When most attorneys retire, they might take up golf or gardening. Amy Petulla chose a different path entirely – she became Chattanooga's premier ghost tour guide, leading visitors through the shadowy underbelly of the Tennessee city where the past refuses to stay buried.
What began as a simple observation – why didn't this historic tourist town have ghost tours like other cities? – evolved into a thriving business that has uncovered layers of supernatural activity beneath Chattanooga's streets. From the flood-drowned spirits of Underground Chattanooga to the infamous Annalisa Netherly who haunts Room 311 of the Read House, Petulla has built her reputation on more than just storytelling. Her tours regularly produce unexplained photographs, electromagnetic anomalies, and encounters that leave even skeptics questioning what they've witnessed.
In our conversation following a recent Murder and Mayhem Tour, Petulla shared tales that stretch credibility – ghost brides trying to talk bachelorettes out of marriage, spectral figures appearing in thermal imaging, and a decades-old murder case in Georgia where the victims may still return to the scene each year. Yet her matter-of-fact delivery and wealth of documented evidence suggest there's more to Chattanooga's supernatural reputation than mere urban legend.
An Interview with Amy Petulla by Richard Marranca
RM: It was a pleasure meeting you and going on the Murder and Mayhem Tour last week in Chattanooga. It's a great way to experience the historical and mystical side of life. I hear that you used to be a lawyer. How did you get into ghosts, murder and mayhem?
AP: I enjoyed chatting with you, as well! As to how I got into ghosts: My children and I always loved taking ghost tours in other cities, and wondered why Chattanooga did not have one, as it is such a tourist town. So when I decided to retire from practicing law, I did some research to see if Chattanooga had enough ghosts downtown to keep guests entertained for an hour and a half. Turns out, we have an abundance! The issue became, not whether there were enough ghosts, but culling it down to the best.
Can you tell us about that parking lot we first visited in Chattanooga? Layers of history there, some of it spooky.
Back in the 1800's, Chattanooga had a flooding problem downtown. Rather than building a levee as New Orleans did, we decided to build the city up a level. What was the original second story of much of the downtown area became the first story, and the former first story became what is often called "Underground Chattanooga," which was rediscovered by Dr. Jeff Brown, an archaeology professor at UTC, in the 1970s, after he'd noticed the tops of old windows at street level.
Several of the people who died in the floods continue to haunt the area. In addition, the site your guide probably took you to was formerly an undertaker's, and numerous ghosts seem to have become attached to the area as a result of that.
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Can you tell us about your favorite cemetery for ghosts and hauntings in Chattanooga?
Part of our UTC/Cemetery Ghost Hunt (with equipment) goes into a strip of 3 adjacent cemeteries. Citizens Cemetery is the oldest cemetery in Chattanooga, and some of the residents buried there were the town fathers. That cemetery has a lot of history, which I cover in my books Haunted Chattanooga, and the children's version, The Ghostly Tales of Chattanooga.
We started the hunt for our adult guests who wanted an experience, rather than just hearing about the ghosts, and we have had some truly amazing things happen on the hunt over the years. Anna is the suicide bride who got stood up at the altar in Danforth Chapel, inside Patten Chapel on UTC's campus. When we first started the hunt, on numerous occasions she on request unlocked the door to the chapel which our guests had already tried and found locked. She has shown up in numerous photos, including one that I consider to be the best ghost photo I've ever seen.
I show that one at the beginning of our tour, and while I do not have permission to share it for publication, your readers can see it on our website at ChattanoogaGhostTours.com, and also on our Facebook page. Anna usually will only talk to women, and has on more than one occasion, when we've had a bachelorette party on the hunt, tried to talk them out of getting married. I am aware that that is so outlandish, it sounds like I made it up, but I assure you I did not.
Anna also regularly plays a game with our guests using the EMF detectors, which my guides call "Oranges." This involves making the EMF detector go to and stay for a few moments at orange on request, rather than staying on green (normal) or all the way to red (which can be indicative of supernatural activity or of power lines - we explain to our guests how to tell the difference). In any event, it is usually rare for it to go to and stay at orange, which is why they use that for the game.
