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In September of 2014, Tom Maxwell moved with his family into a

large, historic home in Hillsborough, North Carolina. With its
affordable rent and lush surroundings, it seemed too good to be
true. Nine months later, they broke their lease, loaded up the
truck, and ran away as fast as they could from the spirits and
 apparitions that had tortured them. Only afterward would
Maxwell learn about the 300 years of bad mojo that had piled up
in the house they called Nannie.

Story by Tom Maxwell | Illustrations by Phil Blank

Audio Reading by Matt Godfrey

Content warning: This story, published in October 2016, includes historical information and unexplained
experiences as remembered by the author and his family or as told to them by friends and neighbors. It includes
mention of rape, violence, war, and excavated human remains.

We Salted Nannie

Story Read by Matt Godfrey

“When the earth was new just one deer emerged from it, but he returned
below in search of a companion. Thus there are two names in the Deer Clan,

‘He Who Appears First,’ and ‘He Who Returns.’ When the deer came to earth
they encountered the first fireplace, but it only contained smoldering embers.
So they blew upon it until it blazed.”

— Winnebago Deer Clan Origin Myth

“Salt is good: But if the salt have lost his saltness, wherewith will ye season it?
Have salt in yourselves, and have peace one with another.”

— Mark 9:50

“Remember Lot’s wife.”

— Luke 17:32
Brooke and I were on vacation when we noticed the
headaches had gone. We had moved into the house in
Chapel Hill, North Carolina, only three weeks before, and
knew it was time to leave. It had mold, and was making
us sick. One bright summer day, we packed two bags, a
guitar and the cat into our car and realized we had no
place to sleep. We accepted a friend’s offer to crash in
nearby Hillsborough, and started looking for a new
rental.

The historic house we saw in the ad was big and strangely

cheap. The website featured only a couple of out-of-focus
pictures, so we walked over to the property and were
shocked: It was an enormous place, wonderfully situated.
She had five fireplaces and wide wood floorboards, which
ran in waves across the ancient rooms. The land was
spacious, rolling pasture and old, spreading hardwoods.
The Eno River ran placidly only a hundred yards to the
south, part of its 40-mile meander from its source to its
convergence with the Neuse — indeed, the house sat
snug inside the tenderloin of land, bound on three sides
by the river’s horseshoe. We could walk to Hillsborough’s

modest downtown, but felt as if we were in the country.

The night sky was dark and thick with stars.

We moved in Sept. 3. The house was mansion big, but still

country, its outside a calm and peeling yellow. The
kitchen addition on the north side was far too big, with a
large stone fireplace in the center and cheap appliances
on one side. The narrow, uneven stairs led to a warren of
second-floor rooms. Claustrophobic hallways emptied
into cramped bathrooms. Apart from some built-in
bookshelves in the living room, the only thing fancy
about the house was its exterior. Inside it was plain, even
a little severe. It had a musty, stale smell, which we set
about cleaning away.
We named the house Nannie, after the wife of its most
famous owner. We were looking for refuge and the name
had a comforting double meaning: the Nannie of history,
and a nanny to take care of us.

Down by the river, there were some historic markers

describing the land as once belonging to a Native
American tribe. It was easy to see the land as hunting
grounds. There were catfish, gar and minnow in the
river; frogs and box turtles dotted its banks. Persimmon,
Osage orange and mulberry flowered in spring, coming
to summer fruition. The pastures were lined with
hardwoods: white oak, red oak, willow oak, maple and
redwood. Magnolia, tulip poplar and dogwood flowers
dotted the forest in spring and early summer. The bear
might have been long gone, but fox and wild turkey were
not. Families of deer grazed around our house, the
spotted fawns keeping close to their mothers. They were
so numerous we called them the Deer People. You had
only to reach out your hand to grasp a little of this plenty.

The old and sturdy house, set on rolling pastureland

alongside a placid river, appeared safe and calm. It was

not. Nannie, and the land around her, was thoroughly

haunted. In less than a year we would break the lease,
perform a binding ritual, and leave.

English explorer John Lawson wrote extensively about

North Carolina's indigenous people. In 1701, he visited
the Occaneechi tribe in their little town surrounded by
the Eno River, only a few yards from where Nannie would
be situated. The "Achonechy," as Lawson called them, had
been displaced from their Atlantic coastal home on
 Roanoke Island (where they controlled the deerskin trade
and coined a common language) by a militia attack in
1670. In their new Piedmont village, a dozen or so
wigwams surrounded a sweat lodge, set in a central plaza.
A defensive stockade encircled the town, with cemeteries
outside the gates; testament to the destructive power of
Iroquois war parties and European disease.  

