The Boy in the Bedroom
I don’t remember the move-in day.
I couldn’t tell you what color the walls were, what furniture was there, or what anyone was saying. I was only three years old. But I remember the boy who wasn’t there.
We had just moved into a brand-new house on a mountaintop in North Georgia. My parents had built it themselves, every board and windowpane full of hope for a new beginning. The driveway was steep, the land still raw and red from construction. I remember the dip and rise of the roads, like we were living on the bones of giants.
I was standing in the doorway of what would become my bedroom, sunlight slanting in from the window behind me, the air still full of sawdust and fresh paint. That’s when I saw him.
A boy. My age. Maybe younger.
He walked across the room without a sound. Calm. Purposeful. Like he belonged there. He didn’t look at me. Didn’t speak. But every part of me knew: he wasn’t supposed to be there.
When I turned to tell someone, he was already gone. And no one believed me.
But I’ve never forgotten him.
And in many ways, he never really left.
Guitars, Gospel, and Ghosts
My childhood was built on guitars, gospel, and ghosts.
My grandfather was a country musician. Played in Jerry Reed’s band, back in the days when you made music with your hands and your heartbreak. He was the kind of man who carried himself with quiet confidence, polished shoes, and a voice that could hush a room or fill it with warmth.
I learned to play sitting on the edge of his bed. My small fingers clumsy on the strings, his voice a steady anchor. He never rushed me. Never corrected with anything but a smile and a story.
And oh, the stories.
He talked about Heaven like it was a place you could get to with a good heart and a stubborn soul. He believed in grace, in redemption, in things unseen.
But he also believed in ghosts.
He’d tell me about strange lights in the hollers, about voices that echoed where no one stood, about shadows that followed a little too closely. He’d sip his coffee slow and say, “Son, there’s more truth in a ghost story than most folks find in a courtroom.”
He gave me music. He gave me belief. And he gave me a way to see the world that never left me.
The Streets That Speak
People always ask how I ended up in the ghost tour business. They expect me to say it was a side job, something to help pay the bills. But that’s not the truth.
It was never just a job.
I loved ghosts. Loved the feeling of walking into a room and knowing it remembered something. Loved the tension of a whisper in the dark. Loved the way history and mystery tangled together like vines on an old fence.
I read everything I could about hauntings—not just the folklore, but the theories. Parapsychology, EVP phenomena, the Stone Tape theory, residual energy. I spent nights in abandoned houses, recording empty hallways and waiting for voices that might never come. I wasn’t just curious. I was devoted.
And then came Savannah.
The first time I walked those cobblestone streets, it felt like the past reached out and took my hand. The city breathes history. You can smell it in the moss, hear it in the hush between footsteps. The air is heavy here, not with humidity, but with memory.
When I became a guide, I didn’t recite stories. I summoned them.
I carried a lantern not just to light the way, but to honor the dead. Each tour was a walk through sacred ground. Every house, every square, every shuttered window held a secret. And sometimes, if you stood still long enough, they would share it with you.
It wasn’t about fear. It was about remembrance.
Destiny
Her name was Destiny. And some nights, I still wonder if fate lives up to it.
We were supposed to meet after one of my tours. Nothing big. Just a drink, a conversation. She was waiting on me downtown while I wrapped things up—ghost stories and goodbyes, another night walking the line between the living and the dead.
But she never showed up.
She called me. Her voice—fragmented, distant. Like it was breaking up between dimensions. I couldn’t make sense of it. She sounded terrified. Said she needed help. Said something wasn’t right. But she didn’t know where she was.
And I couldn’t get to her.
I searched the streets that night. Called her phone until it rang itself hoarse. Walked every block I thought she might be on. Asked bartenders, checked alleyways, retraced every step I could think of.
But I found nothing.
The next morning, I found out the truth.
Someone had drugged her drink while she was waiting for me. Took her to a hotel. She died there. An overdose.
And I wasn’t there to stop it.
I’ve walked through haunted houses with unseen voices whispering my name and felt calm. But nothing has haunted me like that night. Nothing ever will.
I still hear her voice sometimes. Not in the way ghosts talk on EVP, not in the way spirits whisper in the halls—but in that final phone call, caught between sound and silence.
Some ghosts don’t show up in the dark. Some show up in the things we wish we could change.
And some follow us quietly, a soft echo in the heart, a grief that never finds rest.
