Mystery Ghost of Surrency, Appling County Georgia

I was around 10 years old and my family was having a family outing to a family history site.  Normally I found these excursions fun and interesting but on this one day I was overheated and tired and cranky.  I don't remember what the rest of my family was going to go see but I was not interested.  I just wanted to sit down.  So my grandfather whom we called A'pa said he would sit with me while everyone else went on to whatever they were going to see.  I remember the heat of the air and the smell of the dust.  I was sitting on a wood bench next to A'pa and him telling me to prop my feet on his lap.  I was so aghast at the very idea of putting my shoes covered in southern red clay dust on his lap because he was wearing slacks and a dress shirt like he always did.  At some point while we were sitting there waiting for me to get a second wind to rejoin my family the conversation turned to the past.  He told me the story of Allen Powell Surrency his great grandfather.  He told me how A.P. Surrency's house was haunted.  It had so many strange occurrences that it was written about in the several newspapers and that strangers would come from miles away to come visit the haunted house and that because of the social conventions of the time A.P. Surrency had to host these strangers for their visit.  He then laughed a little and said how his great grandfather got frustrated by all of the visitors and moved.

Years later as an adult talking with my siblings I realized that this was the only story A'pa had ever told about his past.  Everything else we knew about him from before we could remember were things that our Mom had given us more information on than he had, like the fact that they lived in Ireland for a year when A'pa had a visiting professorship or that he had grown up on a farm.

A few years ago after A'pa passed away I was going through his paper's and books with my mom and we found a book of ghost stories, The Haunted Land by Nancy Roberts and Bruce Roberts which was published in .  Mom thought she recognized the book as one that contained a story about the Surrency Ghost. So I flipped through the book and found that sure enough one of the stories was about the Surrency Ghost.  So we sat down and read it as a family.  I was so shocked at how violent the ghost story was that involved Allen Powell Surrency and his family.  It was not at all the type of story that had been implied in the short story A'pa told me.  Talking with Mom about the difference between the story A'pa told me and what we read in the book, we decided there were a few things in play.  For one A'pa did not believe in ghosts or other supernatural occurrences, and for two I was a young child who didn't like scary stories so he would have left any of that part out of the story he told me.  The book was written well after the events occurred and as I recalled A'pa telling me about the story being told in newspapers at the time of the occurrences, so I decided that I wanted to learn more about the story and that I would search for some of these news articles.

As luck would have it I found several newspaper clippings in my grandfather's paperwork detailing the events.  He had transcripts from the Hawkinsville Dispatch from 1872 and 1873.  Stating the events started within a few weeks of the writing of the article.  These articles portray a vastly different story from the one presented in the book.  In the articles which involved a reporter visiting the Surrency family and speaking with them about the events and even witnessing some of the mysterious events tell of property destruction and flying objects (including items referred to as brickbats, which per Websters Online Dictionary are fragments of a hard material; especially one used as a missile).  The implication in the newspaper articles is that the family was trying to solve the mystery, that as my mom put it they were looking for someone playing a prank on them.  The articles written at the time start with references to a mystery not a ghost.  They had friends and neighbors over at the house watching everywhere trying to solve what was happening.  The articles mention the fear people had but nothing about anyone getting hurt.  Whereas the book has Clementine Surrency (about 16 years old) being tormented with her hair being pulled and her bed violently rocking while she was in it, and Robert Surrency (about 6 years old) was hit in the head by a flying andiron (per Websters Online Dictionary "either of a pair of metal supports for firewood used on a hearth and made of a horizontal bar mounted on short legs with usually a vertical shaft surmounting the front end") and beating him until he was unconscious "in a pool of blood" after which the family moved to another plantation they owned taking only their clothes.  The book also mentions broken bones and other wounds.  I know there are some errors in the book as it mistakenly names Millard Surrency as the father of the household and as a child in the household.  Millard Surrency was the oldest child of Allen Powell Surrency and about 21 years old at the time of the start of the events. The book is the only source I have of the family moving though this was also relayed to me from my Uncle that this occurred.

Further articles in my grandfather's collection include some articles from the Atlanta Journal from 1929, one from 1940 and one from 1984, an article from an unknown source with no date but a line that states it was written 70 years after the events, and chapter 10 from Footprints in Appling County written in 1981, which details the history of Surrency Georgia and and article from Times Union 1985.  All of which follow the tenor of the stories written in 1872.

So now I am left with a mystery.  Over the course of 100 years how did the story change from property damage and fright to malevolent injuries caused to the people of the household.  Was it that the newspapers were selling railroad tickets and wanted people to come as my uncle suggested.  To counter that my mom pointed out that Allen Powell Surrency treated all how came as a guest and housed and fed them at no charge and went into financial difficulty because of all the travelers so the only ones getting money were the railroads.  Is there contradicting information in some of the articles mentioned by the Hawkinsville Dispatch in 1972 as being previously written by the the Macon and Savannah papers which I have not located copies of yet.  Was the story altered to make it a better ghost story, or were the physical attacks not reported in the newspapers and instead verbally passed on to reach the authors of The Haunted Land.

The search continues.