Sorrel Weed House - Carriage House Second Floor

Carriage House Second Floor

I wanted to finalize my posts for The Sorrel Weed House in Savannah with an extended audio clip that, to me, is one of the more remarkable ones that I have ever encountered due to its' length & relevancy to what was being said by our tour guide at the time the recording was made.  On this particular evening, my wife and I were lucky enough to have Bradley Dilling as our tour guide.  Bradley has an incredible grasp of history and is a fabulous story teller, especially when it comes to the history and legends of Savannah (search him out before going to Savannah - trust me you won't be disappointed).  During the tour, as Bradley was telling us the story of Francis Sorrel's affair with Molly (his servant), his wife Matilda's discovery of the affair & her resulting suicide and the murder of Molly as described by the psychic that Bradley walked through the house, you can begin to hear the voice of a woman talking over Bradley's voice and continue for several minutes. What is fascinating to me is that Bradley had a captive audience that evening. Everyone in the room was silent for the majority of the time that he was telling us the story, yet you hear a woman, with what sounds like a Caribbean accent, going on a diatribe in the background. And yes, you guessed it, Molly was a slave taken from the Caribbean and brought to Savannah.  Keep in mind that, not only were the people on the tour not speaking at this time, but there were no other people on the grounds since it was almost midnight and this was the last tour of the evening.  The other interesting aspect of this clip is the relevancy it has to what Bradley is talking about at the time.  As he begins to speak about the psychic's experience with the "dead girl" who was "running her mouth" and "in her face", the woman's voice becomes louder.  And when Bradley tells the portion of the story about the dead girl explaining to the psychic that Francis and his buddy killed her, you can hear the woman, with her heavy accent say "yeah he did it".  There are other moments when Bradley pauses between sentences and you can hear the woman say "yeah, yeah" and "yes" seemingly in agreement with his account of the facts.  Anyway, without further ado, here is the clip in its' entirity.

The following are short sound clips, highlighting some of the clearest evps captured during this time on the second floor of the carriage house.

The first excerpt is a loud phrase in a woman's voice, presumably in another language.



The second clip is the evp that appears to be a response to the statement made by the tour guide right after he says that Francis and his buddy killed Molly (contrary to the official report at the time which stated that she had killed herself).



The final audio clip includes whispers both in a male and female voices, the words YEAH YEAH, more whispering and the word YES.  It seems really strange to me how, when the tour guide pauses two times during this clip, the voice that was continually rambling quietly in the background gets louder so that you can clearly hear YEAH YEAH and YES during the breaks..



Well that's it from the Sorrel Weed House (for now).  Next up, Savannah's most haunted bed & breakfasts: The Marshall House, The Kehoe House & The 17 Hundred 90 Inn & Restaurant!

See other posts about the Sorrel Weed House at Sorrel Weed House Savannah, Georgia 2011 & The Sorrel Weed House, Savannah Georgia 2012.

Sorrel Weed House, Savannah Georgia 2012

As I stated in my last blog, my wife and I were so captivated by Savannah and amazed by the findings from our first haunted holiday, we vowed to return as soon as we could manage it.  Thankfully, we were able to arrange to make a trip back to Savannah the following year.  The previous year we had stayed at The Marshall House.

The Marshall House

On this trip we decided to split our time between The Keyhoe House and The 17Hundred90 Inn (Room 204).

The Keyhoe House

17Hundred90 Inn

All three haunted hotels proved to be quite interesting, but that is a topic for another time..................

As part of our second visit to Savannah we elected to take the last Paranormal Ghost Tour at The Sorrel Weed House on two separate evenings.  The first evening's tour started with an orientation in the courtyard and a walk through the basement of the main house where we captured several photos with bright orbs that appear to be moving when you examine the images in succession, snapped a few seconds apart.

Sorrel Weed House Basement

Sorrel Weed House Basement

As we proceeded to explore the rest of the basement, the balls of light continued to show up in our photos.

Sorrel Weed House Basement

Sorrel Weed House Basement

Sorrel Weed House Basement

Sorrel Weed House Basement

Next, the tour took us upstairs where we once again took a photo of a orb in motion right below the cabinet with the two dishes on display.

Sorrel Weed House - Second Floor

However, one of the most fascinating photos that we took that evening was the image of the mirror over the fireplace.  If you look to the lower right hand corner of the picture you will see a reflection of something wearing a baggy white shirt, a black strap on its right shoulder (presumably one of two suspenders), and total darkness where the face should be.

