A spirited adventure everyone should try

There are just some days when I really love my job and a couple of weekends ago was one of them when I got to preview the Historic Mount Airy Ghost Tours presented by the Mount Airy Museum of Regional History.

As part of the trial process before the tours started officially running, I was invited to take the tour so that I could write a story for the paper and give the museum some feedback on what they could do to make the tour better. I invited a fellow reporter Morgan Wall and a friend Melissa Hiatt to go on the tour with me.

Mark Brown, a local radio DJ and history buff, was our tour guide for the evening. We started off at the Old North State Winery, which ghost hunters have frequented because of its history of being haunted. As the tour began, Mark lead us through the streets of Mount Airy by lamp light telling ghost story after ghost story.

My personal favorite was about this man who used to come to the museum frequently and would stay for hours. Edgar would pay full price, even though the staff tried to talk him into buying a membership because it would be cheaper for him. As the story goes, one day when Edgar was in the museum and the staff went to lock up for the day, they realized that they hadn’t seen him leave. The spooky part is that he still walks the floors of the museum and has been seen and heard on many occasions.

Since the museum is one of my beats for the paper, I’m frequently up there. This past Tuesday when I went for an interview, I have to admit that I was a little freaked out as I walked alone through the second floor. I wondered if I would catch a glimpse of Edgar.

Morgan’s favorite part of the tour was a story about a ghost at the Andy Griffith Playhouse and Melissa’s was the one about the old Galloway Opera House over Brannock & Hiatt. I’m afraid you’ll have to go on the tour to hear all of the ghoulish stories.

After taking the tour, I was simply amazed at how many ghost stories there are right in our downtown area. And, they couldn’t fit them all on the tour. More stories are surfacing even now. I also really liked that all the stories are based in fact. I learned so much about my town while I was at it too. I highly recommend the tour, which lasts about an hour and a half, to everyone.

Matt Edwards, executive director of the museum, said that on the first weekend of the tour last weekend it was sold out. The tickets are only $10, which is really affordable considering I paid $20 for a much shorter walking tour in Savannah, Ga., two summers ago. He said the people of all ages, including children, went on the first tours and he said everyone loved it. Tours are limited to groups of 25, but more tours will be added as it grows in popularity.

Ghost Writer - Book Group Buzz

By John Harwood.  For me, it was the ideal way to go out–with a bang.  Or a whiteboard.

Once before my book discussion group encounter a convoluted novel with an enormous character list and it required me to use the dry markers on the whiteboard (in multiple colors) in order to chart out all the relationships in the novel over the multitude of time periods in the book.  The novel was A Small Death in Lisbon by John Harwood.  Harwood is an Australian writer of poetry, literary criticism and novels.  He is the son of one of Australia’s most important poets, Gwen Harwood.  This novel is imbued with poetry as well as literary references and allusions that make it a very special work indeed.