This story a part of the True Ghost Stories page on Obiwan's UFO-Free Paranormal Page. Please do not copy or distribute without permission from Obiwan and/or the original author!
From: "John Schultheis" (nimmo@ioa.com)
To: obiwan@netcom.com
Subject: The haunting at Richmond Hill, Asheville, NC
Date: Fri, 3 Jul 1998 23:34:26 -0400
This is a pretty interesting haunted house story... just take a listen.
Every year when I was a young boy, my family would have a huge christmas party at my Aunt Lilian's house. I mean everyone would be there. So it became a tradition with us kids to walk up the road from my Aunt's house to this deserted Victorian mansion that had been uninhabited since the early 1900's. It was named Richmond Hill or the Richmond Estate, and was located in the Rolling Oaks community of Asheville, NC, across the river from Asheville proper ( it might interest you to know that it is a very fashionable bed and breakfast now, but the time I'm talking about is the late 70's, early 80's). Of course we broke in, through one of the basement windows, and god help us if we didn't have a flashlight to get to the flight of stairs. And up we'd tromp, just pleased as punch that we were in a ' bonafide haunted house ', as the local kids maintained. The interior had been looted pretty bad, after the basement level the bannister on the stairs had dissapeared ( Ilooted a little myself, I took a tile from one of the upstairs bedrooms fireplace, I still have it today ). It was totally grand, especially if you were some snotnose kid doing something ' important '. At least the first couple of times it was. It started getting weird when I turned 12, in 1982. We would see lights in the third floor and the attic. We didn't think much about them, we knew derelicts used the place from time to time. We didn't start to get scared until my sister, Jenny, heard the moans or screams or whatever the hell they were. You see, the first time, she got this really funny look on her face, and I asked her if there was something wrong. She just looked at me, like she was going to puke or something, and ran down the stairs hellbent for leather. My older female cousin, Leeann, ran after her, and my cousins and I didn't see them until later that night when we went back to our Aunt's. I didn't hear anything and they didn't hear anything, but after my sister ran out of there, the fun had kind of seeped out of the adventure, you know? It wasn't until a year later that we saw what had been making that noise, and I'll never go back...EVER. It formed in front of us in the kitchen like smoke ( I know the correct term is ectoplasm, now but back then all I could think to describe it was smoke ) if it hadn't been so frightening, it would have been comic. We all screamed at once, and the boys sounded just like the girls, and ran out of there like our asses were on fire. We never went back. A couple of years later someone bought Richmond Hill, and moved it about 1000 yards down the bank ( a better veiw of the river, you understand...), renovated it, and turned it into a B&B. It looks nice, but I'll never step another foot in there.