Illustrative image of a ghost bride. (Lario Tus/Adobe Stock)
We have had other people get ghost photos on the hunt (as well as the tour), and on one occasion, a woman wearing a see-through shroud with nothing underneath, barefoot, with what our guests described as "dead eyes," walked from across the street, through the middle our group at the edge of the cemetery, with no acknowledgement or apparent recognition of the presence of the group of people, continued on into the cemetery, where she vanished before their eyes. In one of my Facebook ad videos, I have some consecutive screengrabs of her disappearance. On another occasion, the thermal imager clearly showed what appeared to be a large beast, chained to one of the gravestones and struggling to get away. There was no such creature visible to the naked eye there.
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On one side of Citizens Cemetery is the Confederate Cemetery. The original graves of many confederate soldiers were located adjacent to the river, and were swept away in the flooding. Those that were recovered were buried here, and there is also a monument there to those whose bodies were lost forever and never recovered. Some of the spirits there are quite perturbed because, right in the middle, where the American flag is located, two Union soldiers are buried. It is a fairly active spot for supernatural activity. On the other side of Citizens is an unmarked field which served as the paupers' cemetery. Many of the graves there were robbed and the bodies sold or used by students at the former medical school. It is not surprising that their souls remain agitated and continue to haunt the area.
Can you tell us about Read House and Room 311? That is a very dynamic place, I recall, with quite a history.
Room 311 of the Read House has Chattanooga's most famous ghost, Annalisa Netherly, who depending on who you ask, had her throat slit in the bathtub by either a jealous husband over perceived flirtation with another man, or by a "customer" of her services, often said to be a yankee (this is the South, so it is ALWAYS a yankee, lol) soldier. However, she is not the ONLY ghost of the Read House, or even of Room 311. We talk about the other ghosts on our tour, and would be happy to have some of your readers join us one evening! We have also had a number of guests get ghost photos at the hotel, including one of the best ghost photos I've ever seen.
Read House Chattanooga. (Andrew Jameson/CC BY-SA 3.0)
Again, I don't have permission to share that one for publication, but it can be seen on our website or Facebook page. I CAN share a photo with you that I took, though. Some people attract a lot of things and some do not. I do not (though several of my guides do), which is why, when the Read House staff took me on a private ghost tour of the hotel, I took several photos but did not bother to look at them for a month. When I finally did, I was shocked to find the attached photo of the famously haunted mirror of the Silver Ballroom, which shows a man with a blond ponytail. The only people in the previously locked room were my two female brunette guides and me, and we were all to the side and out of the picture. There was definitely no one else in the room. You can read more about the hotel's history here: https://www.thereadhousehotel.com/history/
The haunted mirror in the Silver Ballroom of Read House, with the presence of a man. (Amy Petulla)
Can you tell us about some of the famous people and famous ghosts that you find especially interesting?
I love all the ghosts of DC, including famously Abraham Lincoln and Abigail Adams, and have even spoken to a class at my children's school when they were younger, before they did a DC trip.
Augusta Hoffman is another favorite ghost of mine from Chattanooga. She haunts the Hunter Museum, after her home next door was destroyed. It is not uncommon for ghosts to move to a nearby location they are familiar with when something happens to their home. Ms. Hoffman was a famous socialite in her day, had her niece and nephew move in with her when she was in, I believe, her 70s, and when she disappeared, their explanation was that she had run off with some unknown man to some unknown place, despite the fact she had been a spinster her whole life. After the home was sold, her skeleton was discovered in a crawl space during renovations, identified by her glasses and a few scraps of fabric. The relatives were arrested and in fact convicted, but the convictions were overturned for lack of evidence.
My co-author on Haunted Chattanooga discusses her story in more detail. During our tours, we have had guests get very detailed photos of "Aunt Gussie." There are also 4 other ghosts of the Hunter Museum - George Hunter, who peers out of a bay window; a maid near the staircase; a poltergeist that was encountered by the former president of Provident Insurance (a man not given to creating fanciful stories), and a gardener or soldier, who we've also captured a detailed photo of on our tour. I will attach that one, as well.
This photo has been checked by experts and they can find no natural explanation for the blue figure that appears in it. (Amy Petulla)
Oh, a bunch of ghosts. The more the merrier.
Probably my favorite location of supernatural activity is Corpsewood Manor, the famous and now nearly destroyed Trion, GA home of two murder victims, Dr Charles Scudder and Joey Odom. If you google the word "Corpsewood," you will come up with thousands of websites, and every one of them has to do with these murders. Around here, they used to be referred to as "The Devil Worshipper Murders." It is the subject of my only book that has gotten national attention, The Corpsewood Manor Murders in North Georgia. It truly is the most bizarre true crime you will ever hear. There are dozens of bizarre and sometimes paranormal things associated with the case. I will relate two.