Still, the Occaneechi had done well for themselves.

Lawson was unreserved in his praise.

“About Three a Clock, we reach'd the Town, and the

Indians presently brought us good fat Bear, and Venison,
which was very acceptable at that time,” Lawson wrote.
“Their Cabins were hung with a good sort of Tapestry, as
fat Bear, and barbakued or dried Venison; no Indians
having greater Plenty of Provisions than these. The
Savages do, indeed, still possess the Flower of Carolina,
the English enjoying only the Fag-end of that fine
Country.”

That was all going to change. Creeping south from

Virginia and north from South Carolina, the Europeans
finally gained full possession of Charles II’s extensive land
grant of 1663. “The Country thro’ which we pass’d, was so
delightful,” Lawson wrote of his trip to visit the
Occaneechi, “that it gave us a great deal of Satisfaction.”
By 1722, the remnants of the Occaneechi and other
Piedmont tribes, decimated by “disease, warfare and
rum,” moved northeast to seek protection in Virginia’s
Fort Christianna. A few sagging thatch huts stood a
hundred yards from the house we had just chosen to rent,
reconstructed to remember the tribe’s brief tenure.
Scotland’s economy had collapsed by the end of the 18th
century.  Squatters and vandals roamed the land, some of
them visiting the Highland farm of James Hogg in
Caithness.

"The people in my neighborhood were extremely

addicted to theft and pilfering, the constant attendants of
slavery and poverty,” Hogg wrote in a letter dated March
29, 1774. “I was fond of improvements in agriculture: I
sowed field-turnips, but they were stolen before they
came to perfection: I sowed pease, and was happy if they

left me the straw: my potatoes and carrots suffered in like

manner: and, in short, I found it impossible to save
anything from their rapacity.”

“To complete my disgust,” Hogg wrote, “in the end of 1771

a ship belonging to Liverpool, loaded with iron, deals and
flax, was driven ashore in sight of my house.” Hogg gave
“active assistance to save the wreck and cargo from
plunder,” and in return barely escaped with his family
when their house was set on fire in revenge.

“Had my situation in other respects been agreeable,”

Hogg remembered, “I should not have been easily
prevailed upon, with so young a family, and at my time of
life, to leave my native country, and expose myself and
family to the fatigue and dangers of a long voyage, in
order to settle in an unhealthy climate in the woods of
North Carolina: but by the barbarity of the country
where I lived, I was in a manner forcibly expelled.”

“A list of the murders, robberies, and thefts, committed

with impunity there, during my residence in Caithness,”
Hogg declared, “would surprise a Mohawk or a
Cherokee.”

James Hogg and his family made it to America, then

North Carolina, and ultimately Hillsborough, where they
would no longer be victimized by the disadvantaged.
Hogg became a participant in the largest private sale of
land in the country’s history: a naked, extralegal grab of
Cherokee hunting grounds west of the Appalachian
mountains.

Hogg joined the Transylvania Company in 1775, led by a

former judge, Richard Henderson. In 1771, the same year
Hogg defended the shipwreck from looters, Henderson
was a presiding judge over the trial and execution of six
Regulators. The Regulator Movement was an early form
of backwoods rebellion, objecting over unfair colonial
taxation and corruption. Once released from the bench
in 1773, Henderson was free to pursue his burning
ambition of land speculation.

The Transylvania Company’s goal, through the

acquisition and settlement of the wild lands to the west,
was no less than to create the 14th colony. In January and
February 1775, James Henderson and some colleagues

met with around 1,200 Cherokee who gathered in

Tennessee for a Great Council.

In the Treaty of Sycamore Shoals, as it came to be known,

the aboriginals were given six wagon loads of liquor,
guns, ammunition, blankets and trinkets in exchange for
some 20 million acres, making up most of modern-day
Kentucky and eastern Tennessee.

Tsi’yu-gunsini (“He Is Dragging His Canoe”), a young

chief from the Wolf Clan, objected to this European
expansion.

“Whole Indian Nations have melted away like snowballs

in the sun before the white man's advance,” he said on
the second day of negotiating. “Such treaties may be all
right for men who are too old to hunt or fight. As for me,
I have my young warriors about me. We will hold our
land.”

Things reached a breaking point when the colonists

asked for even more territory — a Path Deed — as a
conduit for settlement.
"We have given you this, why do you ask for more?”
Dragging Canoe demanded. “When you have this you
have all. There is no more game left between the
Watauga and the Cumberland. You have bought a fair
land, but there is a cloud hanging over it; you will find its
settlement dark and bloody." Dragging Canoe and his
warriors then left the meeting in protest.

