Twists and turns...

I will make a very long story short. In one of my previous posts I described how I felt as though a tornado was nipping at my heels, well, I feel like it is moving on. Finally!! Stick with me till the end because it gets interesting ;-)

We moved to the Charlotte area 3 years ago and decided to rent until we knew that where we were starting out, was where we wanted to put down our roots. We moved into a lovely rental and fell in love with the house and area. We asked our landlord if he would sell the house to us, he agreed and so we began to think of the house as "ours". We did a few improvements and generally felt like this was "home".

6 weeks ago a man came to our door to serve our landlord with papers. We told him we were just the renters and he proceeded to tell us that our house was in foreclosure and that the landlord hadn't paid his mortgage for 11 months!!! We paid him on time, each and every month, only to have him put our money in his greedy little pocket. This sent us in to panic mode and then immediately into action mode. We found a beautiful house that was in our same neighborhood and decided that needed to be home.

Well~ it was a short sale, so we needed approval from the bank which we were told could take up to 6 months. It didn't. They got back to us quickly and last week we closed on our new home!!

I'm in complete love. We were very blessed each step of the way and it has felt like this was all part of our "plan". Like it was meant to be. I won't go into the specifics because we would be here all day long but suffice it to say, the list is long and we were blessed.

Right before we closed we made a very interesting discovery. Hold on to your hats....

I have a graveyard in the woods behind my house!!!! No kidding!!!

I was a little taken back at first but now I find it amazing and strangely comforting. There is a huge old tree that looks over all the graves. The graveyard is abandoned and grown over. Time has forgotten it and the people who were buried there so long ago.

Many of the graves are just these rocks, stuck into the ground, with no markings or any way to identify the person who was laid to rest there. It pangs my heart. Who was this?

Others have names and were buried in the 1920's and 1930's.

This headstone is the first one you see as you walk into the woods.

There are about 40 of these unmarked rock headstones. The neighbors have been told that they could be slave graves or a poor mans burial ground. *sniff sniff*

Some of the graves are knocked down and sunken in.
Ahhhhh...this is a bit creepy.

I plan to take care of this sweet discovery with my kids and not let it be lost in time and grown over. Hopefully there is no lingering ghosties that want to say hello :-)


Have a very
HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

xoxo Emily xoxo

Ghost Stories & Haunting Love...

Today is the Halloween blog party at A Fanciful Twist. For the party on my blog, I want you to stop a while and let me tell you some ghost stories and a haunted love story.

I recently had the pleasure of visiting Charleston S.C. The city is intriguing and enchanting. You feel as though you are traveling back in time. I also had the pleasure of going on a "Haunted Graveyards" tour at 10pm with my husband. It was exciting and scary. Your blood got pumping as you walked through the cemeteries that have been there since the 17oo's.

We heard scary stories about ghosts who are often seen there. A story that has stuck with me was about a young girl who had influenza, was thought to have died, and was laid to rest in the family crypt but wasn't actually dead. She tried in vain to claw her way out of the crypt even using her relatives bones to boar out of the door. Only 10 years later when her brother died in the civil war did the family know the horror of what had happened. Here is the top of the family crypt...


and as the story was being told I moved away from the group to take some shots of the cemetery and side of the crypt. A strange shadowy figure seems to lurk in my photos. To me it looks like it's wearing an old pirate looking hat but then again it could be nothing. Right behind where I took this picture was the "hanging tree" for the pirates who were caught around the port town. Strange eh...


The night was eery and exciting. The Spanish moss that hung down from the trees, added a spooky feeling to the night. Not to mention when I looked back through my photos and saw what looks like an old scraggly man's profile and cloaked figure in the very right hand corner. Click on it to look closer. Maybe my eyes are just playing tricks on me. Or are they....


This headstone was from 1755. The rest were so beautiful in a creepy way.

Now this haunting love story leaves me with chills and a heavy heart. Having known the feeling of true, burning love, I can't help feel such sorrow and sadness for these two lovers.
When we had our little girl Annabelle, my grandmother who is in her 80's, read me a poem that I had not heard. It was called Annabelle Lee by Edgar Allen Poe.
Here it is in Poe's very own handwriting.
Please read it...

I thought it was beautiful but didn't quite understand it until I went on our cemetery tour. Here is our tour guide outside the cemetery where Annabelle Lee was buried, telling us this tale..

