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ghost story

    Eastman, Ga. -- The curious behavior of the dog at dinnertime convinced Robert Kight there was something uninvited in the house.

   He brought home a chihuahua, and at 6 p.m., a time when odd things had been occurring in the house on Georgia 46, the little dog began yapping frantically near the table. Then it lunged, snapped its jaws together and began straining backward, pulling and tugging -- on something no one could see.

   "That's what made me believe in Mrs. King," said Mr. Kight.

   His wife, Betty, had been convinced long before -- she glimpsed the ephemeral Mrs. King several times the day they moved into the house.

   In 1927, according to accounts handed down in Dodge County, Mrs. Sammy King, a widow, was sitting by her living room window knitting a shawl when a lightning bolt plunged through the open window and incinerated her on the spot.

   This particular patch of ground appears to be a poor place to wait out a storm; the Kight's son, Robert Jr., says piecing together recollections of his grandfather and older relatives indicates at least four other people have been killed by lightning with 100 yards of Mrs. King's house.

   That house was demolished in 1949 or 1950, Mrs. Kight said, and a smaller one built on the same ground, using some of the old lumber. In 1962 the Kights moved into that house.

   In 1972, tired of living with the ghost, they built a new house just across Booze Mountain Road from the old one. It took Mrs. King less than a week to catch up with them.

Prominent citizens

   Betty Kight, 62, works at Dodge County Hospital. Robert, 65, is a city building inspector in Eastman. The house they built in 1972 is a large one, sumptuously furnished and decorated, set among towering pines just out of town.

   They are among the area's leading citizens. "They're very giving people, always there when a neighbor needs something, involved in a lot of things around here," said one resident. 

   Dr. Richard Broughton of the Parapsychological Association in Research Triangle, N.C., said the Kight's case is "very typical of a haunting case. Nothing about it would strike a parapsychologist as unusual, except for the ghost moving with the family."

   Mr. Kight, strangely, has never seen Mrs. King. But he accepts her presence with the same cheerful resignation as Mrs. Kight. He has, in a sense, felt her.

   "There's times when I'll be lying on my side in bed in night, watching the TV, and I'll feel the bed move. I'll turn over expecting to see Betty and there's no one there. That scared me real bad the first time it happened."

   Mrs. Kight, a dark-haired woman with a shy smile who agreed to talk with a reporter only after the urging of her children, sees Mrs. King regularly. She said the ghost, rarely visible for more than an instant, always wears an old-fashioned high-collared dress, with a cloche hat or bonnet. But in 30 years, Mrs. Kight has never seen her face.  "She's always looking down or away from me," she said.

   Only once can Mrs. Kight recall hearing the ghost speak.

   "I woke up in the middle of the night and heard a voice whispering, 'Your son is sick! Your son is sick!'" she recalls. I looked up and there was Mrs. King standing by the bed. She vanished right away."

   Mrs. Kight shook her husband awake and insisted he get up and drive to Statesboro, where Robert Jr. was attending college. Mr. Kight, somewhat disgruntled, obeyed and found Robert Jr. sick. He brought him back to a hospital, where he was treated for two weeks for mononucleosis.

   It was not the only warning Mrs. King has provided.

   "Once all the kids were home for a birthday party," Mrs. Kight recalls. "We realized we'd forgotten to get ice cream and the kids said, 'We'll go back to town and get some.'

   "I was standing on the porch and when I heard that, right then I saw Mrs. King standing right beside me, shaking her head like this, from side to side. I just panicked.

   "I yelled, 'No, we don't need any ice cream. There's no need for it. Don't go!"'

   As she begged them not to leave, a pickup truck passed the house headed for Eastman, "right when they would have pulled out of the driveway if I hadn't said anything." A few hundred yards away, a big truck swerved out of control, striking the pickup and killing both its occupants instantly.

   "If it hadn't been for Mrs. King, that would have been our children," she said.

Regularly seen by children

   Both of the Kight children, Elaine and Robert, saw Mrs. King with some regularity as they were growing up. Robert Jr. recalls his most chilling encounter came when he was in the seventh grade.

   "I was in bed and I heard this eerie noise on the porch. I got up and looked out my window and there in the glider was this little old woman in a bonnet and a little girl. They were holding a little book, like a hymnal, and they were singing 'Shall We Gather at the River?' in these weird high-pitched voices. They they just disappeared. The glider was empty, but it kept on swinging. My spine like to jumped out the back of my neck."

   Visitors rarely see her.

   "A few years back, we had some friends over to dinner," said Mr. Kight, a man with a wide, cherubic grin and a slow drawl. "They didn't believe a word of Mrs. King; thought we were just seeing things. Well, I grilled us some steaks, and we sat down at the dinner table inside.

   "We just started to eat when this cold wind blew across the table," he said.

   "More like a whirlwind," said Mrs. Kight. "The wind chimes outdoors started ringing and all the smoke alarms in the house went off."

   "They wouldn't quit," said Mr. Kight. "I had to pull the batteries out of them. Our friends didn't eat more'n about three bites of their steaks. They got up and went home."

   After the death of Mrs. Kight's father in 1990, other things -- things the Kights do not seem ready to attribute to Mrs. King -- began to happen.

   "I was backing out of the the driveway to go to work one morning when I heard a man calling me, saying, 'Bob, hold up! Wait for me!' It was her daddy's voice."

   They heard that voice every morning for a week this summer, calling to Mr. Kight to wait for him. They haven't heard it since. But they are awakened by loud noises at night, often in the kitchen. Lately their telephone has been going dead even though the telephone company buried the line leading to their house.

   Lately they've been smelling smoke after going to bed. "We come downstairs and right around the bar there's the worst smell of cigarette and cigar smoke you've ever smelled; so bad it burns your nostrils sometimes. But nobody's ever smoked in our house."

   It's come to the point that she doesn't have to see Mrs. King to be aware of her. "You know she's here all the time," Mrs. Kight said.

   The Kights say they're used to Mrs. King now. "A woman called and started telling me how to get rid of my ghost. I said, 'Why would I want to get rid of her? She's part of my family.'"

   But Mrs. Kight also admits she's afraid to come downstairs in the middle of the night to investigate the noises in her kitchen. She finds it difficult to explain why.

   "I don't know...It's not that I'm afraid something will happen to me, she says in her soft voice.

   "I'm afraid...I guess I'm  afraid I'll learn something I don't want to know. There's some things, you know, that I just don't want to know about."  -- Atlanta Journal-Constitution, October 31, 1992

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