Is Rutherford County Health Building Haunted?

Murfreesboro, TN - The happy sounds of children laughing and playing sometimes can be heard in the hallways but no one is there. Knickknacks are unexplainably moved out of their place on office desks.

These kinds of tales are being told by some of those who work or have worked in the former Rutherford County Health Department building at 303 N. Church St. for the past 10 months or so.

They say spirits of some sort, most of which seem to be children, are causing some minor disturbances in the building.

“It is not scary,” said Linda Wilson, who works on the first floor of the building in the Rutherford County Drug Court offices. “Apparently they are good spirits. They have not hurt us or done anything.”

The Rutherford County Health Department is listed on the National Register of Historic Places for its significance in the development of health care and public medicine in Murfreesboro and Rutherford County. Until the building opened to the public in 1931, Rutherford County had no permanent public health care.

The facility played an important role in the promotion of public health care programs and training of health care professionals in the South. The health department was one of four Commonwealth Fund of New York health projects that sought to bring modern health care to rural communities.

It’s unknown who if anyone could be haunting the 76-year-old building. Some suspect the impressions of children, thousands of which must have come through the doors of the building over the years to receive some form of medical treatment, remain in the building.

The building recently underwent a massive renovation now houses the Rutherford County drug court, human resources and archives.

Wilson said she hasn’t felt the presence of spirits, but she has seen some things that can’t otherwise be explained.

She mentioned a rag doll that sits on a shelf in a co-workers office.

Several times since she and her co-workers moved into the building in mid-June, she and others have seen the doll’s left arm up in the air pointing towards the wall.

A former co-worker who had small toys around her computer would often come into her office in the morning and find that they had be knocked over or rearranged.

The presence of spirits was perhaps felt most by members of the construction crew.

Charles Gilmore, a member of the crew, doesn’t know if he really believes in ghosts or spirits, but he had some encounters that he also couldn’t explain any other way.

One day he was on a ladder on the second floor of the building when he heard a young girl exclaim, “No mama no, no mama no.”

Gilmore immediately went to the nearest windows see where the noise was coming from. No one was outside.

“I didn’t believe anything could manifest like that,” he said.

While alone in the building one evening, another member of the crew apparently saw shadowy figures walking through the building and heard heavy footsteps on the slate stairs.

Most of all the spirits seemed to make the process of renovating the building much more difficult.

“It was just a nightmare job,” Gilmore said. “Nothing would work.”

He said it almost seemed like the building didn’t want to have its face lifted.

One thing after another would go wrong.

“I call it the ghosts in the machine,” Gilmore said. “Nothing went right the whole time.”

If there was a list of a 1,000 things to do, then only three of them would work out properly.

Everything went wrong from materials not being delivered to the site or having materials mixed improperly and machinery failing to work.

He said for the massive amount of hours the crew spent working on the renovation two new facilities of similar size could have been built with less headaches.

Despite the problems, Gilmore said he never felt uncomfortable working in the building or being there by himself.

Gilmore would often work in the basement in the pitch dark.

“I never felt uncomfortable being in the building,” he said. “It is not a bad energy. Things are not being destroyed. It just didn’t want to be bothered.”

But even now as Gilmore has moved on to other projects, he is having dreams about the renovation. He said it has weighed on his minds like no other project.

Rutherford County Health Building Haunted
Rutherford County Health Building Haunted

Triangle-Shaped UFO Sighted Over Minnesota

"Driving down County 1, near Stewartville, MN. Sighting occurred at 10:45pm, on Thursday 08/02/07.

Saw a bright light coming in my direction from the horizon. As the light neared, I noticed it didn't look 'normal' so I pulled to the side of the road.

The thing looked like it was heading right at my vehicle, but made a sharp right turn at the last second - almost directly over me. I rolled my window down to listen to the craft as it passed. It appeared to be making a roaring sound. As the craft tipped on its side to turn, I snapped one picture with my phone. The triangular shape of the object was only apparent at this angle. Then it leveled-out and drifted into obscurity to my left. Very fast moving. Whole sighting was under a minute.

The craft's elevation, its speed, its light configuration tell me that this was no ordinary airplane. I wouldn't rush to say that it was of alien origin, but definitely something I can't explain and never have seen before."

Minnesota UFO
Minnesota UFO

Minnesota Mothman Sighting Reported

George Noory, during the “Coast to Coast AM” program last night, August 10, 2007, took various calls from individuals who reported many kinds of cryptids.

Folks telephoned in and told their own eyewitness accounts for hours. Here are two examples:

A caller in Illinois claimed to have witnessed the Mothman on June 27th [2007] while driving outside of Stewartville, MN. She said the creature had a huge wing[span] about the width of a Ford….Carol in Kissimmee, FL described her encounter with a Bigfoot. She claims the 7-ft tall animal had a tree branch in his hand and stood only 10 feet away from her car.

