This Halloween, why not go to a haunted house that really is haunted?

In this crumbling factory building at the end of King’s Highway, I was meeting Terry Mayo, Murfreesboro’s favorite ghost hunter, to take a look at his latest enterprise. After walking around in this gigantic brick factory building for a few minutes, I was starting to become a bit uneasy. Shadows would pass just outside my line of sight. Odd noises quickened my heart rate.

“Can I help you?” a sincere looking man in a ball cap and large eyeglasses snuck up behind me as I nearly jumped out of my skin. Terry’s a real character. I’d heard stories about his adventures as a ghost hunter, so I was already curious when I arrived just what a real ghost hunter would be like. He and the rest of his paranormal investigators are working to make a new type of haunted house in Murfreesboro?a cross between a psychiatric hospital and a ghost hunt. Who’s hunting who though?
The haunted house will occupy a large factory building built in the 1920s.
Throughout the building’s long life, several disasters have occurred inside. The building was a steel mill for the first 35 years of its life. There were several records of tragic accidents having occurred in the
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building. Steel workers were maimed or killed working with red hot steel and heavy machinery. Its second incarnation, a garment factory, wasn’t as hot, but just as dangerous. People lost limbs, and at least two lost their lives.
The most frightening incident involves a young woman’s murder in the 1950s. She was killed by the train tracks behind the factory, and her body was dumped inside where it wasn’t found for several days.
And some of these spirits refuse to leave the factory. They have successfully scared off a number of people interested in converting the space into art studio space and band practice areas. The bands packed up and left. The artists left?many of them not even returning for their easels and canvases.
In addition to his living staff of actors and workers, there will be several actual ghosts on the payroll.
“We are trying to prepare for the things that we are not doing,” Mayo says with a grim look of dread on his face. The crew is out to create an entirely new sort of haunted house. There will be “no Freddys, no Jasons, no chainsaws, no half-eaten body parts.”
The entire show is psychological. The idea is that the visitor is trapped in an insane asylum. Visitors walk through every imaginable part of the asylum, from beginning to . . . end. Along the way, actual spirits will take over where the psychos leave off.
The staff has been spooked on a regular basis throughout the construction process. Mayo has seen the ghost of a large balding man in overalls walking around the construction site. Late at night, things move without explanation, odd sounds occur, and tools come up missing.
“It’s almost like you can feel the effects of the wind, but you never see it, you just know it’s there,” said Shawn Grimes, one of the ghost hunters working on the project.
“Is that you John?” Mayo asks. A man in a denim work shirt is walking around in the shadows talking in a low voice to someone we can’t see. He doesn’t answer. “John? Is that you?”
“Yeah, it’s me.” Thank God. It was just another construction worker talking on his cell phone.
“Just making sure it was, buddy,” Mayo says with a slight grin. “Follow me, I’ve got to show you some stuff.” The ghost hunter led me through the entire haunted house under construction?a very impressive endeavor. The workers were painting walls in pairs with plenty of light. The majority of the crew has refused to be working in the building alone at any time. One told me a story about his experience hanging a door one evening.
“It was starting to get dark out and I’d been trying to hang this door all afternoon. I started hearing these strange sounds outside, like a kind of grunting,” said Grimes, who was visibly disturbed while recounting the details of his experience. “I tried to see what it was, but I didn’t see anyone or anything either. I kept working because I wanted to finish, but I finally had to give up, because the sounds kept getting louder and louder.”
After talking to Grimes, I noticed a man with deep set eyes in a black shirt and a silver scorpion necklace. His long, wavy black hair and pale skin gave him the appearance of a grave digger. He looked like he’d been working long hours, plagued by some unknown horror. One afternoon he was working on the building when he made a frightening discovery. He was working on a temporary ramp painting, when he started losing his balance.
“Something was pulling me down the ramp and we think the reason was there were some toys down there, some freaky looking dolls,” he said. The toys will be used as props in the haunted house. Perhaps they belong to one of the ghosts spotted in the building, a young boy about 6-7 years old.