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Ghostly tales set in Burke

Book cover | contributed

Margaret Langley’s “Haunted Broughton, Tales from the Graveyard Shift” is available at www.hauntedbroughton.com, amazon.com and at the Muses Bookstore, 820 W. Union St.

By Julie N. Chang | The News Herald

Published: October 30, 2009

MORGANTON - Gather up a group of friends and gather around a fire because two new books featuring ghost stories in Burke County are on bookshelves.
Local author Margaret Langley's "Haunted Broughton, Tales from the Graveyard Shift" is a compilation of ghost stories from Broughton Hospital.
Langley has been a registered nurse at Broughton for 15 years, most of which has been spent on third shift.
"Almost from day one I was told ghost stories," Langley said. "As time went by things began to happen to me … Gradually I came to the idea that these things need to be written down."
Twenty chapters long, the book includes a brief history of Broughton and covers topics such as true and bizarre treatments, the tunnels, yellow gown ghosts and patient reports of ghostly sightings.
Langley said co-workers would often say someone needed to write a book about the ghostly happenings at the hospital.
Eventually Langley turned the collection of ghost stories she'd heard into a book. She headed to the North Carolina History Room at the Burke County Public Library to do some research, too.
"I really felt that if some of this stuff isn't put down, it'll just fade away and we'll lose that," Langley said.
"It will be an entertaining as well as educational book for anyone who wants to read it," Langley said. "It will provide an insight as to how things were in the early days of Broughton Hospital."
Langley said almost 200 copies of her book, which came out at the beginning of the month, have already been sold.
Autographed copies are available on her Web site at www.hauntedbroughton.com and at the Muses Bookstore, 820 W. Union St. Copies are additionally available on amazon.com.
If that's not enough to scare your socks off, Burke County makes a ghostly feature in Daniel Barefoot's "Spirits of '76: Ghost Stories of the American Revolution."
The collection of ghost stories, published this month, from the Revolutionary War includes an episode from Brown Mountain. The story offers an explanation for the mysterious Brown Mountain lights.
The book includes stories from more than 170 locations where famous and not-so-famous ghosts from the American Revolution have appeared.