According to Indian history, the man who would blaze

the Path Deed trail, Daniel Boone, helped seal the
Sycamore deal by plying the remaining older chiefs with
whiskey. Oconostota and Raven Warrior were made so
drunk that their interpreter had to guide their hands in
order to sign the treaty.

According to White history, the liquor was rum, not

whiskey, and the colonists virtuously kept it from Indian
reach until the agreement was executed. English explorer
John Lawson had already noted the effects of alcohol on
the Indian population in December, 1700:

“Rum,” he wrote, “a Liquor now so much in Use with

them, that they will part with the dearest Thing they
have, to purchase it.”

The proposed 14th colony, founded on the land newly

gained, was to be called Transylvania. James Hogg was
dispatched to Philadelphia to negotiate official
recognition from the Continental Congress. The petition
was never considered: The treaty was seen as illegal by
the English Crown as well as the colonies of Virginia and
North Carolina, both of which ultimately voided the
claim. According to European law, the Cherokee could
not own land, and were thus incapable of selling any.

In the meantime, Daniel Boone blazed the Wilderness

Trail through the Cumberland Gap, creating a highway
for settlement to the west.
Brooke’s mother came to visit that autumn. She stayed
in the upstairs bedrooms on the left. Its doorframe
sagged away from the raised middle of the northside
addition, as did the one on the adjacent bedroom, giving
the impression of a worried brow. There was nothing in
this room save a blocked-off arch which once connected
the two rooms, and a large and cobwebbed window,
letting in dreary light. The wood floor inclined toward
the window, dotted with spider holes. At night, Brooke’s
mother heard knocking on the wall separating the two
bedrooms. The knocks came slowly, in threes, and were
left unanswered.

A few days later, Brooke and her mother went for a walk.
As they paused in the pasture in front of the house,
Brooke noticed, from her periphery, a figure standing
under a small maple about 20 yards away. She turned her
head to see a woman, staring at them. The woman’s hand
was against the tree. She wore a white bonnet, a white
smock and a long brown dress. Brooke looked at the

woman for a moment. Then the woman wasn’t there

anymore.

The day after Halloween, Brooke stood near the boxwood

bushes on the west side of the house. It was a cold
morning, and our new dog, Pugsley, needed to go out.
Brooke was still wearing a red devil’s cape from the night
before. Someone called her name from a dark band of
trees a few yards away.

“Brooke?” The female voice was tentative. Its pitch was

neither high nor low, but a combination of both: a single
voice, spoken in octaves. Brooke answered the first
entreaty, thinking we had a visitor and embarrassed to
still be in costume. The voice called again, closer this
time.

“Brooke?”

In the weeks to come, the paranormal events increased.

Brooke and Evelyn, my daughter, often saw a woman in a
white bonnet walking from the west side of the house
around to the front porch. This was her routine.

The things outside that presented as human always

moved in repetition. From a window in the kitchen, I saw
a man in buckskins walk quickly to the back of the shed.
Brooke saw him too, another time. She also saw a man in
a gray jumpsuit mount invisible stairs into the southern
sky.

Other outside things, not readily identifiable as human,

moved around the perimeter of the house
counterclockwise.

One mild November evening, as I gathered firewood by

the shed in the light of a full moon, I looked over to see a
vertical, cigar-shaped shadow, about five feet tall and a
foot off the ground, floating silently away from me
toward the back of the house. I stood there  —  naked,
with an armload of wood —  and watched it for the
second or two it took to register that the thing was
actually there, a real column of tapered shadow, illuminated
by porchlight, gliding away from me like a spinning top. I
calmly walked inside the house, locked the back door, and
cursed extravagantly. Afterward, I realized that, in order
to be on that trajectory, the thing must have moved
behind me unnoticed.

Some weeks later, we stood on the severe front porch on

a cold night. The original porch was made from wood,
and was level with the front doors. This porch was brick,
and positioned several feet below the entrances.
Precarious brick steps led up to each front door. Opening
the screen door almost made you drop off the stoop.

We stood on the uneven brick, waiting for our dog to pee.

He suddenly strained the leash, pulling Brooke to the
west side of the porch, near a dark little band of trees by
the shed. Out of the black, a tan figure advanced. It had
bowed legs and no head. It shimmied towards Brooke in a
crouch, whipping its long, thin arms like tentacles. Then
it receded back into the trees.

“If it weren’t so terrifying, it would have been funny,” she

told me. “It was dancing, as if to get my attention.”

