Post EVP Session Experience

Thursday night, October 8. I find myself hunkered down under a metal pavilion with Jeremy, the dull red lights of three separate voice recorders our only light. Well, that and the retina-shattering flashlight that Jeremy insists on sparking up every few minutes. That's right, folks, we're on a ghost hunt!

In the ongoing investigation into the 1928 murder of Deputy Claude Green and the ghost stories that surround his death, I decided to explore the more paranormal side of the story. Jeremy and I walked down to the old Balsam Community Center from his house and sat up our voice recorders and cameras. Unfortunately, environmental noise ranging from crickets and dogs to a higher than expected amount of traffic made our recording almost unusable. We walked back to Jeremy's house and relaxed for a few minutes, giving the audio recordings a cursory listen, glancing at the handful of images that we took, and discussing our next steps.

I left Jeremy's house an hour or so after we had finished our session, and something odd and startling happened to me. Jeremy's driveway is gravel and lined on both sides with heavy brush. At the end of the driveway, you must negotiate a very sharp turn to get back on the paved road. In my large truck, it usually requires some wiggling to avoid driving onto the railroad tracks on the other side of the road. As I came to the end of the driveway, with my windows up and my iPod playing through the trucks stereo, I was shocked to hear a loud screeching sound coming from somewhere in the woods up the hill and to my left. I can only describe it as the compressed screech of a train braking violently; metallic and harsh and sharp. It only lasted a second or so, but as soon as it was over, my stereo went silent. I was, if I'm being honest, terrified. I don't think I even realized that my music had cut out as I whipped the car onto the pavement. My only thought was that I was going to have to back up to make the curve, and the thought of looking back, looking into that dark forest behind me, was almost paralyzing. I dropped the truck into reverse and backed up blindly, and then threw it back into drive and onto the pavement. The entire drive home was full of dread, absolutely unwilling to look behind me.

I have no explanation for what I heard or felt that night. It's been a long time since anything paranormal has happened to me and I feel that I'm still processing the event. In some ways, it sounds like a UFO experience more than a ghost story. And no, no missing time for me. I'm interested if anyone has had a similar experience. Share in the comments or shoot me an email.

The Cowee Tunnel

In the years following the Civil War, the South seemed unwilling or unable to deal with the realities of an economy that couldn't depend on the free labor of slaves. Continued institutional racism, Jim Crow Laws, the Black Codes and the deprivations of indentured servitude meant that many blacks in the South were really no better off than they had been prior to the Emancipation Proclamation and the passage of the 13th Amendment. One lesser known approach that the southern states took in the decades after the War was the leasing of convicts for hard labor. Business owners, including the plantation owners further to the south, could acquire very cheap labor from the states prison systems, with almost no oversight into how they treated (or mistreated) the laborers. Keeping in mind that many laws unfairly targeted blacks and created harsh penalties for virtually any perceived crime (including walking outside after dusk, for example) and it's easy to see how this system became a nightmare for incarcerated blacks.

One salient example that leads us to our story: As the railroads began to push further and further into the mountains of western North Carolina, they started to encounter very treacherous terrain. Wide, fast, strong rivers flowed beneath steep and rocky peaks; deep gorges and isolated construction sites impeded and slowed the work. As the railroads found it harder and harder to entice workers to join the teams in the mountains, they turned to the state for a solution. In return, the state of North Carolina leased teams of convicts to the railroad to continue the dangerous work.  These teams laid track and dug tunnels through some of the most inhospitable terrain in the eastern United States.

One of these chain gangs was tasked with digging the 700' long Cowee Railroad Tunnel, just outside Dillsboro, NC. They worked with pick axes and shovels throughout the winter of 1882 to clear the forest and tunnel through the rocky mountain. Every morning the team, one of whom was only 15 years old, would be shackled together, ankle to ankle, and make the long march to the site. They would be loaded into a raft and pulled across the frigid Tuckaseegee River. On the morning of December 30, 1882, 30 convicts were loaded in shackles into the boat. The river was especially rough that day, and the icy water crashed over the low sides of the raft. Panicking at the raging water spilling into the boat, the convicts rushed forward to the stern, causing the raft to tip and dump the passengers into the icy water. Nineteen convicts died, chained together at the bottom of the river. The bodies were dredged from the water two days later, on New Years Day, 1883, and buried in an unmarked mass grave near the mouth of the tunnel.

