Home Grown Stories

                       GHOSTS, OWLS, AND BIG OLD HOUSES 

                              by Carolyn Duskin, Dawson, GA 

As a young woman, I left California for New York. I was a classically trained musician trying to make it in a band, but I also had to support myself, so I took small jobs in dance bands. My future husband Whit was at West Point Military Academy in New York. 

Whit was a manager for one of the bands. When he needed a bass guitarist one night, I got recruited! That’s how we met.  

Whit was part of a military family, so he lived all over the world growing up. When we married, we were also a hop-scotching military family living in Germany for a while and five different assignments in the US.  When Whit retired from the military in 1994, his parents invited us to come back to Dawson and raise the children here.  

We've had a lot crazy eccentric characters in this family home. Lots of family members died in this house. If you were sick, the doctor came to your house. When you died, it was in the house. 

On the night Grandpa Griggs died—and his ghost supposedly was seen to flight out of the front bedroom and light in the oak tree out front. For the longest time, people would cross the street and walk on the other side rather than walk near the ghost tree. They knew that his ghost will be up there. 

We always had a family of owls living in the trees. After my father-in-law passed away, this huge owl lit right on that railing out there and just sat there for the longest time looking in the house. And I said, “That's Pop!” For the next few days this same owl would keep coming to this house, to the rail, just be here. I chuckled and thought, “Pop’s just checking us out!”

Sometimes in the middle of the night you can wake up and hear music coming from the living room! Must be Doe’s ghost!

I remember another incident that happened when I unpacked my music box collection. I unpacked and wound them all up to make sure they were still playable. They played until they were all silent. One of them my mother had bought for me in Switzerland. It played a little Mozart. You could see all the mechanisms work. That night I was laying in bed and all of a sudden one of them started playing! It wasn't like the last few notes as the music box runs down—it played the whole piece! I just pulled the covers up over my bed and I said, “Someone wound that up again.” I was really kind of nervous about the whole thing. I was the only grown up in the house!

One More Story...The big CRASH!

 My mother sent me paintings that I had painted when I was in school, some going back to junior high and elementary school. They were on some of this rag type paper about 18” x 24”. So, they were all about the same size. Instead of framing each one separately, she put them all in one frame. She said, “You can take each one out every month. And it's always a new picture, and people will think that you got a new picture every month.”

I remember putting it on a hook in the hallway. The wire was pretty sturdy. The hook was really strong. It was a heavy picture. And I thought, “Well, it'll stay there. It’ll be fine.”

Then one night when we were watching TV, we heard a crash! We went to look in the hall and there were my paintings on the floor! The glass broke. But the hook had not come out of the wall. The wire on the back of the paintings was still intact. 

Well, I'm from California and I know what an earthquake feels like--and we did not have an earthquake! I said, “Some ‘body’ had to take that frame off of hook and drop it!” It doesn't like my art!” 

I have never tried to put that thing back up there again. 

And that was cool with the spirit.