These figures were aggressive, but not malevolent. Their

purpose seemed twofold: to make us know they were
there, and that we could do nothing about it.

In the years after the Transylvania purchase, Dragging

Canoe became the face of opposition to westward

expansion. He preyed upon the wave of pioneers

travelling the Wilderness Road, earning the nickname
Savage Napoleon. He died on March 1, after dancing all
night in celebration of a newly formed tribal alliance.

Back in Hillsborough, James Hogg built a house on the

north side of the Eno river in 1794, near the Occaneechi
village John Lawson had described almost a hundred
years before. It was a large, two-story I-House, with floors
of first-growth pine. Two rooms were set over two
rooms, with big chimneys on either side. On the front, a
large porch was built in the plantation style. It was a
simple, if outsize, place, one which Hogg had only a few
years to enjoy. He called his new house and farm Banks of
the Eno.

The house James Hogg built has stood for centuries, even
as his first Hillsborough house crumbled into the earth. It
would see additions and half-hearted renovations, and be
moved once — only a few hundred yards as the crow flies.
It would also collect, inside and out, an absolute army of
paranormal inhabitants. Maybe they accrued like
emotional residue on the usurious intent of its several
owners. It can’t help — at least in our cultural
imagination — that it stands, quite literally, on Indian
burial ground. This was Nannie, the house of our short
and terrible tenancy.

James Hogg suffered a stroke in 1802. Around this time,

as a response to “years of ridicule,” he petitioned the
General Assembly to change his children’s surname to
that of their mother’s, McDowal Alves. They granted the
request, leading to this bit of revealing doggerel:

Hogg by name, Hogg by nature

Alves by act of the Legislature

James Hogg died in 1804. His house would be inhabited

by Hoggs for another 90 years.

The hauntings increased with the passing months.

Misty forms would rise from the floorboards in broad
daylight and move about the room on their own volition.
They didn’t look like smoke as much as water vapor, and
came and went as they pleased. We all saw “headlights” in
the driveway, but no corresponding car ever appeared.
The distinct scrape of the mud-room door opening
would be heard, even when the door, upon inspection,
remained locked.

Evelyn and Brooke increasingly heard their names being

called.

“Evelyn,” a female voice would say. “Come here.”

If she was upstairs, it would come from below. Brooke

once heard Evelyn’s voice calling her from downstairs,
and walked downstairs to answer. She called Evelyn’s
name, and Evelyn answered from her upstairs bedroom.
The side-door locks rattled frantically one night as the
three of us sat alarmed in the living room. Occasionally,
men’s voices could be heard downstairs, speaking in
hushed and excited tones. They stopped as soon as
someone reached the bottom of the stairs. We shared a
growing feeling that we were to be split up, one from
another. Something was trying to isolate us. A hard
winter was bearing down. The first cord of wood got
burned up in less than a month.

We dressed Nannie up like a pagan hunting lodge that

Christmas, twining pine garlands up the bannister and
hanging enormous evergreen and holly wreaths on the
bare dining-room walls. We fed stacks of wood into the
hearths on both ends of the house — the westside living
room and the eastside dining room — until the warmth
met in the middle archway. The intense heat from the
firebricks kept you from getting closer than the apron’s
edge. We invited as much family as could fit, eating and
drinking our fill. It was an extravagance we could afford
only once. The ghosts left us unmolested until we were
once again alone.

Before he finished his studies at the University of North

Carolina at Chapel Hill, Julian Shakespeare Carr
enlisted in the Confederacy. He served as a private in the
Third North Carolina Cavalry until the South’s military
capitulation the following year. Carr was paroled along
with the rest of Robert E. Lee’s shattered army.

“One hundred yards from where we stand, less than 90

days perhaps after my return from Appomattox,” Carr
bragged in 1913 when giving a speech on the UNC
campus, “I horsewhipped a Negro wench until her skirts
hung in shreds, because upon the streets of the quiet
village she had publicly insulted and maligned a Southern
lady, and then rushed for protection to these University
buildings where was stationed a garrison of 100 federal
soldiers. I performed the pleasing duty in the immediate
presence of the entire garrison, and for 30 nights
afterwards slept with a double-barrel shotgun under my
head.”

After the war, Carr received a $4,000 loan from his father
to purchase interest in a Durham tobacco company.
Trading on the famous Bull Durham logo, and ultimately
acquiring dozens of other businesses, Carr soon became
very wealthy.

In 1891, Carr and his wife Nannie bought James Hogg’s

old 663-acre farm. Nannie called the house “Poplar Hill.”

