A Hanna Family Ghost Story

In the hollow of a Lynches River tributary just outside Johnsonville, where sandy hillsides rise to meet fertile tobacco fields, an old homestead took shape with roots that ran deep. Here, on what’s now called Arles Lane, Thomas Franklin Hanna (1873–1958) and his wife Nekoda Laharp Altman Hanna (1878–1955) built their home—a modest farmer’s cabin above that hollow which they simply called “the branch.” The couple carved their initials into one of the timber beams beneath the porch. 

Some of the bricks used as the foundation were rumored to have once served as ballast for ships arriving from across the Atlantic. The land itself was part of the original grant to Hugh Hanna, Thomas’s great-grandfather and the first of the Hanna family to settle in the Johnsonville area after marching south with General Greene during the Revolution.  Prior to their arrival, this plot of land was familiar to a group of the native Catawba people. Even today, Hanna descendants still find discarded arrowheads and pottery shards left by the native people long ago.

Nekoda Altman Hanna and Thomas Hanna

Thomas and Nekoda were my great great grandparents.  Thomas was the son of Franklin Evander “Vander” Hanna and Julia Ann Grier. Nekoda was the daughter of Daniel Webster Altman and Margaret Elizabeth “Maggie” Stone. The Hannas started their family in that small cabin—the first of two homes they would build on the farm. Their oldest son, James Franklin “Bubba” Hanna (born by 1900), was followed by Arles Timmons Hanna (1903–1986), Pete Hanna (1907–1967), and a daughter, Lucille Hanna Eaddy (1905–1970). This family transformed what was original pine and hardwood flats into tobacco fields, cutting and clearing the land by hand to expose the fertile soil. As their family and farming prospects grew, Thomas and Nekoda built a larger two‑story house across the field from the original cabin, along what’s now Bubba Lane.

It was in that new home that the strange footsteps began...

Uncle Pete Hanna chased the Walking Boss 
from tree to tree

The sound came first at night: slow, heavy steps pacing across the upstairs floorboards. If someone worked alone downstairs, the tread would start above. When they crept up the stairs, the sound would shift below. It was as though the house itself was breathing, restless in its sleep. The Hannas came to call the unseen visitor the Walking Boss.

For those not familiar with the term, walking boss comes from an early 20^th century term frequently used to describe a foreman or supervisor in logging camps or dock work. With all the turpentine industry logging around Johnsonville and the Lynches and Pee Dee Rivers at the time, the term would’ve made sense when the story took hold. 

My Granny Vonnie Hanna Dukes (1933–2015), daughter of Arles and Violet Carter Hanna (1907–1984), remembered the stories well. She told how one bedroom door upstairs would never stay latched—no matter the nails, hooks, or boards set against it. It would always creak open again, softly, as if by unseen hands. To Vonnie and her brothers and cousins, the Walking Boss wasn’t just a scary story, but a family fact.

The haunting wasn’t confined to the house. Pete, the youngest brother, swore he had seen the spirit once at twilight at the edge of the farm, where the trees blocked the light of an evening. The apparition he chased seemed to be playing with him - darting from tree to tree, always just out of reach.  Pete eventually built his own house across the Vox Highway from the old homestead, running a small store beside it until his death in 1967. 

Granddaddy Arles Timmons Hanna had a pillow
snatched out from under his head by unseen hands

Thomas and his sons often drove their mule cart through the branch late in the evening. They said that on certain nights something unseen would climb aboard. The mule would grunt under the extra weight, the harness creaking in the dark. None of the men dared look back. But whatever it was would ride along with them in the darkness.

My great grandfather Arles, a steady and quiet man, was once napping in one of the tobacco barns during curing season. The men would monitor the burners around the clock. Just as he drifted off, the pillow beneath his head was yanked away and thrown to the floor. He woke with a start to find himself completely alone. 

The Hanna family’s story took a grim turn around 1936, when the family home burned nearly to the ground. Thomas and Nekoda salvaged what they could—Nekoda’s writing desk and her wedding ring among the few family treasures pulled from the ashes. One particularly eerie detail recounted years later by Bubba Hanna was that on the night of the fire, while the family helplessly watched their home burning, a ball of fire rolled out of the house and down the long dirt drive.  It was almost as if something was running out of the flames.

They moved back into their old homestead across the field while their eldest son, Bubba, and his wife Lillian "Day" Newell Hanna (1904–1982) built a new house on the old foundation.  In those quiet years after the fire, the stories didn’t stop. They only shifted forward in time—experience by new arrives on the farm. 

