In Brief
In 1872, in the railroad town of Surrency, Georgia, household objects began flying through Allen Surrency's house. He didn't hide it — he wrote a signed letter to the Savannah paper and let crowds ride the train in to watch.
The Full Story
In the railroad town of Surrency, Georgia, the poltergeist case people still tell started in October 1872, at the home of Allen Powell Surrency — a sawmill operator from the family the town is named for. The things in his house started moving on their own.
Tumblers slid off the shelf. Crockery dropped and broke on the floor. Books tumbled down, furniture overturned, and according to Surrency himself, brickbats, billets of wood, smoothing irons, biscuits, potatoes, tin pans, water buckets, and pitchers began falling in different parts of the house. An andiron is said to have lifted off the fireplace and struck one of his sons.
Most ghost stories live on hearsay. This one, the homeowner put in writing. Surrency sent a letter to the Savannah Morning News describing what he saw, then added a challenge: "These facts can be established by 75 or 100 witnesses." He wasn't covering anything up. As word spread, hundreds of curiosity-seekers rode the railroad into town to watch the house for themselves.
The activity ran about five years and stopped in 1877 — the year Allen Surrency died. The house itself burned down in the early 20th century, commonly given as 1925, the circumstances never settled. Nothing of it remains. It stood across the street from the Watson House, which still does.
But the town kept the name, and the strange didn't entirely leave with the house. Since the early 1900s, people have reported the Surrency Spook Light — a yellow ball about the size of a grapefruit, hanging over the railroad tracks. The mayor is among those who've seen it. By 2022, locals said it had mostly stopped, blaming a new overpass east of town.
And nine miles straight down, geologists mapped something called the Surrency Bright Spot — a seismic anomaly they think may be a pool of fluid trapped in the deep crust, where fluid shouldn't be. It only shares the town's name. Some have tied it to the lights anyway.