Other people have covered the history better and more thoroughly than I (specifically Gary Carden, although many others have written on the tragedy). Efforts have been mounted over the years to have the bodies exhumed and reinterred in a proper fashion, to give these men the respect they deserve.

Over the years, numerous people have reported noises emanating from the tunnel; the sounds of pick axes on stone, of voices echoing from inside the earthworks. On occasion, loud moans and screams and unexplained splashing sounds have been reported. Cave-ins and train derailments in the tunnel have led some to speculate about a curse directed at the place by the poor souls who worked on, and in some cases, perished at the tunnel.

Today, the easiest way to see the tunnel is to take a ride on the Great Smoky Railroad. Listen carefully as the train passes through the mountain, and you may just hear the cries of the men who died to cut this treacherous tunnel.

Sources and Additional Info

Gary Carden theliarsbenchgazette.blogspot.com

The Ghost Writer https://spiritedwriter.wordpress.com/tag/cowee-tunnel/

Smoky Mountain News Article http://www.smokymountainnews.com/news/item/10992-1882-cowee-tunnel-disaster-comes-into-21st-century-spotlight

The Fiddler's Grave, pt. 1

There's a story that I heard a few years ago that goes something like this:

There's a grave in a small cemetery in Waynesville inscribed with the name "The Fiddler." No matter the time of year or day that you visit, the grave will be swept clean, even if the rest of the cemetery is buried in fall leaves. Is this hallowed ground swept clean by the dancing of a spectral couple enjoying the fiddling of some long dead musician?

All good questions, I suppose.

I visited the site a few days ago as the initial visit in a longer research project. I had hoped to delve into the legend, find out who this mysterious 'Fiddler' was, then dip into the more supernatural side of things. I did find a little information on my brief visit, and I did notice some discrepancies with the original story.

The headstone is a little more informative than I had heard. The full inscription reads

Joe Gillian

"The Fiddler"
Died 1934

There were, in fact, a few leaves on the grave. Oddly enough though, is that there is very little grass or moss growing on the grave, which consists of the small headstone and a large (maybe 10' in diameter) semicircular depression in the bank, even though the rest of the graveyard is very lush and green.

To the right is the mossy green of the cemetery, to the left is the bare earth of The Fiddlers Grave

To add to the weirdness is the fact that the grave site is set about 20 yards or so from the rest of the cemetery. If I hadn't been looking for this specific grave, I probably would have missed it entirely. 

Beyond that, my research has been fruitless. I can't find any reference to the legend online, and almost nothing about the enigmatic Joe Gillian. So I'll put this here: Has anyone else heard this story? Does anyone  know anything about Joe "The Fiddler" Gillian? If so, please drop me a note in the comments or via email. 

The Spirit Leaves

When I was a kid, my grandparents (like a lot of Southern grandparents) were full of great stories, including a few ghostly tales. This is a story from my grandmother.

When she was a young woman, she had an unusual experience after a family friend had passed away. As was customary, the casket and body were placed in the family's home so that friends and relatives could visit and pay their respects. The casket was on display in the back room of this small house, and most of the well-wishers had said their goodbyes and headed home for the night. My grandmother and her family lived only a few doors down, so they had stayed on to help clean dishes and put away chairs and the numerous pictures and mementos that had been hauled out as the various well-wishers had stopped by.

Late in the evening, with the still summer air hanging heavy in the house, my grandmother and the rest of the family found themselves sitting quietly in the living room. The silence was interrupted by a sharp creaking sound coming from the back room. They all realized that they were hearing the sound of the casket slowly opening. Everyone sat up, alert and scared and fascinated. They heard the creak of the wooden coffin as it opened and the dull pop as the lid closed again. Then there was the soft shuffle of footsteps on the worn wooden floor. And then last, the sharp metallic creak of the spring on the back screen door as it opened and then slammed shut. Silence followed, until the normal summer chorus of crickets and katydid's resumed in the darkness around the house.

They sat in stunned silence for several long minutes until a brave member of the family finally crept into the back room, followed closely by the rest of the family and friends. Nothing was obviously amiss so he slowly raised the lid of the rough oak box. The deceased was still there, still firmly deceased. They retreated to the living room and sat in the gloom of the late summer night until sunrise.