The Haunted Mansion & the Last Goodbye
It was an old mansion in downtown Savannah. Towering and weathered, tucked behind iron gates and moss-laced oaks. It was the kind of place where the past hadn’t just lingered—it had settled in.
We didn’t go there that night for research or for show. We went because we needed quiet. Because the world felt too loud. Because sometimes, old places know how to hold heavy things.
We climbed the narrow staircase, each step creaking beneath our weight, and made our way to an upstairs room that faced the street. The wallpaper was peeling, the fireplace cold. There were two chairs in the corner—matching, high-backed, worn smooth with time.
We sat across from each other, a half-finished bottle of red wine between us, our feet resting on an old trunk. The air was thick with dust and candle smoke. Shadows stretched long across the floor, and the room felt wrapped in velvet hush.
He was my best friend.
Not just a companion. A constant. The kind of person who knows your silences better than most people know your voice. We had hunted ghosts together, cracked jokes in cemeteries, chased theories deep into the night. We had talked about death more than most people ever dare.
That night, we didn’t need answers. We just needed to talk.
We spoke of everything—about grief, and memory, and what it means to be truly known by someone. We laughed. God, we laughed. The kind of laugh that hurts your ribs and heals something in your chest.
I can still hear it.
And then the candles burned low. And the room grew still.
And by morning, he was gone.
A heart attack. Sudden. Final. Cruel in its speed.
Sometimes I still walk past that old house and I swear I see him in the window staring down at me. And I cry like a man who knew what it meant to be haunted.
Because some friendships never really end. They just change shape.
Grief is Its Own Haunting
When my father died, there were no secret journals. No hidden keys or relics. What he left behind wasn’t a mystery—it was slow, quiet suffering. I watched him disappear by degrees, not all at once. A man who once stood tall in my eyes, who carried the world with quiet dignity, faded before me. Pain hollowed him out year by year, and I didn’t know how to stop it. I didn’t understand it.
And by the time I did, it was too late.
I loved him—but I didn’t say it enough. I didn’t ask the questions I should’ve asked. I didn’t see him clearly until he was already gone. Now, all I have are the photos. Faded prints in cracked frames, moments too still, too quiet. They don’t speak. They just stare back, asking nothing—and saying everything.
That kind of absence doesn’t come with a bang. It creeps in. It settles behind your ribs and stays there. It hums in empty rooms and echoes in your chest. Like dusk. Slow. Heavy. Unstoppable.
Grief didn’t come crashing in. It crept. Quiet. Relentless. A fog that settled behind my eyes and made the world feel distant. I’d reach for the phone to call him, then stop halfway. I’d hear a song he liked and find myself crying in the canned goods aisle.
But what hit me hardest was the quiet.
The silence of a room after someone has gone—truly gone—is unlike any other. It’s not peace. It’s not calm. It’s a kind of emptiness that hums beneath everything, like a radio tuned to static. It makes the walls feel too close and the air too thin. You walk into a space they once filled, and everything feels wrong. You hear their voice in your head, but nowhere else. You wait for footsteps that never come.
I sat in his favorite chair once, after the funeral, just to feel something. The cushion still remembered him. The armrest was warm with old use. But the room was deafening in its silence. Like it, too, was grieving.
He wasn’t a ghost in the traditional sense. He didn’t knock on walls or move things across the table. But he was there. In the quiet. In the ache.
I realized then that some hauntings aren’t about places. They’re about people. About the way they echo in us after they’re gone.
.
Walking With the Dead
All of these moments—my grandfather’s songs, my father’s silence, the friend who left a chair empty, the voice on the other end of a broken call—they’ve stitched themselves together in me. Threaded through my days like veins of memory beneath skin.
I’ve spent my life chasing ghosts. But not to prove anything. Not to scare anyone. I chase them because they remind me that we’re all echoes of something else.
The people we love. The places we leave behind. The parts of ourselves we lose along the way.
Ghosts are not the enemy. They are the evidence.
Evidence that something mattered. That someone was here. That they felt something. Loved something. Lost something.
I walk through graveyards not to mourn the dead, but to remind the living. I speak the names of those long gone because I believe that memory has power.
In every whisper on a still night, in every chill that raises the hair on your arms, in every shadow that passes just out of view—there is a message:
You are not alone.
Some people run from ghosts. Some try to forget them.
Me?
I walk beside them.
Because I know what it means to be haunted. And I know the grace in being remembered. And maybe—just maybe—in walking with the dead, we learn how to better live with the living.
