Hello again everyone, it is nice to be writing to you again. I hope you have been enjoying my adventures and I have another to share with you over the next several weeks. On Saturday Nov. 25 I hooked up with my good friend and owner of the Haunted Asheville Ghost Tour Christopher McCollum and he and I started a tour that I wanted to use to help promote his business. On the busy Saturday night streets of Asheville I didn't go along expecting some experience but I wanted the information that came with the tour for my website and column. The events that followed even shocked my friend who's been a tour guide since Author and Paranormal Investigator Joshua P.Warren started the downtown tour about four years ago.

Chris and I met at just outside of Barley's Taproom on Biltmore Ave. which is the site of the largest mass murder in Asheville history and from there we started the tour.

Our first stop was Church St. Now that may not sound very haunted but there's a legend that a young nun in one of the churches on the street became romantically involved with the minister of the Methodist Church and after a few months became pregnant. As time passed and she began to show the story goes that the minister murdered the young nun and buried her along Church St. where there was still lots of construction going on. Her body wasn't found until years later when there was construction going on revamping Church St.. Folks claim to have seen the young nun walking between two large trees in front of the Methodist Church and her feet can't be seen because she is walking at the level of the old street before the modern sidewalks of today. I had my Nikon D50 digital camera with me shooting photos of the haunted places. Upon review and careful examination of these pictures we found the nun in one of the photos watching us from a distance out of one of the upper floor windows. That picture has been forwarded to others for a more professional exam but I believe they will discover what I did. Its The Nun !

We moved on from there to some other places in town that folks have claimed to be haunted. I will give those histories in a later column. Finally we came to the Battery Park Hotel, which today is an assistanced living facility for the elderly. An eerie feeling came over me and I am getting that same tingle telling this to you. The closer we got the further I wanted to get away, but it was part of the tour and certainly a large part of the haunted Asheville legends.

The Battery Park Hotel was built by the same Grove gentleman who built the Grove Park Inn and Spa. It's the site of the most brutal murder in Asheville history. A young girl's face was ripped off her head by a man robbing hotel rooms or that's the documented story anyway. There are some doubts to the truthfulness although a young black hotel employee was executed for the crime just a little over a month after the fact. They worked hard to keep these facts hidden but some also considered the Battery Park Hotel the suicide capital of the south. Legend has it more than 18 folks leaped to their deaths from the outside terrace and prominent ledges that are around the building.

Yes something very strange happened to Chris and I here as well. We had come below the hotel to look at St. Lawrence Basilica, A catholic church that sits just down and across the street from the Battery Park. As unsettling as the hotel site was the church was just the opposite.

So peaceful and calm feeling, almost like it was there to cancel out the evil from across the street. For some reason I looked back at the hotel maybe because of the stark contrast of the two locations so close together when I saw a shadow that looked as if it was crawling out of a window. But not just any window, a window without a true ledge 50 or more feet off of the ground.

I could not move and finally got my wits about me to grab Chris by the shoulder and physically turn him around and said " What the Hell is that Chris" , I think at first both of us thought someone was about jump from the window. Then we realized that the shadow was suspended in mid air floating outside the window and we could still see the Christmas tree that was in the window through this dark image. Now folks I have enough personal experiences to know that there are spirits and that things replay themselves over and over in time.

But this was one of the strangest experiences I personally ever had. We started quickly walking back towards the hotel and then we both stopped like something was in front of us and we just watched from what I will call a safe distance. I snapped pictures as fast as my Nikon would go but to no avail. I got nothing in those photos. Not Even The Christmas Tree !!!

Did I take photos of the wrong window ? Did we see something etched on our reality from the past? I really can not answer either of these questions but I can say with 100% certainty. What we saw was as real as I am sitting here telling you about it. I will keep you updated on future investigations of this location. Thanks for taking time to read this months column and if you want to see more of the Haunted Asheville Ghost Tour go to www.ashevilleconnection.com Look at the photos I took that night and read more about the ghost tour.

• I've Seen Dead People