Mountain Island - Carolina Weekly Newspapers

The possible haunting of Latta Plantation
by Paul Lascara
news@mountainislandwekly.com
HUNTERSVILLE – The hunt at
Latta Plantation began roughly at dusk,
when four members of NAPS started
unloading several pieces of electronic
equipment in the historic house. But
the investigation Saturday night was not
archaeological, and they weren’t checking
for termites.
NAPS stands for North American Paranormal
Society. They were looking for,
among other things, ghosts.
Eric Singleton and Shawn Litton
founded the North American Paranormal
Society in 2006 as a way to study,
research and investigate the paranormal.
Since then, they and the rest of the team
have studied possible paranormal locations
across the state and as far away as
the former Ohio State Reformatory in
Mansfield, Ohio.
Often, they investigate private homes
for concerned families wary of unexplained
phenomena. “We want to be able
to put people’s minds to rest,” Singleton
said as he walked through the woods at
the plantation. “They call us to come
in, to try to figure out what’s going on
in the home. We try to figure out, first,
if there’s a logical reason behind it, and
most of the time we can. … Other times
it’s not so easy.”
The investigation began in the living
room of the house, when Maggie Perry,
one of the investigators, introduced the
team to spirits that might be there and announced
their good intentions quite literally
to the thin air. “We just want to spend
the evening with you and see if you make
your presence known. We don’t mean any
harm or disrespect to anybody here tonight.
We’d just love to kind of talk with
you.”
She paused a lot, waiting for responses
that didn’t come. From records provided
by the plantation’s staff, she called out the
names of the Latta family and the names
of slaves who worked for them “to see if
that stirs up any kind of activity.”
The paranormal group takes deduction
and evidence very seriously. They first seek
out normal causes for possible evidence
of spiritual activity. In the reproduction
miner’s cabin, Thompson suggests that
mice knocking around bits of dry corn are
responsible for a noise recorded on a previous
night. Another tape was sent to the
Carolina Raptor Center so experts could
identify if a noise was an owl.
They told the investigators it was no owl.
Saturday night, Singleton, Thompson,
Perry and Dave Babineau come armed
with digital voice recorders, hand-held
video cameras, parabolic microphone
amplifiers, digital cameras, displays, infrared
cameras and infrared lights, trying
to corroborate otherworldly
tales about the
house that have been
told long before they
showed up.
The historical actors
who work, and
in some cases, live at
Latta Plantation have
told the investigators
about frequent disturbances
in the house.
Sometimes they’ve
heard footsteps upstairs
when the house
was empty or traveling
up and down the entire
length of the attic
space, which is only
floored half of the way.
One of the most compelling bits of anecdotal
evidence occurred when an employee
had just locked up for the night.
While walking away from the house, she
heard a crash come from inside. She went
back in to find a mirror lying in the center
of the living room. It had been hanging
more than 8 feet high on the wall and
was now on the floor, more than a dozen
feet from the wall, completely intact. The
mirror is back on the wall now, without a
scratch on it.
Nothing that interesting happened during
the most recent investigation of Latta
News
Paul Lascara/MIW photo
Dave Babineau sweeps an upstairs bedroom, using a powerful
microphone amplifier and digital voice recorder to capture an EVP,
or Electronic Voice Phenomenon.
Plantation. A shriek in the night was not a
banshee, just a catfight in the woods.
A loud bump from outside the house
was a confused cow knocking against a
wheelbarrow. The slow night’s work concluded
after midnight, with no conclusive
evidence. True to their scientific approach,
however, the investigators aren’t
finished. They’ll be back..
For more information about Historic
Latta Plantation, log on to www.
lattaplantation.org. For more on the
North American Paranormal Society,
visit www.north-american-paranormalsociety.com.
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www.mountainislandweekly.com Mountain Island Weekly • Sept. 18-24, 2009 • Page 3