Editor’s note: For Halloween, we asked our readers to share the scariest things they’ve experienced in our area. Readers came through with shivery accounts of mysterious occurrences, including this one below.
This is a spooky story my grandma Betty Jo used to tell us grandchildren. She lived up South Morgan Branch Road in Candler in a house over 100 years old.
Back in the late 1990s, Betty Jo worked at the old Kmart off Brevard Road (now the At Home store, for any newcomers to the area). One chilly fall evening, she was scheduled to work a night shift and was getting ready in the main-level bathroom of her home. As she was soaking in the tub, she heard the front door open and someone walk through the kitchen. She wasn’t expecting anyone at that time of day, but she assumed it was my grandpa Arville arriving home early.
She was confused, though, when she heard the door to the attic slam shut; by that point, only Betty Jo and Arville lived in the house, and they never ventured upstairs. She sat motionless in the tub as she listened to someone very deliberately plod the perimeter of the attic. After completing a lap of the attic, the intruder went back down the stairs and thundered through the kitchen, still taking those slow, heavy steps.
As soon as Betty Jo heard the front door close, she rushed out of the tub, put on her housecoat and hurried outside. She looked around her porch, down the driveway and around the sides of the house, but Arville’s car was not in the driveway and no intruders were found.
Later on, she asked my great-aunts and great-uncles, who lived next door, if they had come into the house at all that day; none of them had. Betty Jo never found out who — or what — visited her that day or what they wanted in the attic, but she never stayed alone in an unlocked house again.
– Megan Hall, Candler
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