Self portrait of Charles Scudder. (Courtesy of Amy Petulla)
1) Two years before the murders, Charles Scudder painted the above self-portrait. You will see that he is gagged with five bullet holes in his head. That is how his body was found, and the murderers never saw or heard about the painting. (Note that, until I blew up this picture from a tiny portion of a photo and worked with it extensively to eliminate imperfections caused by the small size, the only photo anyone ever published of the painting, one which was reused thousands of times, was a wrinkled-up black and white copy of a xerox that was included in a booklet published by the Chattooga County newspapers shortly after the murder. If you ever see a color version, it will always be this one I worked to recreate, which is now widely used but rarely credited.)
2) After I had turned my original draft of my book over to the publishers, I had gone to get a massage, having spent months cramped up typing. The masseuse was a young guy, and we chatted as he worked. I told him I had just completed a book about the murder of a couple of gay men in Trion, GA. He asked whether it had happened a long time ago, and I responded yes, in December 1982. He said he had been to the location with several of his friends, a few years ago. It was and probably continues to be one of those locations where teenagers dare each other to go. It is VERY difficult to find. Basically, you go until the road runs out, then go another mile down a dirt road, then you have to find the right turnoff, then the right pull off, which only really has room for one car, and then you have to hike about half a mile through the woods. So anyway, this young man and his friends arrived, and there was no other car around. They said when they arrived at the home site, there were two odd men, dressed in raggedy sort of clothes, sitting in lawn chairs in the middle of what used to be the living area of this small home, before it burnt. They were puzzled about how they got there. Despite their odd appearance, the boys chatted with them for a while.
The two men told them they came there every year on the same day. They told them a bit about what had happened there before. They were friendly, though they appeared to be disturbed by the noise of a nearby car running up and down a road. After a while, the boys went to hike through the woods, and when they came back, the men were gone. Anyway, this all started sounding familiar. If it was winter. He said he couldn't remember, but it had been cold. I asked whether one was heavier, and one was smaller. He said yes. I asked about their hair color, and he said the smaller one had light hair and the heavier one had dark hair, which was consistent with Dr. Scudder and Joey.
When the massage was finished, I had him wait a moment before going on to his next client, and went to my car to retrieve a photo of Dr. Scudder and another man I thought was Joey, though I found out later it was not. When I showed it to the masseuse, his jaw dropped. He pointed to the dark man and said I don't know who this is, but this other guy (pointing to Dr Scudder in the photo) is one of the men we saw, he's even dressed sort of the same! The reason I believed him is that he didn't realize he was telling me a ghost story, he thought he was just telling me about some odd guys he saw at the site.
Can you tell us about your ghost tour? What are some of the places you visit?
We do our Murder & Mayhem tour every night. It is a 1.5 hour walking ghost tour through downtown, where we tell you about downtown's ghosts, show you the best places to get ghost photos, and tell you some of Chattanooga's more entertaining history along the way. We go to a number of locations - different guides may have different stops, but everyone does Underground Chattanooga and The Read House. We also do our UTC/Cemetery Ghost Hunt, which I described above.
What equipment do you and the participants use? What have the participants done and seen?
The Murder and Mayhem tour does not use equipment, though we do sell EMF detectors for guests who want to use them on the tour or at home. We also do a combo tour/hunt where we give each group an EMF detector to use during the tour.
Our ghost hunt, however, uses a variety of equipment, including EMF detectors, Mel Meters, light-up dowsing rods, a thermal imager, a spirit box, temp guns, and more, and my guide hangs on to the talking Ovilus X, so that everyone can ask questions.
Many guests have gotten ghost pics on both, and I've described above a few of the experiences that have happened on the hunt. Recently, figures have appeared in several photos seated in the pews of the chapel on the hunt, as if worshipping. Except they are see-through.
Two other things that have happened on the tour: there is a ghost, "Walter," who was very enamored of one of my female guides, who was very well-endowed. In front of the entire group one night, he unlaced about a third of the laces on her corset. Another night, two young black-eyed children appeared around 10:30 pm on her in-progress tour, unaccompanied, and began asking very odd questions. A few minutes later, they just disappeared.
More ghostly images and information on Chattanooga Ghost tours with Amy and her team is available here: Chattanooga Ghost Tours Inc.
Top image: Aerial view of Chattanooga and surrounding area. Source: Public Doman