Sorrel Weed House - Second Floor with Apparition in the Mirror

Sorrel Weed House - Close-up of Apparition in the Mirror on the Second Floor

Now, I have tried to come up with alternate explanations for this over the last year and a half but I have not been able to debunk this anomaly in the mirror.  I have looked at all the other photos as well as the video that we took during the evening, and I could not find anyone wearing this type of outfit (and no, there wasn't anyone on the tour that had a black void in lieu of a face). Of course, I wish that the man in the hat had not been standing directly in front of the spot where the thing would have been standing to create the reflection seen in the image, but such is life (or death - I'm not sure anymore). However, what I do know is that the entity seen in the mirror not only doesn't match the description of anyone else on the tour, but its' reflection is much darker than those cast by the two (real) men standing to the left of the mirror.  I simply have never run across anything like this before and I don't know what to make of it.

The tour progressed to the balcony on the second floor where Matilda, wife of Francis Sorrel, is said to have jumped to her death in the courtyard below after walking in on her husband and Molly (a slave girl who was very close to the family) having an affair.  We captured the following evp while listening to the tour guide tell the story about the circumstances leading up to Matilda jumping off the balcony.

Later, we moved on to the carriage house to see Molly's room on the second floor where she was found dead, hanging from the rafters shortly after her affair with Francis was discovered. We received several random evps in the carriage house that are interesting but don't seem to be connected in any logical way. 

When this evp was recorded no one in the group was talking.  At this point, we were all walking up the stairs to the second floor of the carriage house.

When these next three evps were recorded we were in Molly's room on the second floor of the carriage house.



The next evp was a funny one to hear later since the one guy on the tour (seen previously in the picture with the mirror) had a shaved head.

This evp was fascinating and a little frustrating since so many random phrases were jammed into a relatively short period of time.



The off-color and seemingly random nature of the content of most evps never ceases to amaze me.  I constantly catch myself trying to make sense of them and draw connections, but the truth is many evps yield very few answers but are intriguing nonetheless.

The tour finally concluded in the courtyard where it had begun and the other members of the tour quickly departed. However, since I had recorded such interesting evps in the root cellar of the carriage house the previous year, I asked the tour guide if I could investigate the area by myself while she locked up the house. She agreed and I proceeded to walk down into the dark, musty root cellar with my video camera and digital recorder in hand.  While I was in the cellar with the door shut in complete silence & darkness, I captured the following evps.  In the first two evps you will hear me ask questions related to the "secrets" that the spooky female voice illuded to when my wife and I were in the root cellar the previous year.  I did not get the same woman's voice this time however. Still, what I did capture was as surprising and unexpected as ever.



Not only did the next evp come through in a demonic sounding voice, similar to the one we recorded the previous year in the root cellar, but I really didn't appreciate it's response to my fairly simple question.

The last two evps from the root cellar (the first one from a female the second from a male) are pretty spooky but at least they don't sound demonic.

After about 20 minutes in the dark, dingy cellar of the carriage house, I had my fill for the evening and resurfaced to find my wife and the tour guide talking in the courtyard.  While I thanked the tour guide for letting me explore the root cellar my wife walked around the courtyard taking pictures. In these series of photos, taken one after the other a few seconds apart, we later found some of the best visual evidence for the existence of ghosts that we have ever collected.  In the last few photos that my wife took that evening in the courtyard, images of orbs floating randomly in the air give way to one photo that suddenly contains a figure of man.  

Sorrel Weed House - Courtyard

Sorrel Weed House - Courtyard

Sorrel Weed House - Courtyard

Sorrel Weed House - Courtyard with Apparition

Sorrel Weed House - Close-up of Apparition in Courtyard

As you scroll through the four pictures, pay close attention to the brick wall left of center that has a light shining up it and tree branches blocking the light creating a silhouette against the wall.  Compare the first three photos with the fourth.  In the fourth image, a man wearing a hat appears just in front of the light source, blocking out the wall, tree and most of the light.  However, when you get to the head of the figure, you can see the light from behind it shinning through the face just below the hat.  Have you been able to find Waldo yet?  I was simply amazed when I first saw this photo when we got home.  It seemed even more astonishing to me when I recalled that these pictures were taken about 45 minutes after the completion of the final tour of the evening, when everyone other than myself, my wife and the tour guide had left the premises. In addition, all three of us were standing on the opposite end of the courtyard out of camera range and, as I found out later, the tour guide had locked the gate to the courtyard while I was in the root cellar and actually had to unlock it for us when we left.

