The Next Dark Age
We're in it Now
Road Trip 2014: How it Began
Road trip 2014 started with..I blocked a week from my work calendar for a vacation and then didn’t plan anything. By the time I got serious, the ticket prices had skyrocketed. At the same time, I had decided that I have not had enough summer and I wanted to be someplace where I was absolutely certain the weather would be balmy. I was looking at New Orleans when my mother – who can’t stand the idea of my being in New Orleans by myself even though I have been there plenty of times before – reminded me that Vicksburg, Mississippi has been on my road trip bucket list for awhile.
Why, yes. It had. It’s a History Nerd thing. Don’t judge.
So I started looking for hotels. I came up empty with my usual suspects – chain hotels where I have points or status or something useful to keep the cost down. Then I went to the website for the Vicksburg Convention and Visitor’s Bureau and found they have a whole lot of Bed and Breakfast places where the prices were quite reasonable. Because, you know. Who wants to be in Mississippi in August?
This Yankee.
So that is how I found Cedar Grove Inn. It was once one of those old antebellum mansions in town that became and B&B and has since built out to have 33 rooms, a bar, a restaurant and a swimming pool. It looked like a lovely place to sit outside and read books. So I clicked over to Trip Advisor to read the reviews, and the first one I found was a guest that had experienced a haunting. You might want to take a minute and read this.
Short version: the Library Suite is a two-story room. The library is on top and the ghostly gentleman of the house seems to hang out there. The bedroom is down a spiral staircase in what had been a wine cellar…and later, during the siege of 1863, a morgue. The dead soldiers were kept there because it was cooler.
Damn straight I wanted to stay there. But I wasn’t sure that I wanted to stay in the Library Suite by myself. So I started asking everyone at work. Stay at the hotel, they said, but not in that room. Yeah. That wasn’t the only room that was haunted. It just sounded the scariest.
When I told my sister-in-law, Becky, about the place she said: “Oh, you need to go there. And you need to stay in that room. And you can take your brother with you because he needs a vacation.”
It took a little bit of schedule juggling, but I booked the Library Suite the next day.
The Next Dark Age 