West Of Free Press — December 2022 - Flipbook - Page 5
Local tour guide
gets us in the
Halloween spirit
by Lorne Chamebrs | Editor
P
atricia Goron isn’t afraid of ghosts.
But that’s not to say she hasn’t been
freaked out a time or two. The owner/
operator of Ghostwalk, Charleston’s
original ghost tour, has seen numerous
things over the decades that just can’t be
explained. Most would keep an average
person up at night. But this stuff is old
hat for the West Ashley native, who
estimates that she’s probably given more
than 10,000 tours in her life.
CNBC and The Travel Channel have
both dubbed Charleston one of the most
haunted cities in America. With Halloween
upon us, West Of Free Press caught up
with the always-entertaining Goron on
one of her “Spiritual Awakening” ghost
walks last month on a particularly busy
Friday night in downtown Charleston,
the day before the Cooper River Bridge
Run. While the influx of people in town
may have scared the spirits away for
most of the tour, there were at least
two odd electrical occurrences, where
specific streetlights flicked on and off,
while Goron was walking past or in the
direction of where she was pointing
something out. She says this is not
uncommon for her.
“I think I’ve given so many ghost
tours for so long that somehow these
ghosts are attracted to me,” she says.
“They see me all the time and things
really do happen that are not explainable.
Not everything happens on que. If they
did, I would be a zillionaire.”
According to Goron, it’s not uncommon
for something a little bit otherworldly to
happen on one of her tours. Sometimes
they’re small things, like a creak here
or a moan there. Then there are some
things that are a little more obvious,
like a particular streetlight going on or
off just as she walks by with a group of
wide-eyed tourists. “Did you do that?”
someone will ask. Goron just smiles.
“These kind of things just seem to happen
to me,” she says.
Sometimes those things aren’t always
as playful as a disembodied moan from
a graveyard or a flickering light. She
recalls times when, what she believes to
be ghosts, violently rattle a set of doors
at the Mills House on Meeting Street
or when an elevator violently shook
on the way to the top of a downtown
parking garage where she claims to have
captured photographic evidence of an
apparition of an unknown man who had
either jumped or fallen to his end from
atop the garage. She also claims to
have strong evidence suggesting that
none other than Gen. Robert E. Lee
haunts a historic downtown hotel. She
has numerous photos of strange lights
and orbs and shadows that show up
inexplicably in photos people take on her
ghost walks.
One photo that’s particularly
interesting that Goron shows her tour
groups is of St. Philip’s Church on Church
Street downtown. Three years ago, while
a member of her tour group was snapping
a photo of the iconic church, she had
asked Goron what she thought happened
after you passed on. Goron says she told
Patricia Goron of Ghostwalks
the woman she believed we go to heaven
and that there was a staircase that goes
there. Oddly enough, in the photo the
woman took of the church, between two
of the giant columns there appears to be
a long and bending staircase going all
the way up and with what appears to be
the outline of a winged angel at the top of
the stairs. Goron swears the photo isn’t
doctored and it’s certainly a hair-raiser.
There have been so many moments
like these over the years that Goron says
she has changed the scope of her ghost
tours from retelling the same old ghost
tales from books that all the other bigger
tours tell, and instead focusing her tour
on things that happened specifically on
her walks. She also mixes in bits of
Charleston history along the way.
One of the spookiest things happened
just last year when, Goron is certain, that
a spirit latched on to her and followed her
home after one of her recent ghost walks.
A woman on one of Goron’s ghost walks
told her that her husband recently passed
and now whenever she is photographed
there’s an unexplainable red orb near her
in the pictures. Sure enough Goron saw
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