Each year in early October, my kids and I attach heavy-duty punch balloons to the ceiling of our front porch with rubber bands and strings. We cover the balloons with white bedsheets, eyes and ghostly mouths drawn on in black permanent marker—a little homemade seasonal flair to liven up the streetscape during spooky season.
But for a while, I’ve also wondered if there are ghosts living inside my house, too. Unlike the ones bobbing around on my porch, I can’t actually see them, but they’ve had ways of making their presence known through mysterious whispers and footsteps, unexplained shadows, cold spells, and unaccountable smells.
So I did what any self-respecting journalist in pursuit of truth would do: I turned to the experts—in this case, a local group, cheekily called Onlyphantoms, that offers free paranormal investigations in the Triangle area—to debunk my suspicion that my house is haunted.
Because ghosts are make-believe, right? As someone who deals in facts, I feel like I’m required to think so.
First, some background: I live in a restored two-story Queen Anne frame home near downtown Raleigh, just on the edge of historic Oakwood. It’s all creaky wooden floors, drafty chimneys, and squeaky doors, but it stands on a new foundation. According to documentation from the Society for the Preservation of Historic Oakwood, the house was originally built on a lot located a few blocks away on South Wilmington Street, for one Lizzie O. Watson, in 1906.
But Lizzie Watson wasn’t the first person to live in the home, although a 1914 directory from the Edenton Street Methodist Episcopal Church in downtown Raleigh indicates she lived there later (she died in 1927, according to historical records). The home’s first occupant was H. Harold Hume, North Carolina’s state horticulturalist and a professor at NC State University. According to a letter from a neighbor who discovered and gifted us a framed photograph of the house in its original location, the home once belonged to my neighbor’s cousin-in-law, Virginia Watson. The state of North Carolina acquired it from Watson by eminent domain in the 1960s or ’70s, when it was planning to build a North-South Expressway through Oakwood.
The expressway was never built, and the home housed state offices for several decades. In 2008, it was picked up and moved to its current location for a planned development project. That project never happened, either, and so we bought the home, officially named the Watson House, from the state in 2018. We moved in in 2022, after a long restoration process.
Soon after, I began noticing that things were amiss—literally amiss, as in cups and glasses, dresses, cutlery, candles, books disappear occasionally, and what is that smoky smell, that sudden rush of cold air on my arm? Why do I often get the feeling that I’m stepping into a room after someone else has just left it?
This fall seemed like the perfect time to search for some answers. When I heard about Onlyphantoms, I knew I’d found my opportunity.
Onlyphantoms is a team of more than a dozen people who get together regularly to conduct paranormal research across North Carolina. Founder Jason Smith had his first encounter with the paranormal as a six-year-old growing up on his grandparents’ farm in Franklin County, but it wasn’t until the pandemic lockdowns in 2020 that he actively sought out such experiences.
Smith and some friends went camping at the notoriously haunted Devil’s Tramping Ground in Chatham County, outfitted with a pair of dowsing rods and an electromagnetic field (EMF) detector.
“We had a couple of things happen that night, nothing necessarily paranormal,” Smith says. “But it was interesting, to say the least.”
The camping trip evolved into a hobby that led to an organized group that now conducts regular investigations at residences and public buildings. In addition to Devil’s Tramping Ground, the group has investigated the battleship North Carolina in Wilmington, Stonewall Manor in Rocky Mount, and the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in Weston, West Virginia. They’ve found evidence of the paranormal in all these places, to varying degrees, they say, whether it’s a dissipating shadow or a strange, unexplainable mist.
It was something of a process to get a residential visit from Onlyphantoms on the books. I proposed the idea to Smith, who discussed it with his team. After much emailing, they ultimately agreed, and our first step was to meet on a Zoom call for a preliminary discussion with Jennifer Pearce, a Raleigh-based certified evidential psychic medium.
A kindergarten teacher by day, Pearce operates as the Sugar Skull Psychic on the side, where she works as an animal psychic medium, paranormal investigator, and manifestation coach and specializes in Reiki, energy clearing, and intuitive tarot.
On the call, Smith advised me that I could tell Pearce as much or as little about my situation as I wanted, and she would fill in the rest.
I told her the gist—old house, weird noises, smells and sensations, things disappearing—but also the realities: little kids, big dog, noisy street, roommate that I’m married to. Like, I’m not blaming ghosts for that time my keys went missing for three days, only to be discovered stuffed down a Christmas stocking at the back of the toy closet. Or the smoky smell that permeated the downstairs for weeks following an unfortunate incident with the gas burner. Or the sounds of ghostly music that could be confused with a five-year-old’s truly startling piano-vocal rendition of the Enya track she likes to listen to on repeat.
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Most things, I know, can be explained. But I was surprised by how much Pearce knew that I didn’t tell her.
She was picking up on a lot of residual energy, she told me, a lot of comings and goings. Was it a boarding house in the past, she asked? Close. Also, she had visions of a well-dressed man, an educator maybe, she said, and a woman, who inhabited the home peacefully but “didn’t want to scare the little girls.”
Pearce was convinced there are spirits here. Then again, she said, “There are spirits everywhere.”
“Everywhere is haunted,” she told me. But not to worry, because the spirits in my home didn’t mean me or my family any harm. They aren’t malicious; they just had some of their happiest living memories in the home, Pearce said, and most of all, they don’t want to be evicted. Turns out we never truly escape the struggles of the material world.
If I didn’t mind sharing the space with spirits, Pearce said, she could describe ways to set some boundaries. Soon after, we ended the call and all agreed to meet up at my house three weeks later.
It’s just after seven p.m. on September 27, and my front doorbell rings. The ghost hunters have arrived.