Edgar Allen Poe was a young man serving at Fort Moultrie in Charleston. He met his love Annabelle Lee and carried on a relationship in secret with her because her father disapproved of the relationship. She was "high society" in Charleston ( the kingdom by the sea) and her father didn't like her being in love with a lowly soldier. He secretly proposed to her and they planned their life together. She became ill and her father would not let Poe into the home even when it was apparent she was soon going to pass away. She did pass and Poe was banned from the wake and the funeral. The father was so hateful that he would not even erect a real headstone up for his daughter because he didn't want Poe to know exactly where she was actually buried.

Edgar Allen Poe was obviously destroyed by losing his true love and would go to the cemetery at night and would talk and cry over each and every grave, not knowing which contained his love, so that his tears would fall on her.

He was never the same and many say he became an alcoholic and so "dark" because of what happened to him and his Annabelle Lee by the "kingdom near the sea".


It is said that he roams this cemetery still in search of his Annabelle Lee. I think I may have caught him looking for her. If you look closely you can see my shadow taking this picture.
I was the last of the group trailing behind snapping pictures, so I know that no one was standing by me casting this shadow in the distance.

Maybe it is him, in search of his love...


To enter the giveaway for a special Halloween treat from me...

become a follower of this blog and leave a comment.

Have a Haunting Halloween!!!

xoxo Emily xoxo

Tornadoes and Tombstones

Imagine this is me right now. Except I have blond hair, and I'm not rockin some eighties looking outfit, or risking my life for a crazy good picture, but this is how I feel. There's a tornado of chaos and CHANGE nipping at my heels right now, so please forgive me for not blogging as often as I should.

I had such great plans and posts ready, but this "tornado" is engulfing everything right now. I won't be so cryptic soon I promise.

I promised the tutorial on the headstones and they are such fun to make, plus year after year you can get something out that you created with your own two hands. Very satisfying!



So~ here are the ones I have made and I really wanted to make more this year but that pesky tornado won't back off. I can't even decorate for Halloween!!!!
!!!!!ME!!!!!

What you will need is some foam insulation board available at home improvement stores for like $4. I think you can get 3 regular stones cut out of one board or a big one like my Celtic cross above out of one sheet.

Cut out the foam with a good serrated knife or a little power saw if you have one in whatever shape or style you want.
Then I cut out some cracks and nicks to make it look more weathered. Look at the previous photos to see what I mean.
I found these tutorial pics at Martha Stewart. Here is a more detailed tutorial if you like.

Paint the foam a slate grey color. Then start dripping and mottling some watered down black paint onto the stone with an old rag to get the aged feel. This may tale several coats till you get the depth you want.
Add the names and sayings with paint or a big sharpie. It's a lot easier with a big permanent marker.

Here is a site that has some funny sayings to put on them.

Now this where I differ from Martha~the crafting Goddess. I think the moss color should be more green and less pukey colored. The green really pops and looks better in my opinion. Again- scroll up and see the green on my tombstones. Just make sure the paint is very watered down and that way it trickles and runs over the surface more organically.

Take some doweling and hammer it into the ground gently leaving about 5-6 inches out of the ground, then carefully stick the headstones down on it and you are good to go. Those babies are not going anywhere unless of course people steal them from your front yard like they did to me.
I guess they were some pretty good looking tombstones for someone to steal them. ;-)


Have fun and if you make these, I want pics people!!

xo Emily xo

It's here!!! It's here!!!!

~OCTOBER~
is officially here! The best month of the year (in my humble opinion).
Everything is warm and inviting. The smells are spicy and calm, the sun falls on the earth in a softer way. The crisp air in the mornings feels amazing after such a long hot summer here in the Carolina's. I LOVE it.


Exciting news...I was featured here on this cute blog




by Kim at



who was making a guest post. She loved this tiny graveyard I made last year.
Awesome huh?

I will give a short and quick tutorial on how to make it.

I bought the tiny headstones at Micheal's. They are for the mini spooky town's and haunted houses. I can't remember the exact name of the company that makes them but they have a whole aisle for all the things you can buy to decorate them.

I took some green moss, piled it in and make some mounds a little bigger than others. Just go for it. You want it to look organic, not perfect.

I placed them where I thought they would look best, then simply hot glued them onto the moss.
Voila~ a mini graveyard.

Everyone who came to my house had to go close to it and inspect it. It is enchanting.
I called it my fairy graveyard ;-)

Here is the link when I blogged a little about it last year. The post was for a Halloween blog party and all of the pictures are mine, and all of the decor was mine, and I will be explaining how to make a lot of the projects in the next few weeks.
The headstones in my yard are a blast to make and last forever. So come on back y'all.

It's October!!!!!!! YAY!!!!!!!

xo Emily xo