Haunted Travels........Enter At Your Own Risk !!!

Good Evening Dear World....As you all know a dear sweet lady named Jeannette of Jeannette's Jottings often shares with you all dear world tales of ghost and haunted places. Check out her journal at --------> http://journals.aol.co.uk/jeanno43/Family/ .I would like to do the same......

Let me begin by saying welcome to Haunted Travels I will be your hostess for the evening. Our first haunted travel takes us to Dunwoody, Georgia in which a house is known as the Donaldson House - named for the original owner, of the late 1800's - and its 3 acres on Chamblee Dunwoody Road. A family called The Chestnuts are preparing to say farewell to their house including the ghosts they claim to live there. 

The Chestnuts claim that the house is inhabited by an old man, a little girl in a dress and pinafore and a lady who they claim stares out the window as well as a spirit that makes their Bible levitate around a particular room in the house. After 3 decades, the Chestnuts have sold their family estate. The new owners are now the Dekalb County. The county recently spent $1.2 million under its green space program to buy the Donaldson House. County officials plan to preserve the house. The grounds, with magnolia trees and lots of roses will become a county public space.

The Donaldson House is known for its wandering spirits, so notorious that it's considered one of the top seven haunted places in Atlanta, according to CitySearch, a popular Web guide to major cities in the country. Other web sites which feature other hauntings also list the house as a notable spook spot.The Dunwoody spirits aren't nasty poltergeists the Chestnuts claim. The family - David, Linda and daughter Caroline - believe that the spirits protected them during a tornado that swept through Dunwoody in 1998. The house will be open to the public once the county decides what use the house will have in the county - a community center, a meeting place or a museum said DeKalb Chief Executive Officer Vernon Jones. The invitation presumable also extends to the ghosts, who,according to the Chestnuts, were there first.

From Savannah to Atlanta, plenty of historic sites have paranormal presences, reported Bob Hunnicutt, founder of the Georgia Ghost Society, a nonprofit group whose members - eight active ones at last count - investigate such places.

Jim Donaldson, the house's original owner, was attached to his land, literally. The property includes a century- old farmhouse and a backyard cemetery where Donaldson, who died in 1900, is buried. Jim married 3 times, had 14 children. Some of the descendants still live in the Dunwoody area. The house was built around 1870. Donaldson, an emigre from Great Britain, came to Georgia in the mid-1800's at age 12. After brief service in the Civil War, Jim farmed and amassed land. He sold 1,000 acres- and helped to bring more settlers into what is now north Dekalb County. He had a massive amount of land during that time, said Danny Ross, president of the Dunwoody Preservation Trust. 

Linda Chestnut, an interior designer, and her husband, David, an attorney and former chairman of MARTA, had wanted a place big enough for their daughter to have a pony. In 1975, they found the house. That February day was bitterly cold, but when they stepped inside the empty house it felt warm, as if the furnace was on. They bought it. But they WEREN'T alone. "Sometimes lights turned on and off by themselves. The daughter of the husband and wife would claim that there would be a lady looking at her while she was in bed, " said Linda Chestnut. Relatives visiting the house reported hearing a choir singing. Then a Bible started levitating. One time, David Chestnut claimed, he saw the Bible rise from a table and slide to the ground. Wife Linda claimed she too had seen it levitate.

Several years later a television crew wanted to spend Halloween night at the house, said Linda Chestnut. As the cameraman and a psychic approached the cemetery, the camera stopped working, Chestnut said. The cameraman slept inside his van. " A lot of people don't believe that kind of thing," said Linda Chestnut, who teaches college courses in historical restoration. "We do." Caroline Chestnut Leslie felt easy growing up with spirits, she once told that to her high schoolclassmates. " I got made fun," which was told by the landscape architect." I wish, for their own sakes, they ( the ghosts ) would go off, but they're stuck here. There's nothing we can do."

Dear World....what do you think of this spooky tale ? From what I heard the story is true. I hope you enjoyed our little haunted travel here in Georgia. I hope you will return for another ghostly tale set here in Georgia. I will welcome you with open arms. It was really nice being your hostess for the evening.

Until then.......Sleep Tight.