SPECTERS
Skeptic Spends Night at Vicksburg's McRaven House, Departs Briskly at 1:30 A.M.
A CNN Travel writer who professes disbelief in ghosts joined a monthly late-night hunt at the Civil War-era Mississippi mansion and reports thumps, flickering gadgets and a hasty exit.
VICKSBURG, MISS. — A self-described skeptic of the supernatural spent a September night among thirteen other guests at McRaven House in Vicksburg, Mississippi, according to an account published by CNN Travel and flagged by The Anomalist. The antebellum home, whose first quarters date to 1797, served as a makeshift hospital for wounded Confederates during the siege of Vicksburg, and hosts monthly late-night ghost hunts alongside its daytime tours.
The evening began briskly. Shortly before 9 p.m., the author writes, thumps sounded from the unoccupied second floor, and a fellow guest, Jon Williams, agreed they sounded like footsteps. The author describes the pair as sharing a look of bemusement.
Staff and visitors offered a catalogue of experiences. Tour guide Grace Bailey says she saw a formally dressed man approaching the door one July 4th, only to find nobody on the path. She says his hairstyle matched the portrait of John H. Bobb, the owner who, according to the article, was murdered by Union occupiers exactly a year after the siege ended. Williams says he watched an armoire open and close by itself, and his wife, Cassie, says something touched her hair while she held her young son.
Brian Riley, a veteran paranormal researcher who led a separate group, says he has seen shadowy figures and once met the gaze of a woman in an 1830s-style dress on a balcony, who was never seen again. He links a rise in activity to the accidental unearthing of a human femur during trenching work.
During the hunt, according to the author, an EMF meter and REM-pod registered activity in one bedroom while a spirit box produced obscenities. In the parlor, devices flashed after guests asked about a party, and a phone app displayed the name "Ida," which matches that of a woman said to have died in the house in 1946. The author allows that the responses may have been coincidence.
By nearly 1:30 a.m., exhaustion had ended the author's curiosity. The writer reports walking the brick path with the sense of being watched, then locking the car doors and driving off in one motion. The Anomalist's digest also links a podcast episode featuring psychologist Brian Laythe, which asks whether understanding a haunting means looking beyond the ghost.