Coast to Coast with George Noory, August 10, 2007, Premiere Radio Networks.

BTW, this area is near the site of Bigfoot sightings in 1968. For example, Larry Hawkins reported he saw a hairy hominoid when he was going south on Highway 52, during that year, according to a report from Brad Steiger. Steiger, writing in The Allende Letters also mentioned he collected a Stewartville sighting of aerial phenomena from Warren Anding, for October 24, 1968.

This reports are suspect at best but interesting.

Minnesota Mothman
Minnesota Mothman

Amazing UFO Video! Haiti 8/6/07

Amateur video shot on the evening of August 6th, 2007 near Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Doesn't appear to be manipulated with CGI. I have been told 1 other known video was taken at another location.

Haiti UFO Video
Haiti UFO Video

Bahia Horned Beast (Photo)

Photographs are shared with me weekly. Some are compelling (as in “interesting,” but not necessarily “evidence” quality) enough to make it to Cryptomundo.

Here’s one, above, of an alleged horned biped creature on a South American riverbank just in that I find intriguing, if not curiously prosaic. Needless to say, in these days of photoshopping, frame captures from sci-fi films, and animation that nearly looks real, anything is possible as an origin of any new photo. But what is this? Does it look familiar to anyone?

Here’s what I know, to date, on this “Bahia Beast”:

Loren, hopefully you can shed some light on this thing. The thing has many human qualities I can see under a scope. [It] appears to have clothing, however the burnished bronze color throws me off. [It was] photo[graph]ed by a 15 year old American girl. She was on tour with a group from Michigan. Supposedly the temp. is 100+.

Loren, the photo was taken in July 2007. The story behind it is this little 15 year old girl was attacked by this [thing]. How it happened is unclear. I met personally with the girl and her parents; I felt imposing since I had just met these people for the first time. It was a large family gathering and I was an outside guest invited. Still not sure why I was invited other than they had motorcycles and needed answers to questions. I was their answer guy.

Her father plainly said she’d not be going on anymore trips out of his sight. Supposedly this thing grabbed her and attempted to hold her and put mud in her face and hair. She said she couldn’t get away from it by pulling so she got a firm hold and tackled it causing it to lose balance thus allowing her escape.

Supposedly there are other witnesses; I am still trying to get more info.

The area is: Porto Seguro, Bahia, Brazil.

Surely, someone there knows of this incident.

Two-Cam McLaren, August 9, 2007.

“Bahia is one of the 26 states of Brazil, and is located in the northeastern part of the country on the Atlantic coast…The state’s geographical regions comprise the Atlantic Forest or mata atlântica; the recôncavo region radiating from the Bay (the largest in Brazil), the site of sugar and tobacco cultivation; and the planalto, which includes the fabled sertão region of Bahia’s far interior…The São Francisco River, Brazil’s second longest river system, runs from the Atlantic Ocean along the state’s northern border with Sergipe and Pernambuco down through the planalto into the neighboring southern state of Minas Gerais. The state has the longest coastline in Brazil; the northern coastline running from Salvador forms the Linha Verde (Green Line). Bahia contains the longest known cave in the Southern hemisphere, Toca da Boa Vista, which has 84km of mapped passages.” - Wikipedia.

Bahia Horned Beast
Bahia Horned Beast

Is Clewiston Inn Haunted?

CLEWISTON, FL — They say that a ghost appears at the Clewiston Inn.

The figure of a woman walking toward a window in one of the rooms startled one of the maids. Frightened by the episode, she turned in her letter of resignation the next day.

A psychic medium dining at the Inn came upon an illusory trail of books leading to a room where one of its former inhabitants n an avid reader whose room was found stacked literally several feet high with books n had spent her last days.

Or so the stories go.

Some of the employees swear they have seen the hauntings themselves, others claim they’ve experienced things they cannot explain but remain skeptical. Still others simply go on doing their job.

For Chris Hill, the manager of the Inn, the ghosts don’t scare her.

See, she’d rather not spend too much time trying to explain why the front-desk switchboard kept lighting up for Room 255 when the room was vacant. Even after the communication lines to the room had been severed because the staff had had enough of it, the light sometimes glowed as though someone inside was calling for help.

Anita Conklin’s short obituary ran in the Nov. 2, 1994 issue of The Clewiston News: Anita Reece Conklin, 80, died at her home on Oct. 27, 1994 at home 12:30 p.m.

She had lived a long time at the Inn, in Room 255, where she and her husband would retire to each night after he would get back from his job managing the Miami Seaquarium.

He was a large man, affable, and always got along well with everyone. She was much the same, according to Inn employees, and could talk up a storm if you gave her a moment.

