Shield

Grey Lady? Images from Willard Library's Ghost Cam

Stone horses and molded angels grow from the ground at Shiloh Cemetery.

The graveyard - which lies just outside of Rockport, Indiana, a few miles east of Evansville - stands across the street from a small, white church. An uneasiness stillness settles over the elaborate wet-stone graves. The tombstone of a three year-old girl sets toward the back. She died in 1954, and a black-and-white photo of her dancing hangs just over her epithet.

Under the picture it reads: Awaiting the touch of a tiny hand.

Staring at the long-dead girl, I actually await the touch of a tiny hand; a touch that will burst from the ground and pull me down to hell.

I feel this way, mostly, because the cemetery is reputedly haunted.

While many students sludge through tame haunted houses like The Catacombs, several local hot spots like Shiloh Cemetery can provide a real scare during the Halloween season.

The most infamous Evansville haunting comes courtesy of the "Lady in Grey" who lurks in the basement of the Willard Library.

According to legend, the Lady first appeared to a janitor in 1937. When the lady appears, her witnesses feel the wave of a cold draft and smell the strong scent of perfume. Her thin gray apparition shimmers briefly, and then disappears into thin-air. Contemplations abound about the identity of this famous ghost. According to the Willard library website, the most popular assumption identifies Louise Carpenter. Carpenter, the daughter of Willard Library's founding father, supposedly haunts the library out of anger.

Early in the building's existence, she sued Willard library, claiming her father was "of unsound mind" when donated money for the library's creation. Though the lady usually appears only at night - making her accessible only to library employees - other haunted sights remain open to the public.

In Jasper, haunted railroad tracks lie on a dark street known as Devil's Road. The tracks were the sight of a fatal school bus crash several years ago that killed every child aboard.

"Ghost hunters" (people who, like myself, seek-out these ridiculous attractions) park on the tracks and drop their car into neutral. Then, a barking dog should be heard in the distance, prompting the ghostly, invisible hands of the children to push the car off the track and out of harm's way.

"Orbs" - mysterious, colored dots - often appear in pictures taken in places like Devil's Road and Shiloh Cemetery.

These "orbs" supposedly represent the floating spirits of the undead, and sometimes resemble faces.

Looking at pictures taken at Shiloh, I cannot see a face.

But, with the kind of chill that actually makes Halloween exciting, I can almost feel the touch of a tiny hand.

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