So let me start by saying that I don’t even know if I believe in ghosts, so if this story sounds a bit crazy to you – it also sounds crazy to me – and I was there. LOL Also, I have taken pictures late at night in the park’s cemeteries, with coyotes howling in the background (no joke), and I’ve never gotten creeped out, until this happened.
Okay, with that as a setup, Holly decided late in 2023 that she wanted to hike all the trails in the Smokies and enlisted a few of our friends to do that with us. We’ve not gotten terribly far along yet, given there are 900 miles of trails, but it has been really fun, AND gets me by a bunch of places in the park I’ve never seen, or haven’t seen in a really long time. In this case, I had been to the Greenbriar Schoolhouse, but it had been a long time, and definitely well before I was thinking about nightscapes. Anyway, we did a hike that went by there, and while we were checking it out, I noticed the hole in the trees behind the building and decided to use my handy dandy app to see what might line up in the sky above, and as luck would have it, the Milky Way does! So I decided to return on a clear night to capture it as a night scene.
Now, the building itself is painted black, and sits in a small hole in the woods, which means at night, this black building lives in a VERY black forest. A challenge for sure. As you can see in the finished image above, I placed some lights on the inside, and then also used lights on the outside to try to illuminate whatever I could. It was while I was outside that I heard it. At first I wasn’t sure what I hearing, but then I got a big cold chill when it occurred to me that the sound was like someone writing on a chalkboard. The more I listened, the more I was sure that’s what I was hearing. I walked over so I could see inside the school, which does have a chalkboard, but no, there was no message to me being scribbled out by a mysterious hand – just things left by random tourists. As I approached the front steps, the sound seemed to stop and I never heard it again, but I also didn’t hang around to see if it would return! I grabbed my stuff and got the heck out of there!
After all this was over, I texted a friend to tell him the story, and he texted me back a picture of Bart Simpson writing on a chalkboard and said “some poor kid is still in there writing on the board after 100 years!” Ha! I have the best support group. 🙂
More next week!
–Dan Thompson