Headline: "Cigar smoke and dead silence"
By Josh Dewberry
Staff Writer
The Monroe Journal
Just after 10 o'clock Saturday night, something unexplainable happened inside the old Castleberry bank building - the distinctly sweet scent of a lit cigar made its way through the building.
In what has become an annual trek, award-winning writer and photographer Lee Peacock of The Evergreen Courant, John Higginbotham of the Alabama Paranormal Research Society and I sought out a location in which we could investigate claims of other-worldly activity.
Located on the corner of East Railroad Street and Cleveland Avenue in downtown Castleberry, the bank was once a busy financial institution and the town's only bank. It later housed the post office.
The bank folded in the Depression of the 1930s. Sometime during the fall of Wall Street, it's said a bank president lost everything and took his own life inside the bank.
Another financial institution occupied the building through at least the 1980s, and employees reported the smell of cigar smoke, the unexplainable sound of a man talking and walking across the bank and items inexplicably moving overnight.
That brings me back to Saturday night. Lee, John and I met just before 8 p.m., and after chatting briefly out front, we went inside.
There are shelves, cabinets and glass cases all full of historic relics from bygone days: an antique stereoscope with slides, books dating to the mid- and late-1800s, dozens of household items and myriad other objects.
Additionally, there were some bizarre artifacts, including a weed pod called Devil's Horn said to have come from a Native American headdress.
Most of the first hour was spent wandering through the tight spaces of the bank, trying to take in all the history around us. Between us, several hundred photographs were taken throughout the night.
Around 9 p.m. we stepped outside for some fresh air - the building is seldom opened, and the air inside is stifling - and to relieve the feeling of claustrophobia that had settled onto all of us.
After a walk up the sidewalk to examine the neighboring buildings and a check of the perimeter of the building, we re-entered the bank and locked the door.
Things soon became very interesting.
John used an electromagnetic field (EMF) meter to check for any anomalies, and noticed there were strange spikes in energy, even though we noted during our check outside there is no electrical service to the bank.
As we sat silently and listened for any sort of noises, there was a certain quietness to the building that was odd. Anyone familiar with old buildings knows there is almost always pops or cracks or thuds as the wood construction contracts when temperatures drop. There were none of those. The silence induced a tinnitus-like ringing in all our ears.
Any sound we emitted was quickly absorbed, too, with almost no echo. Despite several broken windows and a direct opening in the floor to an outside crawl space, there were no signs of life. In the fall in the South, one would expect to see a roach or an earwig or some sort of insect, but there were none. Not event a moth fluttering around our flashlights.
As we took note of all these environmental factors and chatted about how, while the building is pretty creepy, there didn't seem to be anything unexplainable going on, John and I locked eyes. At almost the same instant, an unmistakable scent had hit us both.
It was the smell of a just-lit cigar. Not your run-of-the-mill convenience store cigar. A pure, genuine, undeniable cigar.
"Do you smell that?" I said.
"One side of my nose is stopped up, but yeah, I smell it," John replied.
Lee said he didn't smell it, but he walked across the room between us, and as he entered an adjoining office it hit him.
"Guys, it's right here," he said. "I smell it right here."
In another minute it was gone.
It was the only event of the night we all experienced and for which we couldn't come up with a logical, scientific explanation. We explained away shadow movement as our own silhouettes bouncing off glass or mirrors; we explained odd pinpoints of light on the wall as refractions from passing headlights; but there was no reason for the smell of cigar smoke.
There was no one nearby outside, no vehicles had passed in the last five or 10 minutes and none of us had a cigar. It verified the claims of former employees, and all three of us experienced it.
Shortly afterwards, we all also noted a drop in temperature - something paranormal investigators say may be a sign of an attempt to manifest. While it could well have been a draft from outside, it was unusual in the suddenness with which the change happened.
While checking the temperature drop with a laser thermometer, John experienced a sudden battery drain despite having installed a brand new battery in the thermometer.
By 10:30, though, everything had stopped, and other than passing traffic and three trains rumbling past, the dead silence returned.
We packed up our gear and around midnight all headed home, still trying to digest everything we experienced in the flutter of activity just after 10 p.m.
I'm still perplexed. But even as a skeptic, I can't deny something unexplainable happened Saturday night in the old Castleberry bank.
And it may happen every night when the dead president checks on his bank, puffing a cigar as he does.
(Special thanks to the Castleberry Town Council for graciously allowing us access to this landmark in their town.)
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