Posted on 10/05/2004 7:48:14 PM PDT by CurlyBill
BY MELANIE BENNETT
Staff Writer
A Russell County fifth-grader is convinced bones found in her home last weekend belong to a mysterious friend who told her about being chopped up years ago.
Investigators have few clues about how and when the bones got inside insulation under the living room floor of the mobile home on Jowers Road, near East Alabama Motor Speedway.
The 10-year-old, Stephanie Ogden, and her family have lived in the home since 1998. Her great-grandparents, John and Marion Stewart, own the home.
The bones were found Saturday as the Ogdens, who are renovating the home, pulled up boards in the living room floor. Russell County Sheriff's Lt. Heath Taylor said an initial analysis shows the bones are from the pelvis and leg of a child at least 10 years old, and the child has been dead at least 10 years.
Another bone was found Sunday, Marion Stewart said. The area where the bones were found had duct tape over the insulation, Stewart said.
"There's an odor there that doesn't belong," Stewart said.
The bones probably don't have enough marrow to do DNA tests, Taylor said. Because the trailer has been moved several times between Georgia and Alabama, investigators now are faced with the daunting task of trying to track down missing children from a wide area in two states.
Taylor said gnaw marks on the bones may indicate a rodent placed them inside the insulation. Dirt and plant material on the bones indicate they were outside at one time, Taylor said.
Stephanie said a black girl in a white dress started visiting her room when she was about 5 years old. The girl was friendly, but she told Stephanie a horrible story.
"She told me that somebody put her in the floor," Stephanie said. "She said he had a mask on, and that he chopped her up. She didn't know who the person was, because he had a mask on."
Stephanie, a fifth-grader at Dixie Elementary School, now thinks that the bones that were found in her home belong to her playmate.
"It's possible because that girl was a ghost," Stephanie said Monday. "Nobody knows about them."
Marion Stewart said Stephanie used to tell her family about the visitor, but the adults always dismissed the stories as being an imaginative child's fabrication based partly on horror movies. Stewart said Stephanie used to always ask for two glasses of soda when she would play outside -- one glass for her and one for her friend.
Stewart said the weekend's grisly discoveries have convinced her that her great-granddaughter's playmate is actually a tormented soul seeking peace.
"I'm not a psychic, and I don't believe in some of that stuff," Stewart said. "But I believe this is a soul who has not been put to rest."
Taylor said detectives can't base their work on ghost stories.
"Do you have any idea how hard it is to investigate a ghost?" he said Monday.
Investigators are looking through databases of missing children to find any links to the trailer's location, but Taylor doesn't hold out much hope of solving the case.
"It's just one of those cases where there's just not a lot to go on," he said.
I usually get an all over skin crawl that feels like a mild electric shock. Then I know I'm in for something weird.
I've heard odd stories from my family, all the way back to my great grandmother, and my wife's the same way, her mother and my aunt both swore off this stuff years ago, due to bad experiences. I guess only time will tell if the kids will attract the same kind of weirdness. I get a certain amount of it even when I'm not looking for it, and when I am, it gets way worse. It's like you become a magnet for every screwball thing in the universe.
I've been thinking about really nailing this thing down with a friend of mine, and doing something similar to the guys on Ghost Hunters. Journals, audio, video, photographs, EMP and temp readings. If I ever get our house finished, I think I'm going to start in on it again. If I have to deal with it anyway, I might as well do it right and see if I can't enough material for an interesting book. At the very least, we might be able to help people out who find themselves adrift in a scary situation with no point of reference.
LOL
So it was YOUR leprechaun who stole my bong!
Actually, Dickens literature, movies, and similar works, such as Les Miserables from the early 1800s, has some sort of quaintness about it and are among my favorites, off topic.... and that is some good movie... A Christmas Carol er, I guess that movie is called Scrooge.
Stole your Gold of pot, too - eh?
always after me lucky charms
Silly rabbit - trips are for kids!
That I got in Acapulco, the bastid.
Yeah - that's tobacco.
It's not the girl, Peter. It's the building
;-)
A problem though is that the little "ghost girl" said that someone chopped her up and put her in the floor. The evidence on the bones indicates that they were placed outdoors first and were probably carried in by a rodent.
That would be my thought. Or that she has somehow heard something. I think it's interesting that both Stephanie and the dead bones are about the same age. Probably coincidence.
I see dead people.
They have fried Twinkies this year? I have to applaud their ingenuity in making something that's bad for you even worse. Good job I say! I know where I'm headin when the munchies start!
"Dat is some freaky sh****t!"
Ah, so that's where my ghostie money came from! I posted a couple days ago about my poltergeist who would put two neatly folded dollar bills in my jacket. Hey, $2 would buy a box of chicken back then.
Good catch. That Georgia serial killer might be a good start to solving this mystery.
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