The ghost and the tax commissioner: A haunting in downtown Rome

I’m pretty sure I believe in ghosts. By that I mean that while I can’t say definitively that I’ve encountered ghosts, I have an open mind to it. There’s a lot we don’t yet understand about the universe.

So it’s with that open mind that I agreed to go on a “ghost hunt” downtown on Saturday.

It all started when Tax Commissioner Kevin Payne invited me to lunch. Now normally I don’t get invited to lunch by the big mucky-mucks of city government on account of my ongoing love-hate relationship with City Manager Sammy Rich. I love to make fun of him and he hates being seen in public with me.

Anyhow, I’m at lunch with THE Kevin Payne when he asks me if I believe in ghosts. A conversation ensues and I won’t bore you with the details, but at the end of it he asks me if I’d like to be a guest at a paranormal investigation at the old courthouse (the red brick one with the bell tower where you go pay for your car tags).

He claims that the Southern Paranormal Investigators are doing an investigation into alleged sightings and paranormal activity at the courthouse and he thinks it would be fun if I joined them. My old friend and media mogul Randy Davis would be going as well. So I said yes. At the very least it would make for a good column.

Kevin makes it sound like he’s just letting the investigators into the building and staying during the investigation because his office is there and he’s got all the keys and needs to make sure everything is kept safe and all the doors are locked up and all that stuff.

Ok, here’s the story behind the investigations. According to news reports, in 1951 a lady named Nellie Boswell was filing for divorce from her husband. She had named Eucell Haney as the “other woman” responsible for breaking up her marriage. Well, Eucell was on her way into court with her sisters when Nellie steps out from an alcove near the entrance of the courthouse, pistol in hand, and proceeds to unload the weapon at Eucell. She kills Eucell, and bullet holes and marks can still be seen in a doorway and on the walls today. Nellie was tried in that same courtroom and found not guilty of murder.

So people have said that the restless spirits of one or both women still walk the halls of the courthouse to this day.

Knowing all that, I went to the courthouse on Saturday at 5 p.m. for a “briefing” by the investigation team. Now I should add here that I was FAR more skeptical of the Southern Paranormal Investigators than I was of ghosts. I have seen similar teams on television and they look like they’re just out to make people believe every little light or sound is a ghost.

When I get there, lo and behold, who do I see but tax commissioner Kevin Payne decked out in a Southern Paranormal Investigators T-shirt. HE’S A MEMBER. Bounce to me (as my friend Brandy would say “unbeknownst to me”) our tax commissioner is a ghost hunting enthusiast when he’s not collecting our taxes. He tried to play it off like he was just there to observe, but I wasn’t buying that.

So anyhow, I learned that the Southern Paranormal Investigators, made up of locals from Rome and Cave Spring, is really an honest-to-goodness investigative team whose job it is to investigate and debunk a lot of strange happenings. They don’t go out looking for ghosts. Most of what they do is to actually investigate sightings and sounds and find the perfectly logical explanations for them.

The team’s leader, Barry, said that most of what they do is investigate private and commercial properties and end up assuring residents that there are perfectly logical explanations for the things they’re experiencing. And they don’t charge for their investigations. But they do have a lot of very expensive equipment —including infra-red cameras and audio recording devices and TV monitors and computers to conduct their investigations — much of which Barry purchased himself.

So we break up into three groups, I’m in the first one along with Barry and that charlatan Kevin Payne and Cave Spring mayor Dennis Shoaf. Another group goes downstairs into the basement and the third group stays in a “control room” with monitors and walkie-talkies to observe and communicate with us if they need to.

OK. So we’re up in the old courtroom which is big and in my opinion very beautiful. It’s pitch black and we all find somewhere comfortable to sit or stand. There are cameras set up and an audio recording device. Now I have to mention here that it’s the team’s policy to “tag” every sound we can account for, meaning that if we move and it makes a sound we acknowledge that or if we hear a car driving past outside we call that out. It’s a way of accounting for all the sounds the recorder will pick up.

Barry then starts trying to communicate with whatever spirits might be there. He asks questions and essentially tries to talk with the spirits. He addresses Nellie and Eucell and whoever else might be in there with us. We wait for sounds and if we hear nothing we keep going.

Now I’m sittin’ there in that jury box hoping I’ll see something, but that whatever it is will happen to Kevin Payne so that I can see it happen but not have it actually happen to me.

The minutes go by and it’s deathly quiet up there. Every now and again a car might drive by but that’s about it. Then we distinctly heard a woman’s voice call out in distress. They check to make sure no one’s walking by on the street below. I clearly heard a woman’s voice say “Sadie or Lady” but no more.

After the allotted time, we went back down to the control room where we listened to the audio. Like I said, they accounted for everything except that in the first few minutes of the session a woman’s voice clearly says “Hey you,” then laughs. I don’t think the recorder picked up the “Sadie or Lady” I heard, but it picked up a woman’s laughter that we cannot account for.

My next session would be deep in the basement of the old courthouse where an old holding cell is said to be the home of a massive bailiff who guarded these doors many, many years ago.