I think this is a great story, spooky and a little sweet in the picture that it paints of family and friends coming together and a less frightening view of the spirit world. The house is gone now, replaced with a parking lot for a builders supply store. But the good, solid darkness of a southern summer night is still around, and it's easy to imagine that the quiet is crowded with spirits if you try.

Reader Story :: Spectral Dog

I received an interesting email from a reader that I thought I would share:

I came across your blog while looking for something completely unrelated, and it made me remember something that happened to me about 12 years ago. I was living in Balsam and working in Sylva (a town about 10 miles from Balsam - Wes). It had snowed Saturday night, maybe 4 or 5 inches, and it had been cold all day Sunday. The state snow plows hadn't made it to Balsam yet, so the roads were still fairly covered. I woke up early Monday morning, an hour so so before sunrise, to see if the roads were passable. I walked down to the road, maybe thirty yards from my front door, and stood in the middle of the road, testing to see how slick it was. Because a few cars had driven the road over the weekend, it was frozen into solid ice. There was no traffic, and it was dead quiet. The moon was out and the snow and ice practically glowed.

From down the road I heard the unmistakable sound of a dog running. I could hear heavy panting, the jingling of a collar and the thumping of paws on the frozen pavement. I stared towards the source of the sound, but I couldn't see anything. My first thoughts we simply wondering if I was about to be attacked by a dog. As it got closer though, I started to get weirded out. The sound was definitely coming from the road, and it was definitely coming towards me. After maybe 20 seconds, the sound of this invisible dog passed right in front of me and I could hear it continue down the road for a another few seconds until it faded back to silence. I swear that I could have reached out my hand and touched the source of the sound as it passed me, but I never saw anything. No dog, no ghostly footprints in the snow, nothing. Just this disembodied dog sound.

Anyway, probably not the weirdest story in the world, but your blog brought it to mind so I thought I would share. Nothing else ever happened while I lived there, and that was probably the closest I've ever come to a paranormal experience. Thanks for the blog, cool stuff.

Chris 

Thanks for sharing that. Definitely interesting, and probably really unnerving in the moment.

More tales from the Balsam Mountain Inn

     In doing some research, I stumbled across another book that mentions the strange occurrences reported at the Balsam Mountain Inn. Ghostly Encounters: True Stories of America's Haunted Inns and Hotels was written by Frances Kermeen. Kermeen is the owner of Myrtle's Plantation in Louisiana, which is touted as one of America's most haunted locations. The full book is available on Amazon.
     The brief chapter on the Inn includes a bit of the history of the structure and the surrounding town, and speaks briefly of the restoration of the Inn in the 1990's. Reports from guests of footsteps and jiggling doorknobs are cited. The most interesting aspect of the article is something I've never heard before. Back in the years when the Inn was a seasonal operation, the employees spoke of how they would spend hours buttoning up the building for the winter, tidying up, turning off lights and closing the windows and doors. They would leave the dark structure, say their goodbyes for the winter and then trek down the hill. Once at the bottom of the drive, they would be shocked to look back at the grand old hotel only to find all of the lights burning brightly. They would return, extinguish the lights, and leave again. By the time they had gotten to the bottom of the hill, the lights would be on again.
     This is an interesting report, but little additional detail is given, so it's hard to investigate further. It's a fascinating tale, however, that points to a long history of the paranormal at the Inn.

Ghost Hunting: The Basics

     If you want to watch ghost hunting on television, you are living in a golden age. Ghost Hunters, Ghost Adventures, Ghost Mine, the list goes on and on. There's almost always a show on where people, lit by the ghastly green light of a night vision camera, run and trip through some haunted location with all sorts of esoteric paranormal equipment blinking and beeping to let us now that something is there with them. Likewise, the amateur ghost hunter can pack a bag with meters, cameras and many more expensive electronic baubles that attempt to prove the existence of spirits. There are smartphone apps that are marketed as full-featured ghost detection units. So what's useful? What works? I think there are two answers, and my feelings about this aspect of paranormal investigation may surprise you. So here we go.

A Selection of ghost hunting tools from Amazon

    The list of equipment used in a typical television ghost hunt is staggering: K2 meters, voice recorders, EMF detectors and motion detecting cameras are the old standbys. Newer innovations include the aforementioned smartphone apps and the spirit box, which supposedly allows a spirit to select words from a digital dictionary that the spirit box can then play aloud. There are a host of other devices that show up on each television spook hunt. So what's worth using? Technically, I would argue that most of this stuff is worthless junk. Personally, I think that the chance of detecting any sort of spirit with a digital device is slim to none. K2 meters, EMF detectors and spirit boxes seem to rely on  random chance more than anything. I think that cameras and voice recorders can be a valuable tool to document the investigation and to capture the human reactions to the paranormal. The iPhone apps that I've played with have meters for things like EMF detection when the iPhone clearly does not have a sensor to detect EMF.

