This story is absolutely true. Back in the late fifties, I had a job with a waterproofing company in Atlanta known as Surface Coatings. I was the Florida representative, and I travelled the state from Pensacola all the way down to Miami, calling on established dealers of a waterproofing product we manufactured..

Over the years, it was occasionally necessary for me to drive up to Atlanta for some business need, and I would spend a few days with my family, and over the weekend, normally on a Friday morning, I would drive down US 19 from Atlanta to Tampa, arriving there in the late afternoon, in order to be on hand for my trips that always began on Mondays to various dealers in the state.

This particular Friday morning, I was driving down 19, somewhere below Griffin, Ga., exact spot never remembered exactly, and I was passing one little town after another, passing to the west of Macon, and on down towards the Florida line.

It was a sunny summer morning, and I slowed as I neared yet another little town where the pace of living was much slower than that I was used to. As I came into the northern edge of the town, some quarter of a mile outside the city limits, I found a beautiful, deserted old Victorian mansion sitting off to the left side of the road, backed up by a still standing carriage house. There was an ancient Oak tree standing in the front yard. It's limbs reaching out some fifty feet or so in all directions.

With no one waiting for me in Tampa, I decided to stop and walk around the house, and since it's door was open, possibly walk into it to see how it's grandeur of some seventy years before had survived.

Parking beside the house, I got and walked around to the front yard, and after taking in the particular beauty of all old Victorians, I stepped up on the porch and walked into the foyer of the house. The floor was covered with an old, old carpet, and there were pieces of furniture standing here and there. Over to the door to my right, that opened into the parlor, stood an antique chair that was used years ago to hang umbrellas and such on, with a section built into it to hold boots, galoshes, etc.

The house was cold inside, and this surprised me. It was a summer morning, and the temperature outside was in the 80-90 degree range. The foyer opened into a wide reception area, something like twenty feet wide, and from either side of the room in front of me, two matched stairs climbed in a lazy arc to the landing of the second floor above me. But it was all approaching decay.

Walking into the parlor, the floor became spongy and soft, and I became aware of a malevolent atmosphere forming. Even now, forty odd years later, the hair on my arms and back of my neck raises as I remember it. Feeling threatened, I spoke to the house, or whoever was there, in this manner.

"Hold on a minute. I mean no harm. I only stopped to drink in the beauty of this wonderful old house. If I'm not wanted, I'll leave."

And I did. Outside, before I drove away, I drove back to the stables and found that there were still buggies present in the stalls. I was amazed that anyone would have allowed such a wonderful old house to fall into such a state of disrepair.

I drove around to the front of the house, stopping in the bare front yard under the Oak tree, and looked again at the beauty of this badly neglected, once magnificent old mansion. Then I drove on towards Tampa.

In later years, I tried again and again to find this house in this little town as I drove south towards Florida, and I could never find it again. The town was and is there, alright, but the house is simply gone.

I would have thought no more about it, except for the fact that a friend who knows of my unexpected ghostly encounters asked me about some house I had mentioned years before when I was working in Florida. I repeated this story to her, and to my surprise, she said she had seen the same house. She too had been impressed by it's decaying beauty, and she and her husband had stopped a moment to look at it.

The unique thing about all of this is that I was looking for that house after I first saw it back in 1957. She's many years younger than I am, and she's seen it in the past twenty years herself. Not just her alone, but her husband as well.

I've never seen it again. I looked for it for two years. I never found it. She saw it on a trip to Florida back in 1987. Where does it go? Why is it sometimes there, and other times there's only a vacant field, and the tree too, is missing. She states the tree was there in the front of the house, in the yard, just as I described it.

I don't know the answer to this one. Has anyone else seen this sometimes there, sometimes not there Victorian mansion? Is it really there at all?

What do you think?