There are four of them: Onlyphantoms founder Smith; Pearce, the psychic medium; Smith’s friend since high school Sterling Hunt; and Pearce’s husband, Travis.
They come loaded up with equipment, and I ask them to describe what they’ve brought. They unpack it all on my kitchen table and tell me about each tool.
“Our goal,” Hunt explains, “is not only to try to potentially capture something but also to debunk everything we’ve been told that you experience.”
There’s an Onlyphantoms-branded music box, which plays a chiming version of the Game of Thrones opening score when it senses motion. There’s an EMF reader and little clear plastic balls, cat toys that light up when they detect vibrations. There’s a full-spectrum camera that can pick up infrared and ultraviolet light, spectrums that are undetectable to the human eye, plus an infrared light and an air quality detector. There’s also a night-vision camera and what’s known as a spirit box, “basically a radio, FM radio stations,” Smith explains, that will sweep through the transmissions.
“You’re supposed to ask questions, and … you should get a response,” Smith says. “In theory. Problem is, with that, the response may have nothing to do with what you’re asking.”
“The theory behind it is you can pretty much influence it to give you that particular type of wording, kind of like how Bumblebee talks to Transformers,” Hunt clarifies.
“Yeah, it’s just like that,” Smith enthusiastically affirms.
“I’m good at making analogies,” Hunt jokes. “Part of my training.”
Smith and Hunt explain that there are a couple of pieces of equipment that they didn’t bring. They have an NVR security system with 14 cameras, but it takes a while to set up and disassemble, so they left it at home. And no Ouija boards.
“We do not use them,” Smith says emphatically. “That is not something that we even condone as people, using Ouija boards and not knowing how to actually use them. The game is OK, but when you’re actually putting intent behind it … that’s something different.”
Once all the equipment is up and running, placed strategically around the dozen or so rooms of the house, the investigation gets underway in earnest.
First, I walk around with Pearce, and she elaborates on what she senses. She says she sensed a lot of nervous energy coming from our dog, an energetic English pointer mix named Tuesday, and that Tuesday seemingly barking at nothing means she’s picking up on things humans can’t hear or see. She’s just making her presence known as a protector, Pearce says.
Onlyphantoms will be at Unwined in Wake Forest on October 16 for its Sip With event from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m.; the public is invited to come out, ask questions, and tell their stories. Onlyphantoms will also host a public investigation at Stonewall Manor in Rocky Mount on October 25.
Pearce says she senses the energy of a young woman wearing a wedding dress and a home that the woman’s family built where she lived with her fiancé. But she doesn’t sense any children, Pearce says, “so I feel like she may have passed young.” Could it be Lizzie Watson?
Pearce tells me the spirits in the house “are welcoming of you and your family.”
“They don’t want to scare you,” she says, “but they do know that, like, sometimes you might hear or see something out of the corner of your eye. They try to keep to themselves, but they also see you as part of their family, because you fixed the place up, and you brought the young girls in, and that energy.”
Pearce says the spirits advise the kids to be careful of the tall windows along the stairway—she senses a past accident there—and notices a smoky smell. I tell her I’ve smelled it before, too, and that there was a fire in the attic of the house some years ago, but I don’t know any more about it than that.
While Pearce and Hunt continue to look around, I’m asked to turn off all the lights and join Smith and Travis in the living room. Hunt said he had felt a cold sensation brush against him in there, so it seems like a natural place to linger. The equipment is all set up. We sit on the sofas together and wait.
“This is what a lot of investigating is like— sitting in the dark, with someone or alone, asking questions and hoping a device will go off,” Smith says.
We start with the questions.
“Do you like what the family has done in restoring your home?” Smith asks into the darkness. “Did you live here before? Was this a place of business for you?”
The music box starts playing Game of Thrones, but we can’t be sure if it’s in response to a question or if it’s malfunctioning. We try our luck with the spirit box.
“Do you like being here? Do you enjoy the family’s company?” Smith asks. The box sweeps through stations, and we can make out two words: “Texas Rangers,” and then another, “drowning.”
Suddenly, the infrared camera starts beeping. Smith gets up to inspect it.
“Oh, you died,” he says disappointedly, addressing the device.
“Not necessarily awe-inspiring, is it?” Smith says to me. “Doing paranormal investigating is long hours sitting in the dark, and then long hours reviewing footage, audio—because we may not see anything, but the camera might.”
Just then, the doorbell rings. I head next door to the foyer to see who’s there, but on the front porch, where the bedsheet ghosts will soon sway, there’s not a soul in sight.
A couple of days after the investigation, I call Smith with some follow-up questions. The crew has promised to review the footage they gathered from my house, and they’ll let me know what they find, but they haven’t had a chance to do that yet.
I’m not much closer to having answers to my question about whether my house is haunted, but at least I know I’m not completely crazy: weird things do happen here! Some can be explained, and some can’t—or not just yet, anyway.
I want to know why Smith and his friends do this kind of work, for free, in their spare time.
Everyone has their reasons, Smith says: because they want to encounter something, or want something weird to happen that they can’t explain, “because that will prove to [them] whether or not there is something out there.”
“You know, whether the paranormal exists or not,” he says.
“I just do it for the creep factor, to have fun, to have fun with my friends. But the other side of me wants to be able to explain things. This is something that all paranormal investigators, hopefully, truly want—to capture evidence that proves, without the shadow of a doubt, that there is the existence of spirits on the other side.”
Because if there is, he says, then there might be a way to communicate with them.
“There might be a way to prove, through science, that there is something there,” he says. “That there is something more to us being here.”
Send an email to Wake County editor Jane Porter: [email protected]. Comment on this story at [email protected].