     So, does that make this stuff completely worthless? As a technical tool, probably. But I think that there may be a deeper value to these devices, something beyond the obvious. I think that having this equipment puts us in the proper mindset to be able to notice the paranormal.  The ritual of checking batteries, flipping switches and peering through the green-tinged eyepiece immerses us in the experience. When the voice-recorder is rolling, we are quiet and still, trying not to contaminate the sound. This allows us to actually listen to the environment.  When the camera is action, we are alert and aware of everything we can see. In this way, I think that the equipment can be a useful component for the paranormal team, as long as it's not allowed to get in the way of the human experience.

     I do want to end this with the admission that I have seen good paranormal photos, and I've heard some really chilling EVPs, so I can't completely discount these tools. But the human mind is especially good at making patterns from random noise, so everything becomes suspect. Again, these new digital toys should be used to supplement the human experience of the paranormal rather than as a substitute for it. So by all means, use a camera and a digital recorder to document the moment and maybe even catch something unexplainable. Use these other tools with caution, but don't be afraid to let yourself get into the moment and more open to the supernatural. 

Pots and Pans

This is another reader submitted experience.

For several years, I had a friend who lived just a few minutes away from me in Balsam. Our houses were connected by a narrow trail that cut through the forest. There were no other houses near the trail, so it could be a bit creepy at times, especially if you were walking it alone. My friends house had a particularly weird vibe, but this one incident really stands out to me. 

     My friend and his family were moving, so I had been up helping him get his things together and generally saying a long goodbye. His mother came up, and asked if we would carry some pots and pans to my house. She didn't want to pack them, and she thought my mom could find some use for them. We dutifully stacked the pots, maybe 6 or 8 of them I total, and started walking to my house. After just a couple of minutes, in a fit of rebelliousness and laziness, I pitched the whole stack of cookware over the bank, down into the dense brush.  We continued to walk to my house, grabbed a couple of sodas and never mentioned the pots and pans to my mom. We left for a while, heading out into town. When we returned, we started to walk back to my friends house. It was then that we saw a surprising sight.

     There, on the side of this quiet little trail, was a perfect stack of pots and pans. Someone, or something, had collected every piece that I had tossed down the bank and left a neat pile for us to find. It's important to note that we were out of sight of my friends house, and too far away for anyone to have heard the noise. My mom was home alone and could certainly not have done it. There are no other houses nearby, and no reason that anyone else would have been in this area. I don't recall seeing the brush on the hillside being trampled in any way that would indicate a person had been down there picking up cookware. It simply seemed like the forest itself was unhappy that I littered. 

     

Balsam Mountain Inn guest experiences

     I'm going to try to collect here some of the experiences that have been reported by guests at the Balsam Mountain Inn. Most of these are culled from various websites so I can't really vouch for the veracity of any of them. I think it's still a helpful exercise to simply compare stories and try to get an idea of any "hot spots" within the Inn and to look for patterns within the experiences.

A guest in room 109 was awakened by the senstation of someone grabbing her foot.

Two guests in room 332 were on the porch looking up at the building when a shadow crossed by the window to their (supposedly unoccupied) room. Both guests reported seeing shadows in the room later that night, as well as hearing whispering voices. They were roused from their sleep at around 5 am by the sound of knocking, followed by more anomalous whispering.

A female guest woke to see a man in overalls looking though a suitcase at the foot of the bed. She assumed it to be her husband, but quickly realized that he was still in bed with her. She closed her eyes, and when she reopened them, the strange figure was gone.

     Above reports collected from Ghosts of America.

Haunted Places notes that two rooms in the Inn seem to be haunted: 205 and 207. Unexplained footsteps, jiggling doorknobs and other unexplained noises are reported. No personal experiences are noted.

