was going to California. After the shock soaked in, Roy began looking for a job closer to Mississippi and sold our beloved house. Soon he found the job he wanted at Eglin AFB in Florida. In1967 my journal entries describe what was going on in our lives. Sometimes we don’t understand why changes or bumps in life’s road occur, but occasionally their consequences are not bad. We moved to the small town of Val-