Whispering ghosts in the little old church

Published 1:04 pm Wednesday, August 8, 2012

One of Scout Executive Lawrence L. Stanley’s favorite ghost stories around the campfire at Camp Old Indian happened to his own relatives in the mid 1800s.
Two brothers had decided to go to a neighboring state to work in a copper mine. The day before they were to leave, the older brother was forced to challenge a local bully to a fistfight and bested him. Since the bully had previously sworn out a warrant against another fellow who had done so, the brothers decided to hasten their departure.
They worked in the mine for over a year and decided to return home. Hopefully, any outstanding warrant would have been forgotten by that time.
Taking no chances, however, they decided it would be safer to travel after dark, especially after they crossed the state line.
They climbed down from the train in a neighboring county and started down a country road that led some twenty miles to their home community in another county.
In earlier years, a one-room, grey unpainted church building was built by several farm families alongside the roadway just inside the home county.
It stood on a hill overlooking a creek that ran into the Toccoa River. Nearby was the old graveyard, which contained the graves of three men who had been murdered during the Civil War. The church and graveyard were avoided by neighborhood people after dark.

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