     Haunted Places

In a 2009 interview with The State, the former innkeepers specified room 205 as the focal point of the haunting, and even give a name to the spirit that lingers there: Henry. It's also noted in the brief interview that a crew from The Travel Channel had been at the In, filming a segment of the paranormal happenings¹. One guests' experiences are related: A woman sleeping in the room awoke to find her husband rubbing her back. She turned to thank him, and then realized that he was sound asleep in the bed beside her.

     The State: Rooms with a Boo

Sheila Turnage notes room 205 again in her book Haunted Inns of the Southeast. A jiggled doorknob is again mentioned, as is a window being opened as guests slept in the room.
   
     Haunted Inns of the Southeast on Amazon

So this brief look at some publicly available experiences give us some interesting things to think about. Room 205 is an obvious starting point, and the name Henry is also an interesting tidbit. Without sounding mean, some of the stories on-line seem to be written by ninth graders. It's tempting to just dismiss some of this offhand, but I want to examine them as fully as I can. Some things (footsteps, whispering) are pretty easy to explain in a 100 year old Inn with paper thin walls. Some things are more mysterious. Hopefully this overview of reports can get us moving in the right direction, and provide a starting point for more serious research.

Notes:
1: The Travel Channel spot mentioned in the interview is episode 8 of a show called Weird Travels, which ended its run in 2006. The episode is called "Haunted Hotels: Where Darkness Dwells." I've yet to find a copy of this, but when I do, I'll review it here.

My Balsam Mountain Inn experience

     I worked as a cook at the Balsam Mountain Inn for a couple of years, and I heard all of the stories from the other employees of strange occurrences, unexplained footsteps, all of the typical hallmarks of a haunted space. I hope to delve into some of those in the future, but for now I want to talk about my own experiences. Most are fairly low key and I assume all of them could be explained away easily enough. There are a few instances that I simply can't rationalize away, but I understand if you, dear reader, disagree with me.
   

     Firstly, I'd like to address a big issue: The Inn has a history, a certain gloss of the supernatural attached to it, and that is bound to color the perceptions of anyone who is aware of it. It also looks the part; like a miniature Overlook Hotel from The Shining, with creaky wooden floors, wavy glass in the windows and an overabundance of shadows. My own personal experience with the Inn also alters my perception of it; my first time in the building was an illegal entry through an unlocked window with friends and a Ouija board when the Inn was boarded up and unused. (I'll talk about that when I'm sure the statute of limitations has expired.) All of these things modulate the way that I react to and interact with the space, and I understand that. I guess what I'm trying to say is that the building itself might make one believe in ghosts.
   
     So, here's the easy to explain stuff: Footsteps. Sometimes near, sometimes far away and loud, but footsteps were very common. Many mornings as I sat the kitchen up alone in preparation for breakfast, I would hear someone crossing the large dining room. I would pop my head out to explain our breakfast hours only to be greeted by an empty room. The entrance to the dining room had an infrared door alarm that sounded a chime in the kitchen. This was tripped on many occasions without an obvious source, and many footsteps were heard in the dining room without the alarm being triggered.
   
     There was also that odd feeling of being watched, which undoubtedly has many potential causes. The odd thing about the Inn was that the feeling would come and go. Some nights, the place felt light and airy, like any other building. But other times there was an oppressiveness to it, a sense of foreboding that made the place see darker than it really was. And this feeling wasn't dependent on the staff; some nights I would work alone and feel just fine. Other nights with a full staff present and the whole building seemed to be watching you.

     More difficult to explain was the situation with the gas stoves. One more than one occasion, a cook would walk to the stove only to find an eye turned on, but not lit. I assume that some rational explanation could be found for this, but it seems unlikely. The control knobs were old and difficult to turn, and this normally happened quickly. My experience was this: I walked from the stove to the sink to dump out some water. When I returned to the stove seconds later, one eye had been turned on fully; the smell of gas was immediately evident. Could I have somehow bumped the knob and turned the gas on? Perhaps. But in two years of cooking, I had never done that before and I never did it again. Similar experiences happened to the other cooks, and frequently in situations where no one was using the stove.

     The last experience that I will mention is probably the most perplexing. To understand the story, I'll need to explain the layout, and that's probably easiest with a diagram. When the incident occurred, I was standing in the kitchen, talking to the head chef. It was early in the evening on a fairly slow night. The chef had his back to the walk-in cooler, I was facing him and could see over his shoulder and had a clear view of the short hall that connects the laundry room to our dry storage room.