Carr hired Jules Gilmer Körner to redecorate Hogg’s plain

farmhouse. Körner, under the alias Reuben Rink, was
responsible for the Bull Durham tobacco logo. (These
became famous because Rink painted bulls with huge
balls on outdoor ads. Then he would write letters to the
local paper posing as an outraged citizen. Once the whole
town came out to see this affront to decency, Rink would
return and paint an obscuring fence over the offending
bollocks. Most Bull Durham ads show the fence, along
with gratuitous and deeply racist depictions of blacks.
“My!” exclaims one watermelon-eating grotesque, “These
shure am Sweet Tastan.”)

Körner dressed Poplar Hill up to resemble a stereotypical

Greek Revival plantation, with a widow’s walk, huge
porch columns and a shallow balcony. He inserted French
windows in the downstairs and created two formal
entrances along the wide front porch.

This reinvention was consistent with Julian Carr’s life. He

was an unreconstructed racist; a proponent of the
mythical Lost Cause movement, which by the early 20th
century was beginning to rewrite the history of the South
and its defeat. Because of his support of Confederate
veteran causes, Carr was “promoted” to the honorary
rank of Major General. In his later years, he was often
seen dressed in a gaudy Confederate officer’s uniform of
this rank, one he never came close to attaining during his
actual wartime service. See him now, in this grainy black-
and-white picture, sitting on Poplar Hill’s front porch
with Nannie and other family, a portly dress-up general,
secure in his fake plantation home: an openly racist Col.
Sanders prototype.

“The present generation, I am persuaded, scarcely takes

note of what the Confederate soldier meant to the
welfare of the Anglo-Saxon race during the four years
immediately succeeding the war,” Carr boomed to a
crowd in 1913, “when the facts are, that their courage and
steadfastness saved the very life of the Anglo-Saxon race
in the South.”

The cult of the Lost Cause was, if anything, about

appearance over reality. Confederate veterans, beginning
to die off in droves by the second decade of the new
century, were recast as hale and watchful statues — just
like the one Carr dedicated on the University of North

Carolina campus — placed in front of courthouses and

other seats of political power. The real North Carolina
rebels were in fact half-starved scarecrows, fed into that
terrible maw in sufficient numbers as to make up a
quarter of all Confederate casualties. Their corpses didn’t
bloat and rot like their better-fed Union counterparts, but
rather simply turned to leather in the sunny fields of
Cold Harbor and other killing grounds.
Carr built a railroad spur across the road from his new
farm, so his wealthy friends from the city could come
visit for weekend parties. “Occoneechee Farm,” as he
called his new estate, turned into a big operation, with
Carr as the titular gentleman farmer. There are a few
surviving pictures of the actual farm workers. They’re all
black, naturally, and cleaned up to look postcard pretty.
Scowling cherubs hold shiny milk pails.

A tornado struck Occoneechee Farm in 1919, doing

terrible damage. Poplar Hill was unscathed. But the farm
never recovered. Within a few years, Julian Carr lost his
fortune and his health. The 1923 real estate listing for
Occoneechee Farm included “a large sheep barn, a large
piggery with several breeding pens, a concrete-floored
dairy barn with 56 stanchions, five poultry houses
(capable of housing 1,500 chickens) and a three-story barn
with a slate roof, oak floors, stalls for 36 horses and a
basement for mules.”

Julian Carr died on April 29, 1924. Occoneechee Farm was

sold and subdivided.

The subsequent tenants of Poplar Hill mostly

remembered freezing in the winter. They shut off entire
sections of the place, living in one or two rooms to
conserve firewood. As the decades passed, the house
began to fall apart from neglect.

We too froze that winter, often sick, broke and huddled

in front of a fire in a small upstairs room. Although we
kept the thermostat at 55 degrees, our February gas bill
was still over $700. There was some talk of a cracked heat
exchanger, but nothing was done until the old outside
unit stopped working altogether in early summer. Inside
the house, you could see the packed dirt between cracks
in the floorboards. The pipes froze twice.

We began feeding scraps of vegetables and fruit to The

Deer People, who looked more miserable than us. At first,
Brooke would put the food on the ground and leave. But
the deer, generationally used to humans, were not afraid.
Soon the animals were eating the food in her presence.

