Allen Sircy was working as a manager at the old Food Lion grocery store in the Grassland community a few years ago when he received a rather strange phone call from one of his employees.
“A young lady called and said she couldn’t come to work that day,” Sircy recalled. “I asked, ‘Are you sick, what’s going on?’ ‘Well,’ she said, ‘we saw a soldier walking through the kitchen and I’m taking the day off.’
“Well, what do you say to that?”
Sircy may not have had an immediate response to the fact that one of his Food Lion employees witnessed the spirit of what was presumably a Civil War soldier traipsing through her family’s home, but it was one of the guiding forces that led him to write his most recent book, "Southern Ghost Stories: Franklin, Tennessee."
Published earlier this summer, "Southern Ghost Stories" follows two other hauntings-related books by Sircy, a Nashville resident: "Ghosts of Gallatin" and "Murfreesboro, Spirits of Stones River."
After two years of researching the history and alleged hauntings in and around Franklin — including a night in which he personally witnessed something unexplainable while visiting the Lotz House — Sircy has been led to believe that the city with the small-town charm just may be the scariest place in Tennessee.
“There are so many stories here, and after a while they kind of run together,” Sircy said. “Franklin is a really cool place, a charming small town. But there’s a dark underbelly that people don’t know about.”
Sircy’s book is sectioned geographically, with street names such as West Main, South Margin and Franklin Road serving as chapter titles. If nothing else, it lends credence to the notion that in Franklin there’s a ghost around every corner.
"I worked in Franklin for 10 years," Sircy said in a press release announcing his newest book. "During that time I heard stories about people seeing soldiers in homes, businesses and all over Columbia Pike. With the new book I spent a lot of time digging into not just the Civil War, but all the fires around the square as well as a lot of the high-profile murders that took place around town."
About that visit to the Lotz House, which played a significant role in the 1864 Battle of Franklin and is considered by many to be the epicenter of the town’s hauntings, he said:
“A friend had rented the house for an investigation and I tagged along,” Sircy said. “We were in the music room and it sounded like someone threw a big rock and hit the side of the house. I walked out into the lobby and asked the lady sitting there if she heard someone, and she heard the same thing.
"I walked outside and saw some guys smoking, and I asked if they maybe slammed a car door or made some loud noises. They hadn’t, and so there was really no explanation for what I had heard.”
To help supplement sales of "Southern Ghost Stories," Sircy leads occasional ghost tours with Franklin on Foot, where his book can be purchased directly from him. It is also available at the Lotz House and Landmark Booksellers, as well as online through Amazon and www.southernghoststories.com.
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