The Ghosts Next Door: Still Here

Editor’s Note: IOK’s resident spooky storyteller Ripley Scott is back this year with a fresh batch of locals’ supernatural accounts. See last year’s stories: Part I, SoKno Edition | Part II, Outside of Knoxville, Looking in | Part III, Knoxville Is Alive. We’re All Hallows Eve, all week here; be sure to find your own Personalized Halloween Planner, a comprehensive list of events happening in and around downtown this week, here. And you have until midnight to enter our inaugural pumpkin contest, for a chance to win tickets to Halloween shows at The Mill & Mine (Pilot Light fundraiser) and The 808! 

I spent last October collecting other people’s ghosts. I’ve always been fascinated by the unexplained, but I’d never experienced anything I couldn’t explain myself.

Then came December.

Astrophotography is one of my favorite excuses to wander around East Tennessee in the middle of the night. Sometimes friends come along. Sometimes it’s just me, a camera and a destination far enough from city lights to see the stars.

One night, driving away from downtown in search of darker skies, I missed a turn. My GPS wasn’t cooperating, and I found myself alone on an unfamiliar two-lane road.

That’s when I noticed something standing in my lane.

At first, I thought it was a kid. As I approached, I realized it was a great horned owl. An enormous, living owl, staring straight through my windshield.

It didn’t move.

I eased into the opposite lane and drove around it, then realized I’d committed a fairly embarrassing offense for a photographer.

I hadn’t taken a picture.

I stopped, raised my camera and pressed the shutter button. Nothing seemed to happen. Thinking the camera was off, I lowered it to check the switch.

It was on.

When I looked up, the owl was gone.

In its place stood what looked like an enormous black dog.

Its legs seemed impossibly long, its body rectangular, almost like a table viewed from the side with a head attached. It appeared to be standing exactly where the owl had been.

I’d looked away for only a second.

Did that owl just shapeshift?

I was afraid, but beneath the fear was something harder to describe. I thought to myself, “I shouldn’t be here.” 

I took a photograph and left.

Later, at a gas station, I discovered why my camera hadn’t seemed to respond. I’d programmed it to my astrophotography settings, with a shutter speed of around 12 seconds.

Wonderful for capturing starlight. Terrible for photographing a mysterious animal with shaky hands.

The images were a blurry mess, but I’d finally had a strange experience of my own.

So naturally, I sent them to my friend, who I’ll refer to as “Dave.”

Dave and I have talked about the unexplained for years. Aliens, cryptids and things people swear they saw and things they wish they hadn’t. I’ve always been fascinated by those stories, but fascination isn’t necessarily belief.

Dave, on the other hand, has plenty of stories of his own.

We sat down at La Piñata to talk about them, and he told me his relationship with the unexplained began before he was born.

Dave’s father died just before his birth. His mother later described strange things happening around the house, including lights and a baby mobile that seemed to turn themselves on and off. She believed his father was making his presence known, and she responded to him aloud, “We’re okay.”

I found that detail particularly moving. A child grows up without knowing his father, but with stories suggesting that perhaps his father knew him.

Other experiences were considerably less comforting.

Dave remembers seeing the cover of Whitley Strieber’s Communion, a book about alleged encounters with nonhuman beings, in a grocery store when he was just 6 or 7 years old. Something about the face with its enormous dark eyes felt markedly familiar to him, triggering a panic attack. He remembers crying and running away from the book.

Years later, on a scouting trip, Dave and several others, including adult leaders, watched unusual lights moving through the night sky. He remembers them darting back and forth, appearing to play with one another. Nobody seemed to know what they were watching.

These are hardly Dave’s only encounters with the unexplained. 

He’s had multiple sightings of what he described to me as “green orbs, black triangles and brief glitches in a sky full of cloaked forms,” and spent considerable time researching them. (He recommends watching the documentary “They Live,” by John Carpenter, if you’re curious about the phenomenon.) 

Dave’s research and personal experiences have gradually changed how he understands the things that once frightened him. These days, curiosity has largely replaced fear.

When I described the animal I’d seen on the road, Dave talked about perception. Our senses capture only a fraction of the world around us, he suggested, and our brains do their best to interpret the rest.

It’s a thought I’ve returned to more than once.

Mine had been trying to identify something in the dark. First a child. Then an owl. Then something that looked like a dog, except not quite.

Dave didn’t offer a definitive explanation.

“I can’t give you undeniable truth or undeniable evidence of anything,” he told me. “But it’s all very real to me.”

That’s why I thought to send him those photographs. I knew he wouldn’t need me to arrive with an explanation before he’d be willing to listen.

Kat, a local musician, has a more practical approach to living with the unexplained.

She once lived with her band in a house on Forest Avenue in The Fort where strange occurrences became part of everyday life.

One involved a bathroom door secured with a simple hook latch.

Kat says the hook would come undone whenever someone used the bathroom, sending the door swinging open at unfortunate moments.

Determined to catch it happening, she tried staring directly at the latch.

Nothing.

The moment she looked away, it came loose.

After enough unexpected interruptions, the band arrived at a solution.

They removed the bathroom door.

Not the latch. The entire door.

Then there was the newspaper.

One winter night, Kat heard a tremendous noise, something like a freight train followed by applause. When she opened her bedroom door, she says, a copy of Metro Pulse, Knoxville’s former alternative weekly newspaper, was rising into the air and falling back to the floor.

Then rising again.

And falling again.

The windows were closed. She couldn’t see anything moving it.

Kat considered going to a roommate’s room, but that meant passing by the newspaper. Instead, she went back to bed, pulled the covers over her head and turned on some music. An understandable decision.

There were other peculiarities. Cabinets opened and closed. The band’s dog seemed to watch and follow things nobody else could see. Kat remembers the sensation of someone passing an open bedroom doorway when no one else was home.

Eventually, the residents learned to live with the house’s reputation.

Which raises an obvious question.

Why stay?

“Because it was cheap,” Kat explained.

There it is.

Given Knoxville’s rental market, I suspect plenty of people would make the same calculation.

Even with a bathroom that had no door.

Last October, when I began The Ghosts Next Door, I wanted to know what Knoxville residents had experienced, what they believed and what the places around us might reveal when people started talking.

The stories led me through quarries, cemeteries, old buildings and neighborhoods I thought I knew.

They also led me into people’s lives.

A strange experience might open the conversation, but what followed was often something more familiar: grief, family history, curiosity or the way a particular place becomes inseparable from the things that happened there.

I didn’t expect to find myself on the other side of that conversation.

But there I was in December, sitting at a gas station with a camera full of unusable photographs and trying to describe what I’d seen.

I still have the pictures.

They show almost nothing.

But I remember the owl in my headlights. The way it stood perfectly still. The moment I looked up from my camera and saw a different shape in the road.

And that strange sensation of having stumbled upon a private moment that didn’t belong to me.

I still don’t know what I saw that night, but the experience has stayed with me. I keep thinking about how readily we adapt to things we can’t explain and how we find ways to make room for them in our lives. 

I wonder if that comes from something older than our need to make sense of everything. Some familiarity with the unknown that we’ve never quite lost.

Knoxville has no shortage of stories like these. And apparently, neither do I.

Welcome back to The Ghosts Next Door.