Surrency Poltergeist Site

In October 1872, the home of sawmill owner Allen Surrency in Appling County erupted with violent poltergeist activity: dishes flying, children attacked by invisible hands, furniture overturning. Surrency documented it himself in the Savannah Morning News and invited witnesses. The activity lasted five years, stopped when Allen died in 1877, and the house burned under mysterious circumstances in 1925.

A fireplace andiron lifted itself off the hearth, floated across the room, struck one of the Surrency boys on the head, and then returned neatly to its original position. That was not the strangest thing that happened in the Surrency house in October of 1872. It was not even close.

Allen Powel Surrency ran a sawmill and founded the small town in Appling County that bears his name. He was wealthy, respected, and lived with his wife and children in a large two-story house near the railroad tracks. Nothing about the family invited suspicion. Then the objects started moving.

Surrency himself wrote a letter to the Savannah Morning News describing what he saw: "A few minutes after my arrival I saw the glass tumblers begin to slide off the slab and the crockery to fall upon the floor and break. The books began to tumble from their shelves to the floor, while brickbats, billets of wood, smoothing irons, biscuits, potatoes, tin pans, water buckets, pitchers, etc., began to fall in different parts of my house." He added that "these facts can be established by 75 or 100 witnesses."

The phenomena escalated. Clocks spun with their hands moving impossibly fast. Furniture overturned on its own. Windows shattered. Phantom animals appeared and vanished. Strange pounding noises shook the walls at night. Worst of all, a child was thrown from bed and another was beaten by unseen hands. This was not a cold draft in a hallway or a creaking floorboard. Objects were targeting people.

News spread fast. Reporters arrived from across the country, and from England and Canada. Hundreds of curiosity seekers descended on the tiny Georgia town to see the activity firsthand. Surrency was patient with all of them. He had nothing to hide, and the activity did not care about an audience.

One theory centered on Clementine, one of Surrency's daughters. Poltergeist activity has long been linked to adolescent girls, and the evidence pointed her direction. When Clementine and her mother temporarily moved to a neighbor's house, the disturbances at the Surrency home stopped. They resumed the moment Clementine returned. The activity seemed attached to her, not to the building.

The activity lasted five years. It stopped in 1877, when Allen Surrency died. The family stayed in the house, and nothing else moved on its own. The connection between Allen's death and the end of the haunting has never been explained. If Clementine was the focus, why did it stop when her father died and not when she left? Nobody has a satisfying answer.

The house burned to the ground in 1925 under circumstances that were never fully explained. Nothing remains of the structure today.

But Surrency has a second ghost story, and it is still active. A golden-yellow light, about the size and shape of a grapefruit, has been spotted hovering over the railroad tracks near town since the early 1900s. Locals call it the Surrency Spook Light. One theory connects it to a train derailment from around the same era. A more creative scientific explanation points to a strange pool of liquid discovered nine miles underground beneath Surrency, a substance that is not supposed to be able to form at that depth.

The Surrency poltergeist case matters because it was documented in real time by the family, by journalists, and by dozens of witnesses. This is not a legend that grew in the retelling over a hundred years. Allen Surrency wrote it down, invited people to watch, and dared anyone to explain it. Nobody could then. Nobody has since.