Scary Nice: Ghost House Trail, Big Ridge State Park

When planning our little mini-vacation up in East Tennessee, we were looking to stay in a state park that would offer hiking possibilities, with other short nearby hikes we could throw in before heading back on Sunday afternoon.  Ruth covered our first destination, Norris Lake State Park, in last week’s post.  In this second installment of our three-part series, I’ll tell you about a short hike we took on our way back home.

Tennessee is crazy about state parks.  We have 22 state parks in Alabama, not counting the three historical state parks such as Tannehill Ironworks and two other former state parks being operated by local governments.  Tennessee crams 56 into a smaller state (though to be fair, they have 1/3 more people).  Some of Tennessee’s parks are really small and specialized, but there are 37 that offer some sort of overnight accommodations.  They are often relatively close to each other, and that’s the case around Norris Lake State Park, with Cove Lake State Park and Big Ridge State Park both within 30 miles of our home base for the weekend.  In fact, they are sister parks, born around the same time by TVA as recreation demonstration areas when Norris Reservoir was created in the 1930s.  Neither Cove Lake nor Big Ridge was actually on our way home, but after looking over trail descriptions for both parks, one trail jumped out at me.  In fact, it jumped out and said “Boo!”

Big Ridge State Park is about 15 miles from Norris Lake State Park, but with rural roads that make the travel time about 25 minutes.  Big Ridge has over 15 miles of hiking trails in its nearly 3,700 acres.   The Ghost House trail forms a 1.2 mile loop over easy to moderate terrain, but with a name like that, you know there’s a story behind this trail.  In fact, there are a few ghost stories associated with this trail, and the park in general.  The trail features a cemetery and the location of a reputedly haunted house.  Given that it was a nice sunny summer morning, we figured we’d be safe from any supernatural shenanigans if we took a quick pass around the loop.

After stopping by the park office and picking up a trail map, we drove past the cabins along the southern edge of this arm of Norris Lake and headed toward the Norton Gristmill for a pre-hike visit.   This particular building is a reproduction of the 1825 mill, which was in operation until the early 1930s.  TVA purchased the property and took down the mill when building Norris Dam, but in 1968 the mill was reconstructed on its original site, using some of the original mill machinery and the millstones.  It’s not an operational mill, but it looks like it could grind up some cornmeal if the raceway were operational.  There’s a legend that a man hanged his daughter there on suspicion of her being a witch.  We didn’t see any ghosts there, but we did see a group of men posing on the steps of the mill after our hike.  They looked like a wedding party, and indeed there was a wedding planned for the CCC-built historic assembly hall in the park.  It was a warm day, and with their jackets doffed and matching white shirts and black pants it looked like they were there for a hootenanny.

The parking area for the Lake Trail and Ghost House trail is just past the mill, on the right.  The paved road is gated here, but the gravel parking area can hold eight or so vehicles.  The trails don’t actually start from the parking area.  Instead, we walked past the gate and continued along the paved road for a little over .1 miles to reach the trailhead for the Lake Trail.  This little stretch of road was right along a little cove, and we were entertained by a lively little goldfinch darting among the branches of a fallen tree.

A kiosk on the other side of the Lake Trail sign has a trail map and park info.  Almost immediately, a wooden bridge crosses a narrow creek, and the trail skirts the edge of the lake for .1 miles to the junction of the Lake and Ghost House trails.  Well, it was sort of a junction — as you can see on the sign, it looks like we were to turn right on a spur trail that was 0.0 miles long.  I’m not quite sure I see the point of that sign, but OK.  Maybe it was a warning that we were entering the Other Dimension.

Both the Lake Trail and the Ghost House trail are well marked with the plastic trail markers we’ve seen used in other Tennessee state parks.  Each trail marker is color-coded to match the trail map, and is customized with the park’s name — pretty sharp.  Maybe you get nice things like that when your legislature funds your parks.  I noticed some painted yellow blazes along the Ghost House trail too, which probably pre-date the newer marking system.

