A HAUNTING WE WILL GO

THE HAUNT HOPPER: A GHOSTLY GUIDE TO MOORESVILLE

Historian and history teacher Chris Stonestreet shares three of his spookiest local legends—plus one from his father and fellow historian

BY TAYLOR BOWLER

O.C.“Chris” Stonestreet IV, is a lifelong Mooresville resident who teaches history at Mooresville High School. Free Range In 2016, he published “Curse of the Wampus, and Other Short Spooky Stories of Piedmont North Carolina,” Brewing provides a a collection of 10 local legends he’s investigated over the years. His family has lived in the area for more than wide variety of local a century, so his fascination with history and folklore spans generations. craft beers and a wide variety of local Here are his stories from three local haunts, in his own words. beer drinkers.

The Shinnville Witch

“Just outside the wall of the 200-year-old Mills Family Cemetery near St. James Episcopal Church on Shinnville Road, there’s a small headstone without a name. The legend is, it’s a witch that was killed and buried outside the wall, and her soul still lurks there. It may have been a bogeyman story, or a case of parents trying to keep their children in at night or away from the cemetery.

“Seven years ago, I was part of a team from the church to investigate the possibilities of lost or unmarked graves. The church had started burying people there without realizing there were already bodies there. Within weeks, we identifi ed a number of unmarked graves outside of the original walls. Turns out, in the 19th century, people who had committed suicide, murder, or were deemed evil couldn’t be buried in consecrated grounds. But the Mills Cemetery was also established before the Civil War, and burials were segregated. So there is a stone there now that says something like, ‘To the beloved servants, you’re not forgotten.” The church came out and blessed the area, so once they found out, they tried to right that wrong. A legend led to us doing really good research and giving peace to those forgotten for 150 years.”

O.C. “Chip” Stonestreet III has researched and written about Iredell County history for most of his life. He taught 8th-grade history at Iredell County Schools for more than 30 years and has written two books. For the last 13 years, he’s penned a weekly column for the Statesville Record & Landmark. Here, he shares one of his favorite local legends:

“It’s di cult to know what to do with reports of a quadrupedal mammal, a voracious omnivore that fi rst appeared in and around Statesville 130 years ago. It would be easy to dismiss the so-called ‘sightings’ of the beast as practical jokes or the misidentifi cation of native but elusive species.

“Joseph P. Caldwell, editor of the Statesville Landmark and later The Charlotte Observer, introduced Iredell County readers to the Santer (or Wampus as it was later called) on the front page of his newspaper of August 28, 1890.

“Some critics maintain that this initial story was pure fabrication. According to one eyewitness, the creature: ‘Is made in the shape of a lion, has a thick, short head, and a thick woolly body up to its head from his fore shoulders and runs out thin at the other end with a long thin tail with a brush on the end of it. It is as long as Mr. Key’s big black dog and has a white breast. It is about as high as a half-grown hound but heavier. It has a loping motion and clears about eight feet at a lope … ‘ “The mysterious beastie was the chief topic of conversation around Iredell’s county seat in the days that followed. More rumors swirled. ‘It eats dogs, hogs, and young children bodaciously up and is a dangerous animal to be running loose …’

“In those days, newspapers unabashedly copied stories, and The Landmark’s article was republished widely. Soon there were similar sightings around the Piedmont and even further afi eld. Eventually the sightings subsided, but parents sometimes used the creature as a bugaboo to herd children, as in, ‘You’d better not play in the woods after dark, or the Wampus just might get you!’

“There have been more recent sightings of an unknown, Loch Ness Monster-like animal, ‘Normie,’ said to be a resident of Lake Norman. Whether this is our historical Santer or Wampus, or some new crypto-biological entity, remains to be seen—or, perhaps, not seen.”

The Girl at the Underpass The Magnolia Gym

“On a road just south of Jamestown, a girl named Lydia was trying to get home from a party one night. She fl agged down a young man who picked her up, and she told him where to turn onto her street. When he got out of the car to open her door, she’d vanished. He thought maybe she’d run ahead, so he went to the house to ring the doorbell. An old woman answered, and he explained that he’d picked Lydia up by the overpass to drive her home, but she was no longer in the car.

“The woman said that Lydia was her daughter, and she was killed in a wreck by that overpass in 1923. She explained that he wasn’t the fi rst one this had happened to; Lydia’s ghost still fl ags down a driver some nights. I’d heard this story since I was a young boy. Lydia’s family still lives in the area. Maybe it was a manifestation of someone trying to get back home.

“When I investigated this story, a library archivist said Lydia died in 1923 coming back from a New Year’s Eve party. Her car hit one of the walls and probably fl ung her out. They built a new overpass in the ’60s on High Point Road; Lydia’s Bridge is actually the old abandoned underpass on the right, about 100 yards in just through the trees, but you can still see it. I found that original concrete underpass and used it for the cover of my book.” “There’s a haunted gym across the street from Mooresville High School, built in 1967. Multiple people have heard a basketball bouncing after a girl was killed in the early ’70s; the lunch crew, janitors, even the principal who doesn’t believe in this stu . I heard about it in high school when I was there, but I’d never personally seen anything.

“The story is, there was a girl named Tina who was really good at basketball. She had college scouts after her as a freshman. But she died in a car wreck in ’70 or ’71. After that, people started hearing a basketball bouncing and a girl’s voice in the locker room. My father knew one of the coaches there for 30 years, a guy named Al. Al told him one night as he was closing up, he turned o the lights to leave and heard a ball drop and roll. He turned the lights back on and didn’t see anything. When he got about halfway down the court, he heard a girl’s voice say, ‘Do you want to play a game?’ He turned and ran, didn’t even lock up.

“I used to coach volleyball there, and about three or four years ago, we were in the gym for practice one Saturday. The girls were setting the net up and facing me, so I was facing the main entrance. O to the side were the cleaning supplies, and I saw all of them being fl ung into the air to all corners of the gym. I swear I saw it with my own two eyes. I can’t explain it; I can just say that in a highly tra cked area like a school or a church or a hospital, eventually some things happen that are unexplained. Maybe energy like that stays in a place.”