Some very strange occurrences at a museum means it’s time to call in the ghost hunters.

Port Columbus, Georgia - Books are flying off the shelves down at Columbus’ National Civil War Naval Museum.

One hit a customer square in the back. Others from the museum gift shop’s rear bookshelves land up to 7 feet away - sometimes upright, as if someone set them there in a flash.

An invisible flash, that would be, because no one’s there to move them.

Jerry Franklin, the museum’s maintenance supervisor, said he was standing near the gift shop entrance one day when he saw a book shoot across an aisle and smack a woman in the back, right between the shoulder blades.

She spun around, saw no one there, then looked around the store until she made eye contact with Franklin. He shrugged.

This is the sort of eerie experience a team of ghost hunters will check out next weekend.

To workers who run the gift shop, this is common: “This happens all the time,” said Susan Ingram, the 1002 Victory Drive museum’s visitor service manager.

On average, a book shoots off the shelf every two weeks or so, sometimes more often, she said: “It kind of goes in cycles.”

An Alabama Paranormal Research Team led by Faith Serafin of Salem will conduct a seven-hour investigation in the museum after it closes. Serafin did not want to say exactly when, fearing pranksters might play ghosts.

“We bring in lots of different kinds of equipment, from video to audio, electromagnetic field detectors, and we have an abundance of software that will help us amplify sound or an image,” she said.

“We research all the reports very thoroughly. We kind of figure out whether or not there is a correlation between a story and evidence that we pick up, to determine whether or not we can actually say that this location has some type of abnormal or paranormal activity.”

Her group formed about two years ago, she said.

The book Franklin saw hit a woman in the back was a 10-by-10-inch hardback titled The Confederate Navy: The Ships, Men and Organization 1861-1865. Workers afterward discovered the book’s spine was broken and torn. Lane Palmer, a school teacher and museum volunteer, bought it.

Books aren’t the only gift-shop goods moving on their own: On the front counter, key rings, pins and whistles hang upon a square, black spindle. Workers say sometimes it spins without anyone touching it, and the motion is not spurred by a fan or air-conditioner.

Bruce Smith, the Port Columbus National Civil War Naval Museum’s executive director, would not go so far as to say the place is haunted:

“I am prepared to say that we have these continued unexplainable dumping of books on the floor. We don’t know what the deal is. We’ve looked, and we can’t figure it out. We think we’ve got these things anchored pretty good, and the next thing we know, crash! And there’s nobody in the store.”

Author: Tim Chitwood

Source - www.ledger-enquirer.com/
www.ourstrangeworld.ne...g_mystery/

Must be a dyslexic ghost!! I'd LOVE to go investigate there....

Quiet-one wrote:

Must be a dyslexic ghost!! I'd LOVE to go investigate there....

- well my library was featured on MH (if that counts for anything, lol) and apparently the apparition that often appears is the figure of a woman who was a librarian way back in time. Just wish she'd help me out when I am looking for my study books!

Now that's a place I'd love to investigate, Patty. Definitely something spooky going on there. Now is it to do with the military, or is it a child playing tricks? Hmm. What's known about the history of the building, I wonder? This could be a clue.
I quote from Wikipedia:

The highlight of the museum is the 180-foot (55 m) hull of the CSS Muscogee (also known as the CSS Jackson), an ironclad ram put to fire in the Chattahoochee River by the Union troops of Gen. James H. Wilson and recovered from the bed of the river in the 1960s. Also on display are what's left of the CSS Chattahoochee and an intact rowboat from the USS Hartford. Two models of the warships USS Monitor and CSS Virginia (the former USS Merrimack), used in the Turner Broadcasting film Ironclads, and recreated full-scale sections of three other civil war-era warships are among the hundreds of Civil War artifacts located in the museum. There is also a battle experience theater that will put visitors right in the middle of a Civil War battle and an interactive Confederate ironclad ship simulator offering visitors an opportunity to experience 19th century naval combat first hand.

A large Civil War naval flag exhibit is the newest addition to the museum. According to executive director Bruce Smith, it is the largest display of navy related flags from the Civil War anywhere in the nation. Fourteen flags representing ships and forts from the entire scope of the Civil War are seen in this new exhibit, which is entitled “Ramparts to Topmast: Flags of Triumph and Despair.”
The museum apparently relocated to this new building in 2001. So not the building (unless it's the land it was built on) probably a military haunting?