The talking ghost is one of the lesser known hauntings of North Carolina. Even so, it makes one shiver even to this day when hearing it. The place where it happened still stands in Winston Salem. And by all accounts the inn keeper involved claimed to the day he died that what was told was indeed true.
On a cold November night the inn keeper sat at his desk, reviewing the menu for the following day. It was quiet as all of his guests had retired to their rooms. Quiet that is, until he heard a noise in the hall. As he got up, the inn keeper became annoyed at the idea of having to deal with a drunk customer at this late hour. All that vanished however when he opened the door and saw that the man that stood before him was not drunk, but very, very sick.
The inn keeper called for a doctor and rushed the man into a room. The man was so sick that he was unable to give the inn keeper his name. When the doctor arrived he wasted no time in examining the stranger and although he did all he could, the outlook was grim. That night, the man slipped into a coma and the next day passed away without waking up.
Without a sliver of indication who the stranger was, the inn keeper had no choice but to have the man buried in Parish Cemetery. His belongings were packed up and put into a wardrobe in the inn keepers office on the off chance that someone would claim them. It was then that creepy things began happening in the inn.
The slaves that worked in the inn began to talk quietly about the ‘thing’ that haunted the place. Some of them openly admitted seeing a ghost floating through the halls of the inn, some were jumpy and nervous in the middle of the day and ALL of them refused to go into the basement alone.
The inn keeper first laughed off the idea that his inn was haunted. Until the occurrences become more frequent that is. A dropped tray and a slave screaming that something had followed him into the dining room had angered the inn keeper. Then, one night as he was pouring over his accounts in his office, a maid burst into the office. During her screaming he was able to get that there was ‘something horrible in the hall’.
Determined to put a stop to this nonsense, he got up from his desk and went into the hall. There, a shadowy form appeared before him. Unable to move, the inn keeper listened as the shape spoke and told the man to notify his brother of the strangers death. The shape spoke his name and his brothers name in Texas before vanishing.
Shaking, the inn keeper returned to his office and managed to write a letter telling the brother what had happened. Before long, the brother wrote back asking that the belongings of the man be shipped to Texas.
After that, no one ever complained of a ghost or haunting in the old inn. I guess the old man just wanted someone to know he’d died.