After traveling 0.0 miles (actually, about 50 yards) we came to the “real” Lake-Ghost House intersection and turned away from the lake and into the woods.  The trail was mostly level, maybe slanting slightly uphill, and was nicely shady.  It was a warm morning, though, and we needed to generate some breeze by moving along quickly.  The trail runs along a low ridgetop, with some portions flanked by running cedar ferns.

At .4 miles, we came upon one of the ghostly highlights of the hike — the Norton Cemetery.  The cemetery has marked graves from 1907-1929, and I’d guess there are about a dozen markers ranged around the small clearing in the woods.  The cemetery is the final resting place for Maston Hutcheson and his wife Martha, among others.  Harm Norton is one of three Nortons buried here, and there’s a sad little rock with just the name “Ibby” carved on it.  The grave of Maston Hutcheson is sunken, which no doubt has inspired some of the tales that his spirit wanders the park.

Norton Cemetery, Big Ridge State Park, TN

Let’s talk ghost stories for a moment.  The most-circulated stories about this area seem to be the tale of the death of Maston’s daughter Mary, who succumbed to tuberculosis.  Some versions of the story say that neighbors on the way to the house came across a phantom dog, and other versions say that they heard her cries coming from the bedroom after her death.  Supposedly, some park visitors have heard the ghost dog panting in the woods.   I should note that Mary is not buried in the Norton cemetery, since she likely died in the 1840s or 1850s, and the Norton cemetery is not that old.   Local legend has it that Maston wanders the woods.  Another oft-repeated tale about the cemetery is that in some photographs of the cemetery, silhouettes of the occupants can be seen by their graves.

None of our pictures showed anything ghostly, and the only thing panting in the woods was two hikers starting to feel the heat and humidity.  We ran into one dead thing right outside the cemetery as we resumed our hike:  a pine tree down across the trail, which we easily skirted.  Just .1 mile from the cemetery, we reached the intersection with the Big Valley trail.  Big Valley is one of the longer and more difficult trails in the park, and crosses Pinnacle Ridge, descends into Dark Valley, and rises to the top of the park’s namesake Big Ridge.  Sadly, we didn’t have time to visit this area of the park, but we did travel the .05 miles to the site of the “ghost house.”

A sign at the ghost house site explains that this is the site of Maston Hutcheson’s grandson’s house, which is apparently one of the houses in the area that was reputedly haunted.  There’s not much to see now — a hole that was once a root cellar,  a cistern, and a well casing are all that remain of the house.  Apparently the Hutcheson family home was nearby.

We resumed our loop, noticing that the western side the trail seemed to be less traveled.  The footbed was narrower, as we had left the former wagon road along the ridgetop.  A small creek ran next to the trail, and occasionally the trail crossed it on short wooden bridges.  One such bridge had the “ghosts” of two former bridges on either side — a footlog and the wreckage of a small wooden bridge.  This part of the trail was once farmed, though the woods have reclaimed the fields.  With the nearby creek, this is a good area for wildflowers earlier in the spring.  We didn’t see any wildflowers, but this is the one section of the trail that had raspberries on it.

The trail undulates a little on the western side of the loop, descending down one side of the ridge, leveling out along the creek, and then climbing once to gain some elevation before dropping back down along the creek.  We saw our only notable wildflower in bloom just before arriving back at the Ghost House-Lake trail intersection — a lone smooth phlox in a sunny patch beside the trail.

After returning to the Lake trail junction, we just retraced our steps back to the car.  The total distance was 1.5 miles according to our GPS track.

Despite its scary name and reputation, we found the Ghost House trail to be a pleasant, easy walk in the woods with a couple of interesting historic sites along the way.  Of course, we hiked it in broad daylight!  It might be a different story on a night hike, and the park offers guided hikes in October that probably crank up the scariness.  And if you’re there at any time, in the back country and off trail, you just might see a middle-aged man in gray work pants and a red flannel shirt.  Better look quickly, because he vanishes right before your eyes – or so the rangers say.