I’m usually weary when property owners talk about their bed and breakfast business or their small town museums are haunted because a cynic could say that this is all just for publicity. After all, we’re all just a tad bit cynical, right?

Well what if the place that is said to be haunted has had a long history of reports from previous tenants? What if these reports all included the same type of haunting activity? Black ominous clouds that materialize out of thin air. Apparitions of an old woman in the house and the sounds of children running about. Would those reports intrigue even the hardest cynic to investigate?

SALISBURY — By day, the house at 1031 Highland Ave. will be an art gallery.

By night — and by reservation — the house will offer tours into the unknown.

The anecdotal evidence just became too much for David Harrison to ignore.

“Maybe I’m a landlord to a paranormal house,” he told himself after hearing a series of tenants over the past 18 years speak of weird happenings at his rental property near Rowan Regional Medical Center.

One night, a renter came home late from work when the rest of house was sleeping, and he met an older woman at the bottom of the stairs who he assumed was a house guest.

Upstairs, he woke his sleeping wife to ask her who the woman was. There was no house guest, the wife told him — and no more evidence of the woman.

Other tenants also reported seeing the apparition of an older lady, strange whispers at night about fire, the appearance of black clouds in a hallway and children running up and down the narrow stairs.

Harrison recently spoke to a young pizza delivery man who reminded Harrison he once lived in the rental house as a youngster. He told Harrison that after he left the Highland Avenue address, he was constantly followed by black smoke, causing him considerable distress and prompting his parents to seek out a priest for an exorcism of sorts.

What bothered — or should we say, intrigued — Harrison about all the stories was that none of the tenants knew each other, yet they all described similar phenomena.

“Something is in this house,” Harrison says.

He is even more persuaded after asking James Milbee, Jennifer Mayes and Danny Little of Carolina Association of Paranormal Studies to conduct their own investigation.

“I think it’s a very active house,” Milbee says after three separate investigations.

“Very,” Little adds.

-source: Salisbury Post

What’s interesting about this story is that several people have heard disembodied voices talking (or screaming) about a fire. David Harrison, the property owner, recently discovered a few boards up in the attic which appear to be singed, as if the old structure suffered a fire back in the days. Could this really be something worth investigating? I hope a professional team investigates these claims a bit closer. It sounds interesting.