     As we talked, I saw a person cross in front of the cooler door, as if they were walking from the laundry room into dry storage. There is an exterior entrance into the laundry room, but dry storage has only windows and is several feet off the ground. My initial thought was not of the paranormal. I assumed that someone had simply walked in the laundry room and slipped into storage. I interrupted the chef to explain that someone was in dry storage. Again, there was no thought of anything paranormal, no weird vibes or anything. There was a person, and they weren't supposed to be there. The chef and I walked into storage quickly to find an empty room. No windows were open, nothing was out of place.  Whoever I had seen had simply walked into the room and vanished. I tried to explain what the person looked like to the chef and other cooks, but there was nothing that really distinguished him. It was a man, but beyond that I had nothing. The whole sighting had lasted maybe two seconds, but it was absolutely real to me. Can that be explained? Sure. I had some sort of hallucination, maybe a visual disturbance. Does that seem probable? I suppose it's just as likely as me having seen a ghost, but the clarity and absolute realness of what I saw still makes me wonder.

     
    

Balsam Mountain Inn backstory

     If you live in this area long enough and talk to the right people, you'll eventually hear stories about the supposed haunting at the Balsam Mountain Inn. Guests relate stories of footsteps, covers being pulled from their bed, mysterious shadows with no discernible source. Employees of the historic building also have tales of lights that are turned off by unseen hands, items thrown in empty rooms, even apparitions. I'll be examining some of these stories in detail in later posts, but I want to take a minute to discuss the history of the Inn, and the potential source of the haunting.

Photo by W. Hill

     The Balsam Mountain Inn was opened in 1908 and served the well-to-do tourists who came to the area in search of cool summer days, clean air, and quiet. Built by Joseph Kenney and Walter Christy of Athens, Georgia, the Inn was a grand destination in the heart of the Smokey Mountains. But when the passenger train service to the area ended in the late 1940's, the Inn began a slow decline into disrepair. By the end of the 80's, the Inn was only open seasonally, and served very few guests. A restoration by a passionate innkeeper began in the 90's, and the Inn is again a vibrant destination in western North Carolina.¹

     So with this long history, there are obviously stories to be told. But is there a source for the allegations of a haunting, some trauma or horror hidden beneath the fresh paint and well-varnished floors? Most stories elude to a shooting on the property, with only a vague idea of the time frame in which this murder may have occurred. In general though, the tale goes like this:

     Sometime in years past, the community of Balsam was holding a picnic, celebrating the warm, long days of summer. One of the local deputies was in attendance, enjoying the hospitality and friendship of this small mountain community, when he was shot by some long-forgotten villain. The deputy was carried inside, but died in one of the rooms before medical assistance could arrive. His spirit, tied forever to this place, is now one of several ghosts seen on the property.

     So is there any truth to this? Surprisingly, there is. On Friday, August 31 (or Saturday, September 1, depending on the source) of 1928, Deputy Sheriff Claud Green of the Jackson County Sheriffs Office, was shot and killed during a box supper at the Balsam School, which lies at the foot of the hill below the Inn and is now used as the Balsam Community Center. His attacker, a man named Ed Smathers, used two separate weapons to shoot the deputy, and was later convicted of Second Degree Murder. He served only a short sentence before being released and moving west.^2,3  However, the family of Ed Smathers has their own version of events, one in which Ed was not the true killer, and that a cousin of Ed's had actually pulled the trigger that ended Green's life.⁴

 

Deputy Sheriff Claud Green

     I can't find much else about the death of Deputy Green. Did he, as the legend insists, make his way to the Inn before passing? It's unclear. I've begun some research into this, but it's hard to find historical accounts from the time period. Green is buried in the Parris Cemetery in Dillsboro, NC⁵, but does his spirit still roam the halls of the Balsam Mountain Inn? Did his traumatic death somehow stain the grand old hotel, causing countless unexplained encounters? Guests have spoken of a shadowy man in a hat lurking on the second floor porch. Are they seeing Deputy Sheriff Green searching for peace? Is he still trying to find justice, more than 80 years after his death?

Sources and Notes:

1: A Brief History of the Balsam Mountain Inn
2: Jackson County Fallen Officers
3: Officer Down Memorial Page
4: Smathers Family Legend
5: Claud Green's cemetery record
Note: Deputy Green's first name is spelled either Claude or Claud depending on the source. I've chosen the less common spelling of Claud because that is what is on his tombstone.