Atlanta, 1912: a voice in the jail radiator that called a prisoner’s name.

What the paper reported

Late at night on the fifth floor of the jail, trusties sleeping in the hospital ward woke to what they swore was the voice of a ghost. It came through a steam radiator and plainly called one prisoner by name. They rushed from the ward in a panic.

Exhibit A · Transcription

Ghost-Like Sound Causes Panic.

Considerable excitement reigned on the fifth floor of the jail—the death chamber floor—at a late hour last night when several trusties, who sleep in the hospital ward on the same floor, were aroused by what they declare was the voice of a ghost.

It came through a steam radiator, they say, and plainly called the name of one of the prisoners. The sound threw the prisoners into a spasm of fright and they rushed, panic-stricken, from the ward.

Transcribed from the page image, spelling as printed. The whole ghost passage is in the image; its subhead, “Ghost-Like Sound Causes Panic,” sits between the two paragraphs and is shown as the headline above. Checked word by word against the Library of Congress’s OCR text (the OCR misreads “floor” as “floom” and drops “spasm”).

Newspaper

Atlanta Georgian

Published in

Atlanta, Georgia

Headline

Ghost-Like Sound Causes Panic.

Date

December 16, 1912

Page

2

Permalink

www.loc.gov/resource/sn89053729/1912-12-16/ed-2/?sp=2

Source

Library of Congress, Chronicling America. Public domain (published 1912).