We returned to The Sorrel Weed House a couple days later and got more photos with orbs and a few more evps, but nothing could compare to what we encountered this particular evening.  This is why, when my wife and I are asked what places we have been to that we would consider to be truly haunted, one of the first places we mention is The Sorrel Weed House in Savannah, Georgia.  I hope that you can now better understand why we can make that claim with a great deal of confidence.

See other posts about the Sorrel Weed House at Sorrel Weed House Savannah, Georgia 2011 & The Sorrel Weed House - Carriage House Second Floor.

Sorrel Weed House, Savannah Georgia 2011

If you read my previous post, then you know that I was (and still am to a great degree) a skeptic when it comes to stories concerning paranormal occurrences.  Even though I have had many documented encounters of unexplained occurrences over the past few years, I am still very skeptical when I go to a location that has many stories of paranormal activity but very little evidence to support it.  This is particularly the case when the site in question is a for profit institution such as a restaurant, hotel, etc. that has a great deal riding on convincing people that the establishment is haunted.  On the other hand, I love history and I truly appreciate the work of historians who separate fact from fiction to create accurate written documentation that can be preserved for generations to come and allow individuals in the future to learn form the significant events in our past.  I also enjoy legends and the lessons that they can provide in an allegorical manner.  However, it is disturbing to me when legends are accepted as historical fact without any examination of the veracity of the stories that have been past down over many years.  Often times ghost stories suffer from this syndrome. Many individuals, with their desire for intrigue and need to find "proof" of an afterlife, are far too willing to believe legends at face value and fill in the cavernous gaps left by disparate evidence collected at a location that is believed to be haunted.  In truth, it is extremely difficult to provide unequivocal evidence for the existence of a particular entity in an attempt to lend support for a long standing legend. However, through sound paranormal research, the investigator can provide additional information to previous findings which may in turn someday be pieced together to provide answers to those experiencing paranormal occurrences, increase our historical understanding of a particular location and maybe even support a long standing legend. With this being said, I will provide links to the locations that we have examined so that you can read up on the legends, but I won't go into the back story too much myself.  What I hope to provide is an even handed examination of what we found so that you can compare our findings to the legends and make up your own mind about what (if anything) has been gained in our attempt to uncover the truth behind the stories of paranormal activity.

After I was made to see the light by the unseen little girl laughing in my living room, I became fascinated by the paranormal and began reading everything I could find on the topic and watching every show on television that had anything to do with ghosts.  However, prior to my personal experience with the paranormal I had no interest in the subject and had never seen shows such as Ghost Hunters, Ghost Adventures, Paranormal Witness, My Ghost Story, Dead Files, A Haunting, etc.  As I began consuming all of this new information, I quickly began to realize that several cities were mentioned over and over again, each claiming to be the most haunted.  These turned out to be the focus of our earliest paranormal investigations.  The stories regarding Savannah captured my attention initially due to its beauty, civil war history, multitude of ghost stories and magnificent historical homes.  However, it wasn't until I saw a re-run of Ghost Hunters' first Halloween Special at The Sorrel Weed House that I was truly drawn to travel to Savannah on our first Haunted Holiday.

The Sorrel Weed House

Savannah is an amazing city, seemingly trapped in a time capsule of the old South with all of its beauty, elegance and tragedy.  Nothing captures the beauty, elegance and tragedy of Savannah more than The Sorrel Weed House.  During our first stay in Savannah we toured all of the haunted homes, stayed in haunted hotels and went on every haunted tour we could find to see if there was anything to the stories we had heard.  However, when we got home and examined all of the evidence, the time we spent at the The Sorrel Weed House proved to be the most significant with regards to paranormal evidence.  We owe a great deal of thanks to Bradley Dilling, our tour guide, for letting us into the root cellar of the carriage house (which is usually off limits to tourists).  When my wife and I went into the root cellar with two other ladies from the tour while Bradley locked up the main house, we received some of the most interesting and disturbing evps we have ever encountered.  The two evps that always stand out in my mind when I think of the Sorrel Weed House are the following, which seem to be from the same spooky sounding woman (exact same voice) that both reference a particular "secret".

