Early in October, contributor Ripley Scott sent out a call for real-life stories of paranormal experiences — and our readers delivered. Read “Part I: SoKno Edition” and stay tuned for Part III this Friday, just in time for Halloween.
Knoxville has long been a city at the crossroads, where interstates, rivers and railways intersect and carry people, stories and secrets through its valleys.
When I-40 and I-75 were completed here in the 1960s and ’70s, they quite literally connected Knoxville to the rest of the country, making it a hub of movement and exchange.
But long before that, this land had always been a meeting place where the Tennessee River carved paths through limestone and where generations of people built, traveled and rebuilt again. The city’s geography made it a gathering point, but it also made it a threshold.
And thresholds, according to Appalachian lore, are where things tend to linger.
The stories that follow come from people who have carried the paranormal with them and learned that what unsettles us can’t always be left behind. And in a place like Knoxville that has welcomed so many over time, it makes sense that even ghosts might feel invited to settle in.
Sasha’s story begins, as many do, with the quiet work of sorting through her parents’ things.
She and two of her sisters had gathered to clean out their childhood home in Indiana after both their mother and father had passed.
At one point, Sasha and one sister went out to dinner while the other stayed behind to keep working through her belongings. She had lived abroad for years and still had boxes of personal items to sort through.
Partway through the evening, Sasha’s phone rang. Her sister, the one who had stayed behind, sounded shaken. She’d heard a startling heavy crash, bolted out the front door and refused to go back inside. She begged her sisters to rush back.
When Sasha returned, she found her standing across the street beneath the streetlight, too afraid to re-enter on her own. Her face was pale, her hands trembling. She was hysterical.
Inside, the house was quiet again. They followed the sharp scent of dust and glass to the dining room and discovered the source of the sound, a crystal cake stand that had been sitting untouched on what the family had called for years “the blue table,” a dining room staple their father had built himself, a sturdy wooden base topped with a smooth, bright blue surface.
The glass had split cleanly into three gleaming pieces, its weight alone enough to make the shatter feel impossible.
There were three sisters there that night, and Sasha has no doubt that it was her father’s way of letting them know he was still there with them, that he was proud of them.
When Sasha moved to Knoxville to work at the University of Tennessee, she brought “the blue table” with her. It sits now in her home near downtown, steady and whole.
I’ve had dinner there myself, and I don’t know that I’ve ever met a newcomer who has settled in so naturally, hosting a table full of Knoxvillians like she’s always been here.
I like to think there’s a little magic in that table, that perhaps it’s her father’s newest way of showing how proud he is that the table he built decades ago is still creating and connecting new friends and family.
The following accounts are from an interview with a Knoxville resident who prefers anonymity. His stories are intense, so in effort to provide a bit of levity, we’ll call him “The Buzzard.” The accounts are real, the details his own.
The Buzzard’s memories are more unsettling and harder to set aside, full of sudden violence and tangible horror.
He and his family have seen enough to make you think they’re magnets for the paranormal.
The Buzzard is one of those people who talks about hauntings the way other folks talk about the weather: casually and with a touch of humor, but never with disbelief. He grew up in a big family in rural Pennsylvania, six of them total including his parents and three brothers. The first haunting he remembers began with a power outage.
The entire family was home that night, gathered in the same room, when the lights suddenly went out.
“We heard a crash, and then my brother screamed,” he told me. “When the power came back, he had a pair of scissors impaled through his tongue.”
Not too long after that disturbing incident, The Buzzard sat in confusion as another brother, who’d been quietly coloring at the kitchen table, stopped mid-stroke, his eyes unfocused like he was looking somewhere far away. Without a word, he reached for the same pair of scissors and drove them into his leg, only seeming to register what he’d done when the blood began to spill.
The family called them “the haunted scissors.” Their dad didn’t believe it. “He said we were all crazy,” The Buzzard explained, but the denial didn’t make the happenings stop.