They both appreciated photography and, because their appetite for learning was such, occasionally would go for days without being seen by staff because, employees said, they were reading books.

The hotel hostess said that it appeared the two did not have family living nearby, and rarely had visitors.

He died several months before she did and the Inn was given orders by surviving family members to toss out all of their belongings, and many things were hurled from the top story window to a garbage bin on the ground below.

Ms. Hill thought it was a shame and picked up one of the couple’s photo albums.

They had photographs of the man’s meeting with famous dignitaries and presidents and an itinerary for his presentation at the Merv Griffin Show. The couple enjoyed photographing landscapes and other items, and a picture of her sitting on a field of flowers smiling, and, curiously, a photo of the Clewiston Inn’s switchboard were in the album.

Sometimes, Ms. Hill has stayed up late, all through the night and into the morning for the midnight shift, and not experienced anything but what she believes are noises that the Inn makes when it is settling.

She’d like to understand that there is something beyond the normal, but because she hasn’t seen a ghost, she isn’t certain.

“I’d like to believe that it’s true,” she said.

Still, too many of her employees have reported strange things.

One complaint from employees is that they’ve felt the presence of something around them and actually felt something tug at their clothing or hair but turned around to see empty space around them. This has happened most often in the kitchen at night.

Although a number of incidents have been reported throughout the Inn and inside the kitchen, perhaps the most active area inside the old hotel is Room 118.

Not a lot is known about this room except that the figure of a woman sometimes appears here, moving very slowly across the room occasionally when the room’s front door is opened. She walks, almost sliding, to the back wall, where the window is, and makes a brushing, sweeping motion against the wall. Then, she disappears.

At least five independent reports, according to the ghost-hunting team, have reported the exact same occurrence.

It was here that the manager came in after an employee reported seeing the woman and took a Polaroid picture of the window. In the original photo, the faint figure of a woman’s face and dress can be seen floating inside the window panes.

Workers here are mindful.

A maid, who did not give her name, knocks on the door of the room before she enters.

“I show respect,” the woman said. “If there is one, she’s a good one.”

The Lee County Ghost Hunters team arrived last Friday to investigate the sightings, and brought equipment and recording instruments to see whether they could capture the strange phenomenon.

On Friday, the first of several days at the Inn, the group studied the rooms, spending the night there and collecting vast amounts of information to file away for their records.

The idea to meet there came after one of the members of the group, which had already conducted investigations like this before in other areas, saw a news video about the Inn’s hauntings.

One of the members had stayed in Room 118 for four weeks before the investigations. He woke up one night feeling a strange sensation in his foot, as though it had fallen asleep even though he had slept straight against the bed. He slept near the edge of the bed, where the apparition of the woman had appeared to others, but he never saw anything personally.

On Friday, he once again entered the room and looked around carefully.

He hoped he would find something before the weekend was over.

Clewiston Inn Haunted
Clewiston Inn Haunted

Mississippi Residents Report Kangaroo Sightings

BAY ST. LOUIS, Miss. (AP) - A kangaroo may be on the loose in Mississippi.

Animal-control officers in Bay Saint Louis say there have been several reports in the past few days of a kangaroo hopping along U.S. 90.

The mayor says he's heard reports of people seeing a kangaroo four or five different times, and at first he wondered if someone was just joking around.

Some officials suspect the animal was someone's pet that may have escaped.

Based on eyewitness accounts, the kangaroo is about four feet tall.

The Australian Department of Foreign Affairs says kangaroos usually feed on fruits and vegetables. Most are nocturnal, but some are active in the early morning and late afternoon.

As well, Gulfport’s Sun Herald reporter Ryan LaFontaine appears to be the source of the original article about accounts of sightings in the past few days of a kangaroo near Seminary Drive and U.S. 90.

Mayor Eddie Favre told LaFontaine: “It could be someone had the kangaroo and it got loose or it may be a case where the kangaroo came in with Katrina and has been here ever since.”

The reporter also mentioned other exotic animals of the recent past near there:

The ‘roo seems to be the latest addition to South Mississippi’s “wild kingdom.” In 2004, Bay police spent four days searching in drainage ditches and under houses for a missing 17-foot Burmese python. Police in Waveland pulled a nine-foot alligator from a ditch near a neighborhood bus stop in May. There were reports of wild pigs in Hancock County last year and more in Gulfport last month.

Nearly four months after the python terrorized Union Street residents, the Bay City Council drafted a proposal to ban more than 100 different species of exotic animals, including hippopotamuses, giraffes, some reptiles and kangaroos. But the council failed to adopt the regulation when a handful of residents protested later that year."

Officials say animal-control officers have never tackled a kangaroo.

Mississippi Kangaroos Reported
Mississippi Kangaroos Reported