These two evps occurred only a few minutes apart during the 15 minutes or so that the four of us were alone in the dark root cellar at around 12:30 AM.  And if these weren't scary enough, right before we left the basement we received the following demonic sounding evp.

We were so taken by the stories associated with the house, we decided to try another company's tour of the Sorrel Weed House the following evening.  When we listened to the recordings we found similar auditory anomalies.  In the foreground you hear the voice of our tour guide who has a heavy southern drawl going through the stories about the house while everyone else in the house was silent.  However, in each instance you hear another female voice chime in with responses to her statements that are not at all pleasant.

Another response our guide received from an unknown source that evening occurred when she mentioned the fact that her daughter had seen things in the basement of the main house when she brought her on the tour one evening.  The following evp seems to be from a woman who is concerned by the fact that living people are beginning to see things and that another entity may be "changing the outcome".

The last evp I will share (and we have a lot more) is that of a little boy speaking over a woman who was having an argument with the person she was with on the tour.  The funny thing about it, there weren't any little kids on the late night ghost tour we took that night but his voice clearly states "she's the drunk", something I would have remembered hearing, and a comment that would have received a response if heard by the woman in question.


To say the least, after examining all of the evidence, we were truly impressed by the paranormal activity that we found at the Sorrel Weed House and soon planned another trip to do a follow up investigation.  In my next blog I will show you the amazing visual and auditory anomalies we uncovered on our second trip.  For now I will leave you with two photos taken in the courtyard of the Sorrel Weed House.  In each photo, you will see rather large, bright orbs.  Typically, I don't put too much credence into photos with orbs since they tend to be pretty common from our experience.  However, because of what we found on our second trip in this courtyard, I have begun to re-think my skepticism regarding orbs.

Sorrel Weed Courtyard

Sorrel Weed Courtyard

See other posts about the Sorrel Weed House at Sorrel Weed House Savannah, Georgia 2012 & The Sorrel Weed House - Carriage House Second Floor.

The Little Girl Ghost - What Made Me Believe

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"I believe that if we are to make any real progress in psychic investigation, we must do it with scientific apparatus and in a scientific manner, just as we do in medicine, electricity, chemistry, and other fields."

- Thomas Edison (Scientific American, October 30, 1920)

Photo Credit

I wanted to begin this first installment of Haunted Holidaze with a quote from one of the greatest scientific minds mankind has ever known in order to emphasize the position that I most adhere to when it comes to matters involving the supernatural.  Since I spent the first 39 years of my life filled with a great deal of skepticism (which I now believe was more of an unbending cynicism) regarding stories dealing with life after death and spiritual encounters, I was never receptive to people’s accounts of their encounters with occurrences that fell outside of the realm of my personal understanding or experience.  What I later learned about myself, however, was that the intense interest that developed within me while studying the social and physical sciences in college, set me on a path of pessimism and distrust that jaded me to such a degree that I was incapable of ever entertaining any findings that did not fit neatly within the paradigms I had set in stone in my mind.  As a young adult in my mid-twenties and well into my thirties, I failed to realize that this cognitive impliability prevented me from practicing the scientific method in the manner in which it was intended.  In order for the scientific method to be employed properly, the observer must maintain a mind that is open to outcomes that may not fit with his or her current understanding of the topic being examined, along with a healthy skepticism designed to protect against being led astray by unsubstantiated findings.  However, for one reason or another in the spring of 2010 my mind was forced open by an event that took place in a location that was as controlled an environment as can be expected outside of a laboratory setting.

