A Clinton ghost story
Things that go bump in the night
J.R. Daugherty looks through the back window of what is now Cadence Craft and Trade in Clinton.
Craig Hansen, owner of Cadence Craft and Trade on Main Street in Clinton, was the right person to ask.
“Do I have ghosts?” he laughed. “Do I have ghosts? Come on, let me show you.”
His extra-large antique store and cafe is housed in the old Daugherty building, which was built around 1937. J.R. Daugherty had it built and lived in it for most of his life, according to Hansen.
Daugherty was a tough man. He was a hard worker, according to Hansen, and had a difficult childhood. Hansen has been told that Daugherty’s father was a sheriff when Daugherty was a child, and was shot and killed in church one Sunday after uncovering a moonshine operation.
“He really loved this building,” Hansen said. “He was really proud of it. His office was on the second floor. He passed away in this building. I don’t want to disrespect his memory or his family, but we have definitely seen things here.
“It can be scary.”
Hansen took me to the second floor by elevator.
“This was his office,” he said, gesturing toward an area by the windows that cover most of the back wall. “He used to collect rent from all the people who stayed upstairs, primarily single mothers who worked at Magnet Mills. He was known for sitting right here by this window and looking out.”
When Hansen first moved into the building, he would find a chair moved over by the window with the window open nearly every night. After they’d all cleaned up for the night.
“I’m not kidding you,” he said. “Everyone before me, even when I was looking at buying this building, everyone said it was haunted.”
Seller’s Real Estate agent Joey Smith told The Courier News the same thing.
“We had the building for sale several years ago,” Smith recalled. “I had the opportunity a few times to show it to prospective buyers.”
One day, he decided to explore the top two floors, where Daugherty and others lived decades ago. He entered the apartment at the end of the hallway, the very front of the building.
“While I was in there, I heard scuffling footsteps in the hallway,” he said. “I stepped outside the apartment and looked down the hallway and, of course, saw no one. I turned around at that point to face the apartment door, looked up on the wall above it, and realized it was Apartment 13. At that point, I probably looked like the Road Runner flying back down that hallway to the elevator!”
Little did Smith know that that was actually Daugherty’s personal apartment. When he was there, it was the only apartment that was still filled with personal items.
According to Hansen, if there was rock and roll playing on the radio, it would abruptly change to country or bluegrass. If an employee was being lazy — “He hates laziness,” said Hansen — things would go flying off of shelves and land near them.
And the scariest thing of all: the footsteps.
“You’d hear footsteps all the time,” Hansen said. “When we first got here, that was always the case. We were absolutely convinced there were squatters living here after we bought the building because there were so many footsteps. But when the police would investigate, they never found a single person here.”
Prior to purchasing, there were squatters, according to Hansen. That could explain the lights people in town reported seeing, and some of the footsteps, and the dark figures moving across the windows inside the building late at night.
But maybe not. “It was really creepy when I first got here,” he said as he walked down the halls of the third floor apartments.
He gestures to the paint.
“The paint was peeling, the ceiling was falling in in some places and would brush your head. There were no lights. You’d come up here and it would be completely dark. The hair would raise up on your neck,” he said. “And you’d always hear the footsteps.”
Daugherty’s apartment at that time still had most of his personal belongings.
“It was really creepy,” he said. The first few months, things got increasingly worse. Hansen believes that Daugherty’s spirit was still inside the building, angry at either the new business moving in — it was the first time members outside of the family owned the store — or angry at the dilapidated state of the building. Things were falling over with no known cause, the radio was changing regularly and alarms would go off for no reason, according to Hansen.
“So I told my guys, we’re gonna stop all this,” he said. “We’re gonna go up to his room and take all his stuff out and move out the furniture. All the magazines.”
Hansen believed that he might calm down what he believed to be Daugherty’s spirit if they removed all of his possessions out of the room. But, that didn’t work out too well.
The night after removing all of Daugherty’s things, on what he and other employees call the “night of rage,” Hansen had turned off all the lights and locked all the doors. When he got to his car near midnight, he turned around to see that the upstairs lights were all back on, and the back window was open.
He went on home, not risking re-entering the building. Around 3 a.m. ADT security called him and told him that multiple alarms were going off inside the building.
Hansen asked them to alert the police, and he rushed over.
“There was a shelf pushed over, broken glass everywhere,” he said. “I think he was furious that his stuff was moved out. I know people don’t believe this stuff, but I’m telling you…”
He went up to Daugherty’s apartment the next day.
“I said, look, I bought this building fair and square. From what I know, you’re an honorable businessman. If you want to stay here, you’re gonna have to behave.”
And ever since then, according to Hansen, things have settled way down. Occasionally, they hear footsteps, and, if an employee is lazy, something will get knocked off of a shelf onto them.
“The building was broken and hurting and full of pain,” Hansen said, “but now it’s all being cleaned up and taken care of.”