Q: Can you provide some information about the haunted house in Surrency? The legend refers to a series of attacks on a family in their house. The attacks amounted to objects in the house being thrown at the inhabitants by an invisible force.
—David M. Langford, East Point
A: Here's a perfect Halloween tale.
There was a family named Surrency that lived in a big house near the railroad tracks that ran through the Georgia town of the same name in the 1870s.
If you’ve never heard of Surrency, it’s in Appling County, about 90 miles southwest of Savannah.
At some point, mysterious things began to occur.
Too bad the Ghostbusters weren’t around, because the family sure could’ve used them when the furniture moved by itself, doors flew open and books fell from shelves.
If you think this is just a ghost story, journalists and the curious witnessed and documented these and many other eerie events, according to AJC articles.
They continued until Allen Surrency, the owner of the home, died in 1877.
Few folks mention the Surrency haunting these days, said Laverne Courson, the curator of the Appling County Heritage Center who graduated from Surrency High School in 1957.
“I haven’t heard it brought up in conversation in a long time,” she said last week.
Even the house is long gone.
It burned to the ground nearly 100 years ago, taking its secrets with it.
Q: Was the person who was the voice of Winnie the Pooh from Georgia? If so, who was that person and where were they from?
A: You might not his recognize the name, but his voice surely is familiar.
Cedartown’s Sterling Holloway gained fame in Hollywood before voicing the famous bear in Disney’s “The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh.”
Holloway provided his voice to many characters, including Kaa, the snake in “The Jungle Book” and the Cheshire Cat in “Alice in Wonderland.” He also narrated Disney’s “Peter and the Wolf,” in addition to appearing in many movies and TV shows.
Holloway graduated from what was called the Georgia Military Academy (we know it as Woodward Academy) and then trained at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York.
His hometown honored Holloway, who was 87 when he died in 1992, with a historical marker and by renaming a street Sterling Holloway Place.