After a half-century of decline, Poplar Hill was saved in

by James Freeland, “The Walt Disney of Hillsborough.”
A colorful real estate developer, Freeland already had
great success with Daniel Boone Village, a kind of strip-

mall theme park featuring a small railroad, a wax

museum, an ice-skating rink, a burlap-sack slide and “a
real bison.” Freeland commissioned a large fiberglass
statue of Boone, chubby and holding a flintlock, to stand
guard at the entrance. Gone is the canonical coonskin
cap: This Boone has a frontier hat pinned up at the front,
like a Disney sidekick. He leans forward and looks drunk.
He stands there still, by old Highway 86, holding his gun
like a drum major’s baton.

By 1978, Freeland began to pursue another business

angle. He relocated a Caswell County house George
Washington had slept in and made it a Mexican
restaurant called Pueblo Viejo.

Freeland had similar plans with Poplar Hill: He would

move it to the south side of the Eno, just yards from the
old Indian settlement, and turn it into the Occoneechee
Steak House. Verbal assurances from town elders
appeared to trump zoning laws.

Hillsborough, like so many other historic North Carolina

towns, was preserved through penury. No one had any
money to destroy landmarks through renovation or
replacement. At most, kitchen or bathroom additions to
old houses were tacked on during the Depression, often
built right on the ground to save the expense of laying a
foundation. Very old houses, like Poplar Hill, continued
throughout most of the 20th-century without plumbing
or electricity, and with nothing but inefficient fireplaces
to heat them. Many, abandoned to rot, were simply torn
down.

So, in 1980, Poplar Hill’s roof was removed and the

remaining house was cut into large pieces and slowly
moved from its ancient location. A picture of it, looming
over the moving truck as it crossed the river, made the
paper.

Freeland had carefully prepared the site: The house was

situated facing the river, surrounded by maples, poplars
and stone retaining walls. Japanese pagoda trees ran in a
line along the road. In a historically ironic twist, Freeland
sited the house only a few yards from where the six
Regulators, condemned to death by Transylvania
Company founder Richard Henderson, were hanged in
1771.

The relocation of Poplar Hill, however, was coincident

with bad news: A growing number of citizens, alarmed at
this perceived threat to Hillsborough’s historic district,
disallowed Freeland’s proposed steakhouse.

The house was set on its new foundation and put back
together, although not in a way that was entirely
consistent with its historical nature. A hurried plumbing
addition was tacked onto the west side, just large enough
for some small upstairs bathrooms with low ceilings and
plastic shower inserts. An incongruous picture window
was framed into the ground floor mud room.

The original fireplace mantles, probably sold off, were

replaced with fairly plain and badly constructed
substitutes. The original 12-over-12 windows sat warped
in their frames. There were a series of renters before us.
Most moved out fairly quickly, unable to afford the utility
bills. Nannie was not a house that could be heated.

“Just so you know,” a local friend told me

conspiratorially one day, “that place is known as the
Rape House.” Several years before we moved in, he told
me, a local bartender lived there with his mother. This
man would supposedly roofie women at work, bring

them back to Nannie, and assault them. He was never

charged, but was beat up and run out of town.

The rapes happened in

one of the upstairs
bedrooms — the one, it
turns out, Brooke’s mother
stayed in months before.
My friend was considering
moving in after our lease
was up, and asked one of
the victims to consider moving in with him. She stood in
the doorway of that room, the one of her assault, as a way
of finding her answer.

“No,” she said, after a moment. “I can’t live in a house

where I was raped.”

We didn’t know if the Rape House story was true, but it

made a terrible kind of emotional sense. There were
several female spirits, mostly contained to the north side
of the house — the part Julian Carr added on. Evelyn saw
a tall, gray-haired lady peering at us admiringly from the
kitchen doorway.

“She was interested in us almost as if she longed to join

us in the living room by the fire,” Evelyn told me. “I saw
her for a full second before I looked at you and Brooke.
When I looked back she was gone, of course. Her hair was
gray, about shoulder length. She was incredibly tall. Her
head was at the top of the doorway, which was over six
feet tall. I didn’t see her clothes or body, only her head
peeking around the corner. After noticing that you and
Brooke hadn’t seen her, I got up, angry, and rushed into
the kitchen, ready to confront whatever was spying on us.
The room was cold, but that wasn’t out of character for
Nannie.” The kitchen was empty.

We suspected this was the entity that would follow

people into the kitchen, and stand behind them as they
looked in the fridge. You could hear the floorboards creak
as it came. Once, when Evelyn and Brooke cursed the
ghost, a bottle of baby shampoo was flung violently
across the room.

One night, Evelyn had a sleepover. She didn’t tell her

friend about the hauntings. I went downstairs, into the
yawning expanse of a kitchen, to make popcorn for the
girls. The first batch burned, so I settled on the living
room couch while the second was made. Brooke was
showering in the master bath.

