BY JOSH DEWBERRY
STAFF WRITER
THE MONROE JOURNAL
There have been a few unexplainable occurrences at Rikard's Mill, ranging from claims of a shadow in a window just a few months back to a dead woman in a pink casket floating down the creek years ago, and my intrepid ghost hunting buddy Lee Peacock and I, along with mutual friend John Higginbotham and Nathan Carter with the Monroe County Heritage Museum, set out to see if there was any paranormal activity on the property.
Just before 7:30 p.m. Friday, the four of us met at the mill, heavy coats in tow, and took a brief tour with miller Larry Tuberville, who spends several nights a week at the property in his RV.
Lee, John and I walked the trail around the park, peeking in the mill house - where we eventually settled - and moving on to the cabin, barn and carriage house. The cabin, Nathan explained earlier, is a modern structure built in the style of a pioneer cabin, so we decided there was no potential for any kind of paranormal activity there. The barn and carriage house have limited interior space, and Larry said nothing had happened there, as far as he knew.
Now, let me stop here and say I am a skeptic when it comes to ghosts or the paranormal. I believe most ghost stories have a logical explanation, but there are some things that can't be explained away.
A gentle, chilly breeze puffed throughout the night, making the low-hanging moss and trees around the park wave gently, and Larry walked us to the covered bridge gift shop overlooking the creek and mill house.
"I was standing here fishing one night, and the lights were on inside the mill," he said. "I looked up and a shadow crossed in front of the window. There was no one else on the property at the time."
Tuberville said on a second occasion he was standing in almost the same spot fishing with another man, and the other man reported seeing the same thing. Again, there was no one else on the property.
He took us to see where the shadow would have been, and showed us it's unlikely that anyone could get into or out of the cabin without being seen or heard.
This tale piqued our collective interest, and we decided to see what it looks like when a person walks past the window in the dark. John, Lee and I hiked back to the bridge and had Larry walk across again, and after several passes noticed something odd.
Larry described seeing a shadow or silhouette. What we were able to see, even from that distance and in pitch black outside with lights on inside the mill, was a person. We were able to make out Larry's beard, his cap and even some of the details of his jacket, not just a silhouette.
In paranormal circles, there's a belief in "shadow people," or a simple physical manifestation of a spirit. Experts in the field say shadow figures are the easiest form for spirits to assume and require the least amount of energy.
Earlier, also while all five of us were standing on the bridge eyeing the mill house, Larry told us another tale, this one not so paranormal but spooky nonetheless.
A fellow who fishes at the site once told Larry why he no longer fishes on Sunday.
"When he was young - 10 or 12 or something like that - he was up here fishing with his family," Larry said. "They were just enjoying the day, he told me, and then a dead woman in a pink casket came floating down the creek. From that day on, he and his family never fished on a Sunday again."
Larry said as long as he's been the miller the man has never been there on a Sunday to fish.
We all decided this is a mighty specific story for someone to fabricate, and, for it to affect a man so much that he and his family refused to fish on Sunday again, it would indicate there's some truth in the tale.
Around midnight Lee, John, Nathan and I decided it was time to start some sort of investigation to see if there is, in fact, anything going on inside the mill.
The only thing more interesting than the story of the Franklin Light John related to us, and my own experience at, of all places, Nettles Auditorium at Alabama Southern Community College on two different occasions, was when John cut off the lights and snapped a couple of photos.
In the very first picture there is a large, bright ball of light almost in the center of the image, near the window where Larry and his friend reported seeing the shadow. Orbs of light are often dismissed as dust, bugs or moisture in the air reflecting the flash, but some are believed to be simple manifestations of spirits. In a second photo snapped almost immediately after the first, there is no light.
Also, John brought along an electromagnetic field (EMF) detector - used to pick up fluctuations in EMF, which are believed to signal a ghost attempting to manifest in some way - and picked up a couple of pings.
The most intriguing results were when the EMF showed a fluctuation on one side of where John and I were sitting, right under the window, and again on the other side in succession. This pattern repeated itself several times.
As the night wore down, we decided to get some sleep, and bedded down in sleeping bags and under blankets for the night. By 2:45 a.m. Saturday, temperatures had dropped to the mid-30s and John and I, at almost the exact same time, decided we were done shivering and packed up for the night, leaving Nathan and Lee asleep on the floor of the mill house.
Other than the occasional owl hooting in the woods and some sort of large nuts falling on the roof of the building, jarring me awake, there was really little to report.
While we may not have captured any specific evidence proving or disproving the possibility of ghosts at Rikard's Mill, it doesn't mean there is or isn't anything there. Larry's experiences combined with our inability to show a real, live person could cross in front of the window and cast only a shadow leads me to believe there is something going on in north Monroe County.
But don't take my word for it, visit the site yourself for some ghost stories this weekend.
Monroe County Heritage Museum will sponsor a Halloween Weekend Friday and Saturday from 6:30-10 p.m.
On Halloween weekend at the restored grist mill at Rikard's Mill north of Beatrice activities will include pumpkin relay races, pumpkin painting, a pumpkin toss and more as well as roasting marshmellows over an open campfire.
Costumed storytellers will entertain with scary tales at the covered bridge, millhouse, pioneer cabin, carriage house and barn. Ghosts of Native American Indians, Confederate soldiers and even the Headless Horseman of Gin House Bottom will appear along the Haunted Swamp Trail.
Admission is $5 per person or $20 per car. Food vendors will be available. Contact Monroe County Heritage Museum at mchm@frontiernet.net or 575-7433 or Rikard's Mill at 789-2781 for more information.
I also have to thank the museum staff, especially Nathan Carter and Director Stephanie Rogers for allowing us to make the trip. It was a lot of fun, even if we didn't have any harrowing experiences of our own.
(This story, written by Josh Dewberry, was originally published in the Oct. 27, 2011 edition of The Monroe Journal newspaper in Monroeville, Ala.)
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