For a couple of years I had been taking guitar lessons and had ignored my instructor’s advice to record my practice sessions, a process that he believed could help a student improve quickly by listening to the playback and correcting any mistakes that were highlighted in the recording in subsequent practice sessions.  At the time I suppose I was a little self-conscious about hearing myself on a recording, but after a while I became a little more open to the idea as the instructor continued to make the request.  One day at practice the instructor added that it might be beneficial to make a recording if a melody ever popped into my head during the day.  He said that if I brought in a recording of me whistling or humming a tune he could help me to determine the key the tune is in and work on chord progressions.  Shortly thereafter, I found myself humming a tune while I was taking a shower before work at around 6:00 AM.  After I got out of the shower and woke up my wife I decided I would grab my cell phone and try to record the tune that I had in my head.  I waited for my wife to get into the shower and then hit the record button.  I began humming the simple melody (probably a tune inspired by our recent trip to New Orleans for Mardi Gras), made it through one time, took a breath to hum it a second time and, much to my complete astonishment, I heard the giggle of a little girl a few feet in front of me while I sat on the couch in the living room leaning into the cell phone that was resting on the coffee table.  I was shocked but tried to shake it off and continue humming the tune a second time.  However, I wasn’t able to persist very long until I had to stop the recording and collect myself.  Still not wanting to believe what I had just heard very loudly right in front of my face, I walked around the room to verify that all of the windows were closed, the TV was off, no one was walking outside and that my wife was still in the shower with the bathroom door fully closed.  After confirming all of these things and checking to make sure there weren’t any other applications open on my cell phone, I finally mustered up the nerve to play back the recording fully expecting not to hear anything other than my feeble attempt to recreate the melody I was humming in the shower earlier.  

To my complete amazement however, I heard as clear as day the sound of a little girl giggling just as I took a breath between the humming of the two melodies.  To say the least I was stunned and played it for my wife the second she got out of the shower.  Having experienced paranormal activity in the past herself, my wife had very little difficulty believing that I had just recorded the voice of a spirit.  However, I was not so easily convinced so I brought my cell phone to work to play it for my co-workers and received mixed reactions.  Those who believed in ghosts previously were convinced by the recording and those who did not believe in ghosts prior to hearing the recording attempted to come up with any alternative explanation they could possibly muster in order to explain away the occurrence (a technique that I was very familiar with since I had spent the previous 39 years of my life doing the very same thing when confronted with other people’s experiences with paranormal events).  However, for the first time in my life I realized that the alternatives provided gave no reasonable explanation to what I had documented, and in fact most seemed more improbable than the possibility that it might be feasible, with an extremely sensitive device, to record a residual auditory signal contained within the environment by some means not yet understood by science.  But at this point I would once again yield to Thomas Edison to better explain my feelings about mankind’s ability to comprehend occurrences that take place outside the human level of understanding and the potential for technology to bridge the gap between this world and the next:

"I don't claim that our personalities pass on to another existence or sphere, I don't claim anything because I don't know anything about the subject. For that matter, no human being knows. But I do claim that it is possible to construct an apparatus which will be so delicate that if there are personalities in another existence or sphere who wish to get in touch with us in this existence or sphere, the apparatus will at least give them a better opportunity to express themselves than the tilting tables and raps and ouija boards and mediums and the other crude methods now purported to be the only means of communication."

- Thomas Edison (Scientific American, October 30, 1920)

I share Edison’s skepticism regarding many of the methods that are used to study psychic phenomena including the ones he lists in his quote above.  However, it also seems fairly evident to me that, even with the advancements that have been made over the past century in the technology associated with the recording of sound waves and moving images (two of Thomas Edison’s greatest contributions to mankind along with the invention of electric light), paranormal research will continue to be discredited by the scientific community due to the paranormal researcher’s inability to adequately control & replicate the documented phenomena.  However, the extensive amount of auditory and visual evidence that exists out there today captured with state of the art digital recorders, full spectrum video & still cameras and electromagnetic field measuring devices cannot be ignored and must be examined with an open mind even if this particular field of research is resistant to control & replication similar to the study of living human beings (i.e. Psychology).

In future installments of Haunted Holidaze I will be describing my experiences with the paranormal while investigating locations that are purported to be haunted.  In some instances the data collected proved to be inconclusive.  However, in many locations the documented findings could not be debunked regardless of how hard I tried to find other plausible explanations for the visual and/or auditory anomalies.  It is really amazing for me to look back at the person I was just a few years ago and realize how much one disembodied giggle can change a person’s outlook on life, the afterlife and ignite a fire of curiosity that is impossible to extinguish.  In closing, I would like to leave you with one more quote by Thomas Edison that clearly conveys his excitement and belief in the ability to someday develop a means to communicate with that which lies beyond the veil:

"I do hope that our personality survives. If it does, then my apparatus ought to be of some use. That is why I am now at work on the most sensitive apparatus I have ever undertaken to build, and I await the results with the keenest interest."

- Thomas Edison (Scientific American, October 30, 1920)