Evelyn and her friend heard their door handle jiggle.

Then they heard our bedroom door being flung open,
across the landing. They thought it was me. Brooke
thought the same. She got out of the shower, and
through a wall mirror saw the bottom of a long skirt and
a woman’s bare feet walking away. Brooke described the
figure as “monochromatic — a blueish grayscale.”
Evelyn called my name, and I answered from downstairs.
Brooke, pursuing the figure, ran to the landing in a towel.
When I came upstairs with a big bowl of popcorn,
everyone stared at me, confused.

That night, Evelyn’s friend woke to see a female figure

standing in their room. “It loomed over the bed as if
expecting us to move or notice her,” Evelyn told me.
“Fully bent. Horrifying.”

The woman stood outside the bathroom as Brooke took a

shower, visible from a mirror. One day, we came home to
see all of the bathroom cabinets flung open. Brooke and
Evelyn’s tampons were gone and never found.

As the nature and intensity of the hauntings increased, an

elongate man appeared downstairs, almost two-
dimensional in his flatness. He would peep at you from
around corners or through doorways, just inside your
peripheral vision. When you looked at him, he would
flash a toothy smile, flatten into the wall and vanish.

Scratches appeared on Brooke’s back several times, before

my eyes, as we showered.

A hooded thing with long, thin arms began standing over

Brooke as she slept. We discussed the possibility of night-
hag syndrome, a particularly unpleasant type of sleep
paralysis. Whatever it was, it was recurring and utterly
terrifying. The thing’s hands were hook-shaped, and its
arms looked like black vinyl. It had red eyes. Later on, it
would appear near the fireplace, almost as if it had come
down the chimney, and walk toward the bed where
Brooke lay, horrified and unable to move. It would
disappear once she was able to scream.
Between 1983 and 1986, the Occaneechi village
described by John Lawson almost 300 years before was
found and investigated by The Research Laboratories of
Anthropology at the University of North Carolina.

“The site seemed to be well preserved,” the report read,

“with no evidence of disturbance other than shallow
plowing.” The digging took place just yards from Nannie.
The team uncovered postholes for the palisade wall,
storage pits, the remains of houses, as well as the
“interior rock-filled pit of a small ‘sweat house.’” The
team also found a little cemetery, just outside the walls
on the northeast side of the village. Fourteen graves were
recovered, mostly of young males, killed violently. One
appeared to have been scalped. Another, of indeterminate
sex, still had a flattened lead ball embedded in its leg from
a gunshot. He or she was buried with an iron hoe. Other
skeletons were found with musket firing mechanisms
and kaolin pipes placed carefully beside them.

Several children’s graves were also excavated. They were

buried alongside bundles of valuables: latten spoons,

bone-handled knives, iron scissors, lead buttons. Cut

shells were scattered around their bodies. One wore a
necklace of glass beads; another an anklet of little brass
bells.

In the first excavation, most human remains were kept in

situ, but some bones were removed to the conservation
laboratory. In 1986, according to a landowner’s wishes,
human skeletal remains were left in place. That
landowner lived across the street from Nannie.
There was much evidence of “death feasting” at the
cemetery site, one which the anthropologists associated
with the Busk Ceremony. Practiced with near universality
by Southeastern Indians, it was a ceremony of renewal,
often occasioned by death, in which the sacred fire would
be rekindled in every hearth, old debts and grudges
forgiven, and old food and clothing discarded. Thus
would the community be renewed. This particular little
town had many opportunities for this ritual in its short
history.

The Occaneechi, though in possession of many European

trade items at this time, adhered to their prehistoric
subsistence practices. Although they ate a little pig and
peach, their diet consisted mostly of maize, fruits, nuts,
seeds, fish, and white-tailed deer. This is what the
anthropologists found, in abundance, near the burial pits.

As Spring approached, Brooke took the hard little

pumpkins we had been using as doorstops and chucked
them into the back yard to feed the Deer People. They
came to eat from the border band of trees, as usual.

“One day, I was just outside in the driveway,” Brooke told

me. “And I saw somebody standing up on the northern
slope in the back of the house. It freaked me out. I turned
to look at it, and it ran behind the big oak tree.” It was a
man, naked save for animal-skin pants. He was dark, with
long dark hair.

“When it came out from behind the tree, it was a young

buck,” Brooke said. “The thing that ran behind the tree
was clearly bipedal.” The deer was now 10 feet from
Brooke, and moving towards her.