Day Hanna used to tell about the spring when the new house was going up—the one Bubba built on the ashes of his parents’ burned two-story home. She said her brother-in-law Pete had been walking past a lumber pile one evening when he heard the sharp clatter of boards shifting, as if someone were running across the stack. The pieces jumped and settled again with no wind stirring and no one around to see it.  Day also quickly learned that there was a spot in the middle of the field that no matter how hard she tried, she could never get the horse teams to plow over.  She always noted that as a strange occurrence - but maybe the horses could see something she couldn't. 

Uncle Bubba Hanna built his home on the same site where
the family's burned-out home once stood

Bubba and Lillian had no children of their own but were adored by their many nieces and nephews who were frequent callers at their house. On one occasion their nephew Fay Hanna - Pete's son -came down the lane to pay an afternoon visit. Bubba’s truck was parked in the yard, so he figured his uncle and aunt were home. He stepped onto the porch and knocked. Inside, he could plainly hear movement—footsteps crossing the wooden floors, the faint creak of a hinge, and then the soft click of the living-room door opening. The steps came toward the front entry. Fay waited for the knob to turn. It never did. He called out, “It’s Fay!” No answer. The steps stopped just beyond the threshold.

Puzzled, he stepped back off the porch to glance through a window, and that’s when he heard the crunch of tires on the lane. A car was pulling in. Bubba and Day climbed out, freshly returned from a trip to Charleston with Day’s sister. Fay told them what had happened—how he’d heard someone walk through the house to greet him, only to vanish. Bubba just looked at the door, then at Day, and neither spoke for a long moment. Fay vowed right then never to drop by unannounced again.

Vonnie Hanna Dukes cooking in the kitchen of
the old house, late 1950s

The original old house passed to Arles Hanna and his wife Violet. They raised their three children—Evander Franklin “Vander”, Yvonner Leta “Vonnie,” and Jimmy Earl—within its creaking walls. Around 1950, they built a newer home closer to the Vox Highway, leaving the original structure to weather and age. When Vonnie married Joe Dukes in 1954, they moved into the abandoned farmhouse. Their son, Joseph Stevens Dukes, came home from the hospital to that house. By then, there was still no indoor plumbing, and chickens wandered beneath the floorboards through the open gaps in the wood.

Even in the 1950s, family members claimed to hear faint footsteps crossing the old floors at night. The Walking Boss had not left. When Joe and Vonnie moved across the highway in 1962, the old house stood vacant. Over the next decades, it became a favorite gathering place for Hanna descendants - holiday barbeques, cousins camping out and lighting fireworks, and stories of the Walking Boss retold under the stars.

Bubba's wife Lillian "Day" Hanna holding Laura Jean, 
who later claimed the Walking Boss took up at her house

Lucille Hanna Eaddy’s youngest daughter Laura Jean Eaddy Hanna (1939-2003) built her house directly across the Vox Highway from Bubba’s Lane with a front porch view straight down to the old burned homesite.  She swore the Walking Boss had taken up residence at her place as footsteps from an unseen source were often heard.  Laura Jean's daughter Sharon remembers sitting at her mother's house when they heard the back door open and close.  My granddaddy Joe Dukes, Vonnie's husband, went to check.  No one was in the room, and the door turned out to be locked tight! Both Sharon and her brother Delwynn Hanna have had numerous unexplained experiences they've attributed to The Walking Boss over the ensuing years.

The “Old House,” as it came to be called, finally fell into ruin, and was bulldozed in the early 1990s. The replacement home built by Timmy Hanna, a grandson of Arles and Violet, burned in the early 2000s. That left only the two ancient live oaks guarding the old homestead site for decades. In recent years another grandson, Steve Dukes, built a barn on the land.  He continues the family tradition of all-night hog barbeques at Thanksgiving cooked the old-fashioned way – fired all night by hot coals shoveled into the air-tight pit. This ritual isn’t unlike those all-night tobacco curing vigils conducted by their ancestors on the same land a century earlier. Inevitably by the light of the barrel fire that fuels the cooking and wards off the night’s chill, the stories of the Walking Boss are still told to a new generation. 

And even today, when the evening wind moves through the low-hanging moss on the old oak branches of the Hanna Farm, you just might still hear a faint, rhythmic tread—steady, patient, and familiar.  The Walking Boss, it seems, still keeps tabs on the Hanna land.

I can’t help but pause to examine a story I recently came across, preserved in Catawba oral tradition of those first native peoples that walked the Hanna farm and left their traces for us to find.  One of those spirit stories tells of the Yehasúri, or “little people”— a group of child-sized spirit folk that lived underground and in stumps. They were said to steal food and play tricks on those unlucky enough to encounter them. Sound's pretty familiar...

The Old House -Thomas and Nekoda's original homestead near the branch