The Thomas House: A Haunted House?

Eva Grace Thomas married Charles Oakes in 1949. They grow up several miles apart in the knobs of Monroe County, right on the McMinn county line. Eva lived on Ridge Road in an old farm house that set down the hill from Ridge road on the west side of the ridge. The Thomas family bought the land and the house some time after the Civil War from a Hawkins family. Until recently it belonged to the family. This was the house that Eva grew up in. Eva can remember that the house was known for some strange things. Items that you would place in one location in the house would sometimes be moved and no one would know how they got moved. Most eerie of all were the doors that would open by themselves. Sometimes they would hear the latch rattling and then the door would swing open gently. At other times a door would just burst open as though someone had forced it open. Eva's Uncle Jake and Aunt Sally Howell came to visit one time. Their two small children, W.P. and Hazel, stayed in the back bedroom. One morning they came screaming into the kitchen saying that the door had flown open in the bedroom and that they had seen a shadowy figure in the room. They refused to go back into the room again. Their mother and Eunice Culberson (another aunt) say they have heard the sounds of dragging chains. Charles and Eva have slept there many times and report that they would hear noises in the walls and in the ceiling. Charlie remembers hearing the latch on the door to that room start to rattle and then the door swinging open. Aunt Sally Howell wouldn't go in the house unless the family was there. One evening she came to the house with her husband. As she walked up to the house the lamp in the living room came on and then went off again. No one was home. This scared Sally so she and her husband sat out front in the car until the family came home. No one knows what caused this strange things to happen. Speculations centered around the tradition that a man had hanged himself in the back bedroom in the days just after the Civil War before the Thomas' owned the house. Eva said that she and her family just got used to it and it didn't bother them much. Several years back this house was torn down and has been replaced by a new farm house almost in the same location.