Description of Place: The Old Pringle House is an old Gothic Victorian with an overgrown yard on a lonely rural road south of town. Treetop Road where it exists is an oft-used back road from the main road connected to miles of farmland and dirt roads covering much of the countryside stretching around the farming community of only about two thousand people. The two-story house has four bedrooms and a large parlor living room; the last owner, Hezekiah Pringle, concealed the entrance to the cellar with a bookcase to conceal his illicit whisky making activities, a hobby still carried on by a few of the local farmers. The interior is all filled and decorated with a collection of odd curios and objects which Pringle has “rescued” or obtained from other locations, such as a suit of armor, a restored pipe organ, a stuffed bear and a large crystal chandelier in addition to antique furniture (an old-style canopy bed graces the master bedroom and a Nineteenth century roll-top desk sits in an old study). Despite the condition and neglected exterior, the interior has the opulent grace of a small museum with a demeanor of small town hospitality.

Ghostly Manifestations: Most towns proudly call one lonely and empty house as their own local haunted house. Usually, it’s the most unused or intimidating structure in town, and the Old Pringle House in Waylon, Georgia definitely fits the criteria of the deserted old house that is supposed to have ghosts. Set back from the road and almost obstructed from view by trees, the house has been the location for a few stories from witnesses who don’t indulge in taking the long straight roads to practice racing cars or running illegal moonshine from the local law.

Ghost stories at the Pringle House go back several years. When he was alive, Hezekiah Pringle often chased off would-be vandals from his property among the amorous would-be boyfriends who pursued his attractive daughter, Mary. After Pringle died, the house stood empty along with a number of other area homes, but it was the Pringle House and it alone that attracted the odd guest from among the living as well as the next world. During the Forties and the Fifties, Amos Davenport heard sounds from the property not once but several times over eleven years.

“The Old Pringle House…. I’ve known that place hasn’t been right since I was knee high to a grasshopper.” Ben “Cooter” Davenport still owns his father’s property, but now its used to store cars and old wrecks from his garage in town. “My old man knew Old Man Pringle and the two of them both liked tipping back glasses of white lightning when they weren’t making it. I think they drank more than they sold, but Old Man Pringle stopped coming round when his wife, Mercy, departed and took his daughter. According to how my daddy put it, Old Hez wasn’t the same after his daughter left. He’d wander the place looking in the empty rooms and carrying an old jug as he went wandering through the house looking over the old place. Today, long after he was found dead in his truck, he’s still seen wandering the road out there still carrying a jug in front of the house.”

In March of 1979, Davenport recalls customizing and tuning up several cars at once for the local county stock cars races. As he was under the hood of one orange charger, he recalled getting a feeling he was not alone, but instead of turning round to his family home, he lifted his head up and instead looked up and across the wheat field to the back of the Old Pringle House. Standing in the tree line some fifty to sixty yards away he knew he saw a figure waving and holding up a jug trying to get his attention. Continuing his work, he acknowledged the figure, forced a faint hospitable gesture and then looked away, but looking back, he realized the figure was gone. He had only looked away for a few seconds, but the figure was gone.

“He was just there one minute and gone the next.” Davenport says. “Now, to me, it looked exactly like Old Hez, but I know that ain’t right!”

Even Deputy Sheriff Enos Strate knows the old house very well. A good-hearted country boy at heart, he knows the county better than the typical townsfolk. When he’s not investigating illegal whiskey stills or sitting and waiting for hot-rodding good ole boys, he takes his job very seriously and drives through the deserted Shoveltown area south of town which is full of old abandoned houses and forgotten mining shanties. Among them is the Pringle House. While he was driving back one night, he noticed a light in the house as if someone was going through the house with a light source. Stopping to check for prowlers, he first inspected the doors and windows and after finally confirming it was sealed up, he tried to get a look inside the house, but something else instead made him want to leave. He decided he didn’t want to be there longer than he had to be.

“You want to know why everyone speeds through Treetop Road,” Davenport looks up with a face about to start grinning ear to ear. “They’re still trying to beat Enos’s speed record out of there!”

The Pringle House obviously attracts a good number of the morbidly curious. Now gray haired, Lucas Duke is embarrassed to admit that he and his cousins used to slip through a ground floor window and explore the house when he should have been in school. In fact, the Hazzard Police have a record of years of public grievances from he and his cousins running loose across the county stealing apples from orchards or running from arrows that flew away from their intended targets. During his teen years, Duke recalled the house held a bit of fascination for him after Mary moved away and her father died. Hiding from the truant officer and his uncle, he and his cousins found old cigars in a drawer in the parlor and decided to understand what the fascination for them was. A match was struck and he barely had taken a few puffs of nicotine-tainted air when the sound of grumbling and gasping started coming down from the top of the staircase. Footsteps came from out of nowhere and suddenly five boys started pushing each other out of the way to get out of the house first.

“I was the last one behind Luke’s brother, Jud,” Davenport tells the story between pumping gas and blowing up tires. “And we never saw anything, but I could have sworn someone was in that house. Now, whether it was Old Hez, or a illegal moonshiner hiding his stash, I don’t know, but I do know no one has lived out there until Mary inherited the house.”

Mary Louise Pringle departed Waylon as an adorable girl in pigtails with bright blue eyes and returned to claim her father’s house as a beautiful woman. She never lived in the house again, but while she stayed in the house cleaning it up and preparing to sell it, she herself decided she felt her father’s presence in the house. Objects moved just out of her eye-line, a chair turned to a table moved round to face her when she wasn’t looking and groaning noises came from the cellar. She smelled the scent of hard-stilled liquor in the house, but never saw or found a jug or bottle.

“Do I believe in ghosts?” She answers. “No, but I was about ready to. I just figured there had to be a logical explanation, like I was seeing things or something. The chandelier moves, it’s got to be a breeze; something vanishes, I must not be paying attention, but when I saw my father standing in the fishing trail with a jug in his hand and looking up at me in the house, I was about ready to believe his ghost was welcoming me home.”

In addition to the Pringle House, there are a number of other reported haunted sites in Waylon. Several of these are abandoned barns, failed businesses and empty warehouses of which there are plenty. One is the Old Silas Hogg House where the front porch swing is said to move by itself and a driverless orange stock car has been seen near the Hazzard County Courthouse, but both of these have been exposed as hoaxes in later years.

History: Waylon is an old pre-Civil War farming town and several of the surrounding farms have been in the same families for over two hundred years and more. The Pringle House was built in 1870 on what were then miles of open land but is now surrounded by trees dotted with open parcels of land. Hezekiah Pringle purchased the house in the 1940s with aspirations of being a farmer, but moonshining soon took all his time and apparently led to a breaking up between he and his wife. In 1967, Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane found Hezekiah dead in his truck after he had fallen asleep in it while parked on Hopkins Road. Mary inherited the house when she turned thirty years old and sold it afterward. The new owners stayed only a few months and moved on claiming the house was too large for their tastes. The new owners haven’t had anything to report.

Identity of Ghosts: According to some stories, Hezekiah Pringle died in the cellar when an overheated moonshine still exploded, but this is incorrect. The cellar is intact and shows no evidence of an explosion. It is unrevealed whether the hauntings are still active.

Comments: The Dukes of Hazzard (Episodes: “The Hazzardville Horror,” “The Ghost of the General Lee” and “The Haunting of J.D. Hogg.”). Hauntings based on the Millfield Inn in Millfield , Ohio; Fish House in Oglethorpe, Georgia and Parran House in Bolivar, Tennessee.