Where Friends Meet
Life as a traveling chaplain is never dull. I am always learning something new and seeing new places. Today as I visited one family who lives out in a small rural town, the son showed me a picture of an old local church and told me a story about how many members there died crossing the Savannah River to attend Easter services back in the early 1900’s. The ferry they were using to cross the flooding river capsized. Only one person survived. Such a tragic story.
I asked if the building still stands. It does. It was only about 10 minutes away from their house. I love churches, especially old ones, so when I left I typed the church name into my phone and followed its directions to the location. It was several miles out a narrow country road. I didn’t pass another car the entire stretch. To see the church, you turn off at their sign and take another very bumpy road with crater-sized potholes a short distance until you get to a clearing. There it stands, windows boarded, surrounded by an old graveyard.
I might have a sense of adventure, but I’m not stupid. The place was remote, so I knew to leave the exploration to another time when I could have someone else with me. I did, however, stop the car just long enough to take a couple of photos.
When I got home after work, I did a little research on the church. I was surprised at what I found:
Ridge Church is an old, abandoned church that was used by Satanists for a short time after it closed. All together, it has four graveyards and a mass gravesite, most likely containing the remains of the many victims of a fire that happened in Lowndesville years ago. People have reported seeing orbs floating over graves in broad daylight and at night, hearing sermons going on inside the church itself, hearing footsteps inside the church coming from above their heads as though someone is walking around in the bell tower, and even seeing dark figures inside the church moving around. Many people refuse to enter the church due to a negative feeling they get upon stepping up the stairs and opening the door, as though something is “wrong” with the building. The inside of the church itself tends to feel freezing cold even during the summer time. (https://hauntedplacesofusa.blogspot.com)
I am happy to report that I encountered no orbs, no dark figures, no sourceless sermons, no feelings of doom, no unseasonal cold. I even checked my photos to see if I accidentally captured anything. Nothing. The only creepy feelings I had were more about being in the middle of nowhere and out of sight of the “main” road, which wasn’t a main road at all. I am more afraid of wayward flesh and blood up to no good than I am of spirits.
Or maybe I’m just used to the spirits. There were reportedly unseen inhabitants of my former church in Charleston. When I first heard about them, I was skeptical in ways that only someone not from around there could be. You see, the vast majority of longtime residents of that area have had unexplained encounters of one kind or another. What do you expect of a city with a history like Charleston’s?
It didn’t take long to make me a believer. There were many days when I worked alone in the church in my upstairs office and listened as it sounded like the entire fellowship hall below me was being rearranged. Doors slammed unexpectedly. Sometimes I would walk down a hall and pass right through a spot of unexplainable frigid air. One day I was in my office, the church secretary was downstairs in her office, and a church member was painting one of the classrooms when there came a terrible crashing sound in the kitchen. The three of us rushed to investigate. One set of upper cabinet doors stood open and a half dozen plates were shattered across the entire room. I remember checking for reports of seismological activity in the area in an effort to explain what had happened, but there had been none.
Yes, it was unnerving at times. After awhile, though, it became the “normal” for my experiences inside the church. We named one of the spirits a woman’s name – a name that kept popping up in autocorrected texts between me, my daughter, and my good friend. When we couldn’t explain why so many different words were autocorrected to that one name, we decided she had joined our conversation and was telling us her name. Is it weird that I feel funny about naming her here? I’m not sure how she would feel about being on social media. (And honestly, I’m not really joking…)
There are so many things in life that we cannot explain. I’ve worked around death for enough years now to know that in some times and in some places, the curtain between what we can see and what is hidden from our sight can sometimes get very thin. I’ve sat with countless patients who were seeing and talking to loved ones who died many years ago. I have no doubt that it is real. I find it comforting. I’ve been in the room with a dying person who was most obviously in conversation with at least two spirit presences. As I watched the patient’s expressions as he turned from one side of the room, to the other, and back again time after time, it became quite clear which of the presences was good and which was evil. I did a whole lot of praying in the room that day.
As strange as it all may seem, I remain much more afraid of living humans with evil intentions than of signs of presences I cannot see with my eyes. I think the reason is that I try my best to walk close to the Spirit, which I know is greater than any other spirit I could encounter. Still, I treat it all with great respect – a mystery that I am not meant to fully understand right now. And just like in that patient’s room, I know there is both good and evil around us. That realization has done wonders for my prayer life.
As for the Ridge Church, I think I would like to go back sometime to read the names on some of those gravestones and learn about that old church’s history. I won’t be going to chase ghosts, as a couple of websites might encourage me to do. At most, I just might meet some old friends.
Where Friends Meet
simplyjan 