The following are local ghost stories, as told by Barbara Wheeler Billingsley.
Old Dr. Bill
In the late ‘60s, I started working the night shift at Hamlet Hospital, our local hospital. One night, shortly after I began working, I was taking a break alone in a dimly lit second-floor waiting room. Looking up, I saw a gray-haired man in a long, white robe between the couch I was sitting on and another one on the opposite wall. As we stared at each other, he faded out and disappeared before my eyes.
As I walked through the lobby back to the first floor, where I was posted to work, I looked up at the portrait of the doctor who had founded the hospital, Dr. Bill James. Although he was wearing a dark suit, white shirt and tie, I knew that this was the face I had just seen in the waiting room. He had died years before, so I had never met him.
The white robe remained a mystery to me until several years later. One night, while working with an older nurse who had taken her training under the doctor, she stated, “I can see him now, wearing that long, white lab coat.” I knew then that it was not a robe, but a lab coat he was wearing the night he appeared to me.
The Little Man in Green
Paula G. was a nurse working at Hamlet Hospital when she told me about her uninvited house guest. Paula, her husband and three children moved to Hamlet from Columbia, South Carolina, and bought a house on Hamlet Avenue which had been built in the early 1900s.
Paula’s two daughters shared an upstairs bedroom, and one night, not long after moving in, the youngest girl told Paula she woke up during the night and saw a little man standing in front of her closet. He was wearing a green suit and a green hat. It scared her, and she pulled the bed covers up over her head. When she looked again, he was gone. Paula told her she must have been dreaming.
Later on, the older girl told her the same story about waking up to find the little man in a green suit and hat standing in front of the closet. He disappeared when she jumped up to go downstairs to tell her parents. Paula still thought they were dreaming or just had overactive imaginations.
One night, the older girl was spending the night away from home, and the younger girl asked Paula to sleep in the room with her because she was afraid to be alone. Over in the night, Paula woke up and it felt like someone else was in the room with them. She looked around the room and there he was. A little man dressed in a green hat and suit stood in front of the closet door just as the girls had described him. She could see him plain as day from the street light shining in the window. As she stared at him, he disappeared.
Paula asked one of her older neighbors about the former owners of the house and was told that a Bruton family had built the house and Mr. Bruton had died in the house. The neighbor described Mr. Bruton as being a small-framed man who always dressed in a matching suit and hat.
He appeared less often as time passed, Paula said, or either they had gotten so used to him that they slept through his “visits.”
The Walking Companion
Years ago in Hamlet, a neighbor child of P. Wright had an operation for a ruptured appendix and was seriously ill from infection. Ms. Wright had been worrying about him all day, so that evening when she got home from work, she decided to walk down the street to his house to see how he was doing.
It was late in the afternoon and getting dark when she started down the street. As she reached the Baucom house and was walking along beside it, a man stepped out from behind a hedge and fell into step beside her. Thinking it was the boy’s father, she asked, “How is David doing?”
When the man didn’t answer, she turned to look at him. Lo and behold, it was not the boy’s father but his grandfather who had passed away a couple of years before. He disappeared as she stared at him.
It scared her so badly, she turned around and went back home. David did get well. Ms. Wright had always said she would never believe in ghosts unless she saw one. Now, she believes …
