It’s not everyday y0u see a man walking around the nearly-abandoned Turfland Mall with a cowboy hat and coke-bottle glasses, so I stopped to say hey.
This is Vernon Chism Jr. Kroger cashier, preacher, certified ghost hunter.
Told you.
He does a lot of ghost hunting with Patti Starr, who founded Ghost Chasers International, based here in Lexington. We talked for a while about Bardstown, Perryville, Gettysburg. He says that a lot of Civil War sites are hotbeds of ghost activity. He even said that he believed there was an old battlefield where the mall now stands. Several times during our talk he’d stop mid sentence and say, “did you feel that? Somebody just walked past me, and you better believe that wasn’t no wind either.”
We even spent a couple minutes listening. Just listening, trying to hear paranormal activity. I tried my damndest, but for all my effort I couldn’t hear anything. He’d say, “I just heard a cart go by. Something like an old hospital cart.”
I was thinking too much about what I was hearing. I was rationalizing every sound I heard. The cars going by, the train rumbling down the tracks, the kids playing. I tried to switch my brain into overdrive, trying to pick up on every little noise I heard, but that was the problem. What I needed to do was turn it off and just let it happen. Sometimes that’s all you need.
