The Surrency Poltergeist

The best-known Georgia haunting of the nineteenth century happened in a small railroad settlement in what is now Appling County, near the Altamaha River swamp. The town of Surrency, incorporated in 1911, was named for the family, and the family’s home belonged to Allen Powell Surrency. The haunting centred on that house in the 1870s. A Milledgeville newspaper, the Union and Recorder, printed a reporter’s eyewitness account from the house on 30 October 1872, so the main events date to that autumn, although some later tellers place them in the late 1870s. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution says they continued until Allen Surrency’s death in 1877.

What people reported was the classic poltergeist repertoire: furniture moving without a hand on it, doors flying open, books falling from shelves, shattered glass, clocks running backwards, mirrors breaking and objects thrown at residents. Retellings add hot bricks falling and noises ranging from weeping to sudden laughter. The 1872 reporter, Peter Lindenstruth, named about ten men present when a glass broke, said the house clock was examined and found in perfect order, and estimated that some five hundred visitors had come, many on an extra Sunday train. He rejected the theory that a large magnet was to blame but could offer no other.

The most personal evidence is the family memory kept in the town. Phillip Dukes, a grocery store owner who died in 1985, did not believe in ghosts but said he trusted his grandmother, Mrs. Surrency’s sister, who regularly found her shoes moved into the hallway overnight. A postal carrier, Hershel Tillman, said relatives’ stories of the house had convinced him that something was there. The house burned, with sources giving 1912 or 1925, so nobody can look at it today.

No one has produced a convincing explanation. The case has been told as a possible hoax, a case of suggestion among crowds drawn by the publicity, or something unexplained. Whatever the truth, it was a story about a real household that spent the last years of a man’s life in the glare of newspapers, and the Appling County Heritage Center’s curator told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2016 that few people there still discuss it.

Furniture and objects moving, doors opening, books falling, glass and mirrors breaking and noises, reported by the household, neighbours, relatives and visiting journalists.

The Surrency family home beside the railroad in the settlement of Surrency, Georgia; the house has been destroyed by fire.

The Surrency ghosts feature in Georgia ghost anthologies, in podcasts such as Southern Mysteries, and in a 2016 Atlanta Journal-Constitution column.