Meadows, left, and the dress she claims raised its left sleeve and turned toward her

October 30, 1999
Web posted at: 8:46 p.m. EST (0046 GMT)

DALE CITY, Virginia (CNN) -- Georgia Meadows is so fascinated by 19th century mourning rituals that she has acquired an extensive collection of artifacts, including human hair wreaths and mourning clothes.

And that collection has convinced Meadows, a legal secretary, that the netherworlds of the paranormal are really real.

For one thing, the special room where she keeps her artifacts always seems strangely cold. Then there's the mourning dress worn by a wealthy New York woman in the 1870s, which Meadows insists is haunted.

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Correspondent Skip Loescher reports on a Virginia woman who collects artifacts from 19th century mourning rituals and believes in ghosts Windows Media 28K 80K

"The left arm rose up on the dress," she says. "All of a sudden, on the dress form, it started creaking and the whole thing started turning towards me. That was it. I was out of there."

Meadows says the dress isn't the only thing she's seen move by itself. A picture of a dead child from the 1860s, which she had sitting on a book shelf, suddenly "just flew over my head and flew across the room."

A human hair wreath, part of Meadows' collection of prized artifacts

Meadows knows skeptics will pooh-pooh her claims. But she says her husband can verify some of her paranormal contacts, including twice seeing a ghost take form in the doorway of an old mansion not far from their home.

"It came out onto the porch, and it was a real, real sharp image of a complete form of a woman. She was wearing a long white gown. She had very long hair," Meadows says.

But Meadows says from her experience, there is little to fear from these ghosts. She says they only appear to tell people something they want them to know.

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