The owner of Chattanooga Ghost Tours wasn't trying to prove or disprove the existence of spectral beings when she opened the business in 2007, but she's come around.
"I didn't believe in ghosts when I started the tour," Amy Petulla admits. "I do now."
Whether through voices or visions or a vague sense of weirdness surrounding certain events, Petulla and some of her guides can now add firsthand accounts of otherworldly encounters along with their recitation of history.
The chance to impart history lessons — albeit with a spooky bent — was how the business got started. Petulla says her family enjoyed ghost tours when they visited other cities, leaving Petulla to wonder why Chattanooga had nothing similar. "It's a fun way to learn about a city," she says.
She began researching places around Chattanooga where supernatural events had been rumored to occur, sussing out longstanding legends and lore — "information that tends to repeat itself over and over," she says.
Chattanooga has several places said to be haunted, including Room 311 of the Read House, where guest Annalisa Netherly was allegedly beheaded in the bathtub by a jealous lover in 1927, and Chickamauga Battlefield, where countless souls perished in the Civil War. Word of mouth and, eventually, savvy marketing have propelled those legends.
"There are people who claim to know what ghosts are and why they're there," Petulla says. "I can tell you some of the theories. Sometimes they died suddenly and don't know where to go, or they had unfinished business or there's a lot of emotion involved in the death. Sometimes they're attached to the place and they're still hanging out."
Whatever their origin and accuracy, these tales continue to fascinate. Here, Petulla offers five snippets from her arsenal of spooky stories from places around Chattanooga:
— Grave injustices: Two Union soldiers are known to be buried in the Confederate Cemetery adjacent to the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga campus.
"The Confederates do not like that," Petulla says. "That's said to be a source of some of the (supernatural) activity."
Lesser known are the stories of the paupers cemetery on the same property.
"The graves are unmarked, so people don't know it's there," she says.
Decades ago, the sexton in charge of the graveyard supplemented his income by selling bodies from the paupers cemetery, often to medical students who were required to provide their own cadavers for training. Petulla says newspaper accounts and legal records back up these accounts.
"There's speculation that 80% of those who were buried there are no longer there," Petulla says. "The ghosts are not happy their bodies were removed, so they're still there protesting."
Staff Photo by Robin Rudd / The rising sun casts shadows across the Confederate Cemetery. The Confederate Cemetery near UTC was established in 1867.
— UTC's "suicide bride":
The ghost of a bride-to-be who took her own life on her wedding day is said to inhabit the UTC campus in an area around Danforth Chapel.
"This rumor has been around forever, but nobody has been able to find documentation" of her identity or the exact circumstances of her death, Petulla says.
"Her name is Anna. She has told us that over and over," Petulla says, referencing the use of an electronic speech synthesizer known as an Ovilus, commonly used in paranormal research.
"She'll only talk to women. She doesn't like men. Once, when we had a bachelorette party (on the tour), she tried to talk them out of getting married," Petulla says, before acknowledging, "It sounds like I made this up."
Occasionally, in the early years of the ghost tours, "she would actually unlock the door to the chapel," Petulla says of Anna. "At least five times, maybe as many as 10, someone in the group would ask her to unlock the door, and you would hear a click and the door would unlock."
One tour-goer was able to get a photo of an image in white in the darkened chapel during one such encounter, Petulla says.
— The mystery "student":
Petulla says that one of her guides noticed a girl elsewhere on the UTC campus during a tour. "She basically looked like she was wearing a see-through shroud with nothing underneath," Petulla says.
The people on the tour saw her too. "More than one person described her as having a dead expression," Petulla says. "The guide asked, 'Are you okay?' according to Petulla, "but she didn't act like she heard anything. She walked into the (nearby) cemetery and disappeared."
Petulla says one of the tour-goers later told her, "I didn't believe in ghosts. I was a skeptic. I'm not a skeptic any longer."
Another guide also saw a mysterious young woman believed to be the same apparition.
"He thought it was a student," Petulla says. "He said it was a barefoot girl wearing a short dress and not much else" who suddenly disappeared.
— The antique purse that's absolutely, positively not for sale:
Petulla says this encounter happened years ago at a now-closed antiques store near the Chattanooga Choo Choo.
"I don't know why more people aren't going to antique stores," she says. "They're the absolute best place to find ghosts. People get attached to their stuff and will hang around wherever it is."
As Petulla recalls, a woman who described herself as being "sensitive" to the paranormal had felt "physically prevented" from entering part of the store where several vintage purses were for sale. The woman explained that the spirit of the purse's original owner feared she would buy the purse and remove it from the premises.
Not long after, the store began a going-out-of-business sale. When Petulla checked back in, the purse belonging to the spirit was among the few that hadn't yet sold.
Petulla says she told the owners, "I know why you still have that one. I will pay you double what you're charging if you'll take that purse and hide it so it will never leave this building. Otherwise, I think she'll haunt y'all."
Petulla says she refused to touch the purse, but the owners agreed to the terms of the sale and threw it into a gap between two walls. The current tenants have told her they know nothing about a ghost, but "I don't believe them," she says. The former tenants told Petulla they'd heard someone "walking back and forth, but they had coexisted peacefully."
— The ghost at 57 E. Fifth St.:
That's home base for Chattanooga Ghost Tours.
"It was not there when we moved in," Petulla says, explaining that the presence spends most of its time in King Tut's Tomb, one of the escape rooms at the adjoining business, Time To Escape.
"We did not know where it would have come from or why there would be a ghost there," she says.
Her research has found that the building was once the Beehive General Store, where a devastating fire in 1887 claimed the lives of two firemen.
Petulla says the ghost "likes to set off the door alarm." And she believes it's responsible for continually opening the door of a cabinet, even when she tapes it shut.
"I can duct-tape it and hammer it down with my hand, and five minutes later, that door will come open," she says. "It's usually around the time the door alarm goes off."
Staff file photo by Matt Hamilton / Chattanooga Ghost Tours owner Amy Petulla, right, shows ghost photos, which were taken on previous tours, to customer Tyler O'Hara, visiting from California, before the start of a tour.