Longwood Lights: She had so much to Say

An encounter with the unexplainable while working at an Antebellum home during Christmas.

Preface

This is a true story from my childhood. This is my only brush with the unexplained. I am a skeptic. I still don’t believe in ghosts, but I cannot explain this any other way. You be the judge.

They Come for the Light Show

Every year in Natchez, MS, the antebellum home called Longwood decorates the home and the lawn with elaborate Christmas lights. The road in and out of the grounds is long and winding, and the light show is in sync with a radio broadcast of popular Christmas songs. It is a delight for the eyes, and everyone in my town and the surrounding areas come to enjoy it.

The current owner, The Natchez Pilgrimage Garden Club, is very protective of their old homes, and Longwood is no exception. It is the largest octagonal house in the United States and is part of the National Registry of Historic Buildings.

Construction of the building was interrupted during the Civil War, and all of its floors above the basement are empty and unfinished.

My fine arts teacher in high school was a member of the Garden Club, and she asked me, as well as a few other students, if we would like to work for a few hours each night taking money at the front gate for the light show. They also wanted someone to sit on the lawn near the home to make sure no one got out of their cars and did anything inappropriate on the property.

$8 an hour was good pay in 1999, so I didn’t think twice. For two months, I worked in tandem with another classmate guarding the lawn and collecting money at the gate from the cars that entered the property.

For a few weeks, nothing exciting happened. My coworker and I would take turns; one night he would sit on the lawn, and I would take money at the gatehouse, and then we would switch. We had walkie-talkies, and the person at the gatehouse would notify the person on the lawn how many cars were on the property at any given time. Working with walkie-talkies was the coolest thing I had accomplished at this point in my 16 years of life.

My coworkers were apprehensive about sitting on the lawn. I come from the country. Literally, over the hill and through the woods to grandma’s house. I spent many nights in my childhood walking through the woods home from grandma’s house. Being outside at night didn’t bother me.

Ironically, nothing strange happened when I was on the lawn near the house. Longwood has a reputation for being haunted. Most old homes in the South do. Some more than others, but Longwood is probably middle of the road when it comes to people claiming it’s haunted. It’s not the scariest house on the block, but some people have had some weird encounters.

For instance, when I told this story to a friend, he told me his own personal Longwood ghost story.

One night during a Garden Club reception at Longwood, he was running around like kids do. He said he opened the door to the bedroom, and there was a woman in all white sitting on the bed. He knew the lady that lived in the house was in the other room. He froze in fear, slowly backed out, and slammed the door. He ran back into the reception hall, and the lady that lived on the property was in there visiting with the other parents. He never wandered the halls of Longwood again.

Gateway to More Than Longwood

Over the eight weeks the light show ran, I witnessed different anomalies on the 2-way radio. Interference from truck drivers on the nearby highway, rowdy kids in the neighborhood, normal interference. We would ignore it or try to talk to them. I joked around with some kids in the neighborhood a few times and even said, “breaker breaker one nine, what’s your twenty,” to a long-haul trucker who I am sure did not find it as amusing as I did.

She was different.

One night, while manning the gatehouse, I heard a voice over the radio. This wasn’t interference. This wasn’t a weak signal piercing through the radio channels. This was a crystal-clear voice coming through the radio as if she was standing next to me. The strangest part of her voice was her accent. I am from Mississippi. We have a very distinct southern accent. I am also from a touristy town in Mississippi that is a retirement destination. Even at 16 years of age, I’ve heard accents from all over the world in person and on television. Hers was unique, almost Old English but with a southern drawl. No girl in 1999 spoke like her.

“Hey, let me tell you about all the fun things we did this summer. My uncle took us to the river; we went down to the creeks; we played on the grounds. It was so much fun. I had so much fun. I want you to meet my cousins. My uncle can have all of us over; we will have so much fun together just playing. I am so excited.”

I listened in amazement.

Who was she talking to, so clearly? Like she was in the room. No one was talking back to her. It was just her voice. It was very unsettling. I listened for a little while longer as she talked about how she came to visit her uncle, the lawyer, and that he had shown her all over, and it was so much fun here.

She talked nonstop in what I can only describe as a mix between Old English, southern, and British accents. I didn’t understand some of the words she said. She talked for close to two minutes. Finally, I picked up the walkie-talkie and said, “Who are you talking to?”

Without a moment’s hesitation, she replied,

“You.”

I froze in fear. Not only was she coming through the walkie-talkie in a way that was not another walkie-talkie or some other radio device. She didn’t hesitate. She said “you” so clearly and concisely, like she was standing in the room with me and shocked I asked.

The silence was deafining but the next second my coworker said, “Josh, who are you asking?” I replied, “did you hear that voice over the radio?” He said he hadn’t.

Anytime we had interference on the radio we both heard it, it was very strange that only I heard her voice and it was so clear. A signal that strong should have easily carried over to his walkie talkie as well.

Later, when I told my fine arts teacher this story, she told me that the original owner of Longwood was a lawyer and he didn’t have any kids, but he had a lot of nieces and nephews, and some of them were buried in the graveyard not far from the gatehouse. She very calmly said I was probably talking to one of them.

Unsettled by this, it didn’t end there. The next night, I was scared to be at work. I spent most of the night talking on the phone with friends to try and pass the time. Halfway through the shift, her voice came over the radio one more time,

“Did you have fun last night?”