Machines in the house started themselves. A lawn tractor roaring awake in the basement, a Bronco in the driveway lurching forward into the exterior wall of the house while no one was around to even turn on the engine.
The very same Bronco was what almost crushed his mother later. The next time it took on a life of its own it went straight towards her. She was saved only by a door that happened to jam at the right moment.
When asked if the house felt evil, The Buzzard shook his head. “Not evil,” he said. “Just charged.”
His mother saw things too, a man’s face appearing in the air near the bathroom door, hovering in that space where the hallway turns and shadows thicken. “Just the face,” she told the family, “Angry.”
One night, his younger brother got up in the middle of the night and stopped cold in the hallway.
Floating there was a legless apparition, moving soundlessly toward their parents’ bedroom.
The next morning, their mother said she’d seen it too, at the foot of her bed. When they went to look, there was an indentation on her blanket.
When asked how his father explained that, The Buzzard just laughed.
“He didn’t. He’d been in Vietnam. He didn’t talk about feelings. But he saw enough in that house to eventually stop calling us crazy.”
Years later, the family left Pennsylvania for Tennessee. His dad built a new house for them in Loudon County.
“My mom was out there painting one night,” he said, “and she heard a voice come out of the dark. Just said, ‘It’s me.’”
She believed whatever had haunted them up north had followed.
After his father’s death, a black dog began appearing in their yard. The Buzzard says it barked in his father’s voice. “Not a metaphor. It spoke. It sounded just like him.”
His mother later said the same dog had visited her own father years before. “It’s a mimic,” she told him. “A messenger.”
Something that keeps watch rather than seeks harm. And it appears that protective watch has proven steady over the years.
The Buzzard now lives with his partner in the Parkridge neighborhood of Knoxville, in a home they painted bright, joyful colors during the pandemic while hearing only the voices of each another. That home is where they raised her children, who are now young adults.
Behind the house, he keeps a small studio filled with his collection of creepy and curious things, mementos from a lifetime of encounters with the strange.
Whatever once followed him seems quieter here, if not at peace. It’s as though, when it arrived in Tennessee along with his family years ago, he made the decision not to try and cast it out but instead to pull up a chair for it.
The Buzzard and Knoxville are kindred that way, both proving that peace isn’t about banishing what’s haunted you, but making space for it at the table.
When I asked if he’s afraid, he shrugged.
“I was when I was a kid. Now I just pay attention.”
Annaliese grew up on fairy tales, the dark, old-world kind that never promised happy endings.
So when she moved to Maryville and began to notice a large black dog appearing in her yard, she didn’t scare easily.
The dog had no collar and no tail, with pointed ears and eyes that seemed to know too much. It would appear without sound or warning, sometimes only a few yards away, watching her. Her own dog never barked.
She started calling it the Grimm, borrowing from the old European stories of spectral black dogs said to guard the boundary between worlds. But this one never growled, never lunged. It simply appeared and vanished again, always silent, never caught on her security camera.
Whether it’s an omen or a guardian, she isn’t sure. “It’s not menacing,” she told me. “It’s like it’s just keeping watch.”
And if The Buzzard’s stories are any indication, maybe it is. Maybe the Grimm is one of those things that travels, an echo from somewhere else, drawn to the living by memory, curiosity or unfinished work. Maybe it’s just another guest in a region that’s learned to keep an extra chair open for the unknown.
Knoxville, for all its history and steady presence, is now more than ever a place that welcomes movement. Of people, of ideas and yes, maybe even of the occasional restless spirit.
It’s a community that prides itself on embracing differences of culture, faith and whatever shape the unknown takes.
It’s one of the things I love most about Knoxville: that for a southern city, it’s an inclusive one. And maybe even the ghosts seem to sense that.
Maybe they drift through, sometimes hitching a ride along with the furniture and boxes in moving trucks, or maybe by traveling simply in the memories of newcomers.
And maybe, like so many others who’ve found their way here, they choose to stay for a while.