Ghost Stories from Great Smoky Mountains National Park ...

Reaford McCarter Stories

Little Creek Ghost
Some of the ghost stories were true facts to a certain extent; actually, most of them were made up. I heard my father tell about the time that he was a young man doing his courtin'. He would travel down what they call Sugarland Branch now, and there was a place where you cross a little creek. They call it the ford. Why everybody was scared of that place because there was something, some noise, that they couldn't understand. They couldn't understand what it was that would happen about the time they were going. But this turned out to be that he was fixing to shoot him with a gun one time, and he could see its eyes. About the time he got ready to shoot in the moonlight, the old bull was a layin' there. He shook his head and rang the bell, so my dad figured out what was scarin' the people was the old bull layin' there. He was a bellerin' when people . . . This is some of the ghost stories.

Haunted House
Then we have the one with the haunted house. My grandfather has told me this, and it was actually a true story. Someone had a pet coon, and they had a chain on it. It was a stayin' in a house that no one lived in. This happened here next to Bullhead.

He said that the people would go there and try to stay at night. They got scared because the coon would come down out of the attic at night and come down the stairs. It had a piece of the chain still around its neck, and it would drag that chain and it would pop along the stairs. It scared most of the young people to death, so they (my grandfather and his brother-in-law) went and spent the night there one night. They found out what it was because they turned the light on the coon when it was coming down the stairs. That was the ghost story of the haunted house -- the coon coming down the stairs with a short piece of chain on it. That's the way a lot of the ghost stories get started, from actual things happening like that.