By Ramona Shelton
Motlow Buzz Managing Editor
SMYRNA -- The Sam Davis Home is a local
Smyrna landmark that many Motlow history students visit (especially if they
choose to do the Historical Site Paper for my classes), but the typical house
and grounds tour pales in comparison to the annual Sam Davis Home Ghost Tour,
held only during the Halloween season. This year, the History Club had the
chance to experience all the spookiness the Ghost Tour had to offer.
Sam Davis is remembered as the “Boy Hero of
the Confederacy” because as a teenager at the beginning of the Civil War, he
signed up to be a runner for the Coleman Scouts, carrying messages and
intelligence between Confederate leaders in the area. Sam was captured by the
Union just north of the Alabama line and court martialed as a traitor. Given
the chance to save his life if he gave up information on the rest of his group,
Sam made the statement, “I would rather die a thousand deaths than betray a
friend.” He was hanged in November 1863.
In 35-degree, extremely windy weather, our
intrepid little group of seven met at the site to see what ghosts awaited us.
They added to the ambience by not having any lighting except for small candles
along the way. Needless to say, between the cold and the dark, we were already
a bit spooked before things even began. The special tour started off with a
hayride throughout the grounds, following the route the wagon took when
bringing Sam’s body home several weeks after he was executed in Pulaski, Tennessee.
Our guide told us how Sam’s mother was in the upstairs of the house and fainted
when she saw his casket being brought up the drive. On the hayride, we could
see the shadows of people in the grassy areas but nothing prepared us for the
“Rebel Yell” battle cry and cannon explosion that happened right beside the
wagon. I’m pretty sure it scared our guide worse than the rest of us because he
screamed louder than we did!
Once we reached the house, we were taken
into the parlor where another guide told us about how every family at the time
had at least one prized family music box and the museum still includes one the
family had had back in the day. They would have kept it in the parlor for
guests to enjoy, but because it is so valuable, today it is mainly kept in the
manager’s office. Still, when the house gets quiet, people have reported hearing
the sounds of the music box playing. Our guide told us that the museum manager
herself claims to have been sitting in her office, heard the music coming from
the parlor, and gone to check, thinking someone might have put the box out for
display. She returned to find it on her office shelf where it was supposed to
be. We didn’t hear any music that night but it could be because we were really
close to the aforementioned cannon explosion which left us with ringing ears.
Next we went to the side porch where our
guide told us about later generations of the Davis family having reported a
young woman walking the porch, yet not making any noise at all. Thinking she
needed help, the family members tried to talk to her, to get her to take them
to wherever something was going on. Maybe she tried to do just that but she was
able to go directly through the wall to her destination, and not being ghosts,
the family members weren’t able to follow her. Granted, we didn’t see any
ghosts but they point out the section of the wall the girl supposed vanished
into. At the same time, a zombie Confederate soldier walked up behind us and
started breathing very heavily. I am proud to say that I neither punched him
nor bolted straight into the ghost wall, making a Ramona-shaped hole in my
wake.
Finally we met the last of our guides in
the room where Sam’s body would have been taken in preparation for his burial.
I think this was the saddest part of the tour because it was the most
historical, least related to the ghost aspect of things. During the 1860s,
bodies were embalmed with arsenic to help preserve them. The guide told us that
bodies from earlier than this have been exhumed and because of the arsenic treatment,
they actually had not decayed. It might be a while between a person’s death and
their funeral, especially during wartime. If someone died as a part of mass
casualties on the battlefield, of course they would not have received this
treatment but being a solitary victim of execution, Sam’s body should have been
given this process. Unfortunately, he was not; he was placed in a simple coffin
and after three weeks, his family was allowed to retrieve him and bring him
home for burial. You can imagine how things were at that point.
If you have never been to the Sam Davis
Home Ghost Tours before, I encourage you to put this on your bucket list for
next Halloween. It definitely met the History Club seal of approval! We look
forward to going back for the regular tour in the future… without the zombies
and cannon explosions I hope!
No comments:
Post a Comment