“Haunted Courthouses”
By: John G. Browning With the Halloween season approaching, perhaps we should add “courthouse” to the pantheon of traditional scary places. No, not because courthouses can induce bad memories for those who didn’t prevail in their quest for justice. I mean because there are some courthouses that are genuinely scary places – some might even say “haunted.” In a scene straight out of a horror movie, in January 2015 a trial at the Sevier County Courthouse in De Queen, Arkansas was disrupted by 30 bats that flew in to the courtroom. Although the ensuing “disorder in the court” subsided when the lights were turned off and the trial was relocated to another location, it probably doesn’t bode well that, according to the county’s …show more content…
Courthouse workers at the Union County Courthouse in Elizabethtown claim sightings of a ghostly figure that is said to be the spirit of Hannah Orton Caldwell. Caldwell, a minister’s wife, was killed by British soldiers during the Revolutionary War. Her ghost supposedly roams the grounds of a nearly cemetery as well as the corridors of the courthouse. The sightings have been so persistent that the SciFi Channel TV Show “Ghost Hunters” even devoted an episode to it. And at the Gloucester County Courthouse in south Jersey, construction workers, courthouse employees, and elected officials have all reported strange noises and lights during a renovation project in which old jail cells were being removed. One cell was temporarily left intact; it had housed an inmate who committed suicide in the 1950s, and workers and an administrator theorized that it was this convict’s restless spirit behind the strange happenings. With the approval of a county freeholder, Joe Manganello, family members of the deceased inmate held an exorcism at the courthouse in 2014. “I just wanted to give them closure,” Manganello …show more content…
Workers at the old Navajo County, Arizona courthouse have reported hearing strange noises throughout the building and seeing objects move inexplicably. Some theorize that the courthouse is haunted by the ghost of George Smiley, who was hanged on January 8, 1900 for the murder of a railroad foreman. Smiley may have held a grudge against county sheriff Frank Wattron because he sent out professionally – printed, gilt-edged invitations to Smiley’s first scheduled execution in December 1899 to a number of elected officials, including Arizona is governor and then – President McKinley. McKinley was not amused by the invitations, prompting a reissued invitation that was more somber in tone. Another rumored ghostly inhabitant of the courthouse in Holbrook, Arizona, according to psychic phenomena researchers who conducted a 2008 paranormal investigation, is a prostitute named “Mary” who purportedly died inside one of the jail cells. Both Navajo County employees and visitors claim to have seen the mournful, fleeting, image of a woman looking out several of the courthouse windows. And in Corrales, New Mexico, a stately building that was built as a private residence during the 1860s and became Sandoval County’s first courthouse when New Mexico became a state in 1912 is a private home once again – albeit one that supposedly comes with a ghost. “Perea Casa,” as it is known, is
By: John G. Browning With the Halloween season approaching, perhaps we should add “courthouse” to the pantheon of traditional scary places. No, not because courthouses can induce bad memories for those who didn’t prevail in their quest for justice. I mean because there are some courthouses that are genuinely scary places – some might even say “haunted.” In a scene straight out of a horror movie, in January 2015 a trial at the Sevier County Courthouse in De Queen, Arkansas was disrupted by 30 bats that flew in to the courtroom. Although the ensuing “disorder in the court” subsided when the lights were turned off and the trial was relocated to another location, it probably doesn’t bode well that, according to the county’s …show more content…
Courthouse workers at the Union County Courthouse in Elizabethtown claim sightings of a ghostly figure that is said to be the spirit of Hannah Orton Caldwell. Caldwell, a minister’s wife, was killed by British soldiers during the Revolutionary War. Her ghost supposedly roams the grounds of a nearly cemetery as well as the corridors of the courthouse. The sightings have been so persistent that the SciFi Channel TV Show “Ghost Hunters” even devoted an episode to it. And at the Gloucester County Courthouse in south Jersey, construction workers, courthouse employees, and elected officials have all reported strange noises and lights during a renovation project in which old jail cells were being removed. One cell was temporarily left intact; it had housed an inmate who committed suicide in the 1950s, and workers and an administrator theorized that it was this convict’s restless spirit behind the strange happenings. With the approval of a county freeholder, Joe Manganello, family members of the deceased inmate held an exorcism at the courthouse in 2014. “I just wanted to give them closure,” Manganello …show more content…
Workers at the old Navajo County, Arizona courthouse have reported hearing strange noises throughout the building and seeing objects move inexplicably. Some theorize that the courthouse is haunted by the ghost of George Smiley, who was hanged on January 8, 1900 for the murder of a railroad foreman. Smiley may have held a grudge against county sheriff Frank Wattron because he sent out professionally – printed, gilt-edged invitations to Smiley’s first scheduled execution in December 1899 to a number of elected officials, including Arizona is governor and then – President McKinley. McKinley was not amused by the invitations, prompting a reissued invitation that was more somber in tone. Another rumored ghostly inhabitant of the courthouse in Holbrook, Arizona, according to psychic phenomena researchers who conducted a 2008 paranormal investigation, is a prostitute named “Mary” who purportedly died inside one of the jail cells. Both Navajo County employees and visitors claim to have seen the mournful, fleeting, image of a woman looking out several of the courthouse windows. And in Corrales, New Mexico, a stately building that was built as a private residence during the 1860s and became Sandoval County’s first courthouse when New Mexico became a state in 1912 is a private home once again – albeit one that supposedly comes with a ghost. “Perea Casa,” as it is known, is