“I nodded to it,” she said, “and it bowed to me. Not in a

threatening way, but as a way of saying ‘I acknowledge
you.’” Brooke reached out her hand, but the animal
calmly turned and walked back into the screen of newly
leafed trees whence it came.

Nine months in, exhausted and traumatized by the

house, we decided to break the lease. By this time, we
had a list of nicknames for our tormentors: Smokey,

Spaghetti Arms, The Spook Parade, Bonnet Lady, Smiley,

Buckskin Man, Kitchen Lady, The Upstairs Thing. It was
an attempt at control through humor, but the reality was
that we were living lives of attenuated dread, waiting for
the next, ever more threatening, incident. We had
become energetic chattel, carefully split off and preyed
upon by the true inhabitants of that place.

The house began life as Banks of the Eno, for a man who
emigrated across an ocean to freely use people the way he
had been used; Poplar Hill for a vocal proponent of the
Lost Cause and enthusiastic member of the ownership
class; the Rape House because of another man’s
monstrous exploitation; and finally Nannie for us, a
transient family looking for a home, and not finding one.

However that house was built, and for whatever purposes

it was augmented and repositioned, it had become a
Bedlam for bad energy. Negative feelings, experiences and
intentions got stuck in that place, and were made
distorted manifest. Shadowy tulpas darted around
Nannie’s perimeter, maybe because she had been plopped
down onto that venerated land with the nuance of a
cinderblock tossed into a stream. She only looked like she
belonged. Appearances never transcend reality.

As I paused in the downstairs hall while loading the

moving truck, I saw a black form flitting between boxes
in the living room. It moved in a blur, as fast as thought,
appearing to hide even as it wantonly revealed itself. As I
described it to Brooke and Evelyn, my voice rose to a kind
of hysterical shriek.

We salted Nannie when we left. We didn’t know about

the Salt Covenant in the Old Testament, nor was that our
tribe. We didn’t know about the ancient ritual of salting
newborn babies for protection. We didn’t know that salt
is a key ingredient in Hoodoo Hotfoot Powder. The place
needed to be cleansed and sealed.

We gathered in the mud room, per Brooke’s instructions,

each holding a box of salt, forming a restive single file.
Pouring some salt into our palm, we threw it over our left
shoulders on our way out the door, as you do when
wanting to get that thing off your back. We crossed the
threshold, one at a time, and did not look back. We did
not re-enter the house. We will never re-enter the house.

Once outside, walking clockwise, we ran a thick line of

salt around Nannie’s perimeter, coating every threshold
and window sill, one person’s part reinforced by the one
coming after. It was an ageless ceremony, intuitively
remembered. It was done as a binding and rebuke, as an
acknowledgment of an impossible shared reality.

We finished the salting with a cry of triumph, probably

something along the lines of “Fuck you, buddy!” I walked
behind the house and climbed into the moving truck,
parked just yards from where I saw that floating shadow
thing the previous year. Evelyn and Brooke, still out front,
lingered by the mud-room stoop, where the salt line
began and ended. They stood in silence for a moment,
looking at the house. Brooke noticed a growing look of
shock on Evelyn’s face and turned to see movement
inside the mud room’s picture window. A white, vaporous
thing resolved into view.

“Do you see what I see?” asked Evelyn.

“I think so,” said Brooke. “Is it the outline of a tall figure?”

“Yup.”

The apparition looked like heat waves off hot asphalt. It

flitted from one corner to the other, pacing like an angry
man. Its movements became more furious as Brooke and
Evelyn got in the car and drove away, and then it receded,
along with the house. No one turned their head to look
back.

We made no effort to document our experience in

Nannie. It was a horrible memory, best forgotten. Brooke,
Evelyn and I moved to New Orleans — a wantonly
haunted place — and one night, when the conversation
turned to ghosts, we related our own story. It took the
better part of an hour, and we looked at each other,
amazed, as forgotten incidents were recovered and
corroborated.

I knew about Julian Carr, because I wrote a piece for Al

Jazeera America after Dylann Roof killed the black
congregants of a church in Charleston. “A Confederate
On Every Corner” detailed the many rebel memorials
erected in the South in the 1910s and ’20s, many of which
were situated in front of public seats of power instead of
parks or graveyards. It was, as “General” Carr took pains
to point out, a clear political statement.

I didn’t know about John Lawson, James Hogg and The

Transylvania Company, or much about James Freeland
and the Occaneechi. My understanding resembled
shallow plow marks on an unexcavated field. What lied
beneath, for us, was a compressed story of exploitation
and displacement. Though supposedly long buried, it had
found its way to the surface, and we were there to bear
terrible witness.

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