Wayne County, NC - Heritage Series

Reprinted with permission of the Mount Olive Tribune and cannot be 
reproduced without permission. 
Transcribed by Barbara Kawamoto.

                      The Ghost Of Cameron Certain

"Our Heritage"
By Claude Moore

   Cameron Certain was a native of England and when he was young he 
migrated with his family to Smithville (now Southport), North Carolina.  His
father was a sea captain.  Cameron studied music and became a talented piano
and organ teacher and he was also a master at dancing.

   At the beginning of the War Between the States, a Confederate training 
camp was located at Smithville and young Cameron volunteered to help 
entertain the soldiers with music and dancing. 

   When the Sampson Rangers were located there he made a number of friends 
among them. Cameron decided to enlist in the Confederate Army, but he was a 
dwarf and could not pass the physical examination.  He was accepted into the
Confederate Hospital Corps and went with the troops to Virginia during the 
Peninsular Campaign in the spring of 1862.  

   After the war he wrote at great length about his experiences.  I remember 
seeing and reading his manuscript of experiences about 40 years ago.  At 
that time, it was owned by Miss Ruth Faison Shaw, but probably has been 
lost.  

   Cameron Certain was present at the Battle of Cold Harbor on June 27, 1862, 
when Lt. Col. Franklin J. Faison of Sampson County was mortally wounded.

   After the War Between the States, he taught piano and organ classes in 
Faison, Mount Olive, and Goldsboro.  For a time, he lived with Mr. And Mrs. 
Isham Faison in Faison.  He was the church organist at the Faison and 
Goldsboro Presbyterian Churches for a time.  

   He often played for weddings in Faison and Mount Olive.  Later, he ran a
music school in the village of Turkey, and I well remember seeing the little
building in which he taught.

   Cameron Certain could also do tailoring and he made his own clothes.  He 
believed in spiritualism and he occasionally claimed to communicate with the
dead.  Several times he is said to have seen the images of two Yankee 
soldiers who were killed and buried under the large magnolia trees in the
yard of the Faison-Williams house in Faison.  

   Old timers said that ghosts especially like Spanish moss and magnolia 
trees and nights of full moon.  Cameron claimed to see a ghost one night in 
St. Gabriel’s Episcopal Church yard in Faison.  Someone asked him what kind 
of ghost he saw and he replied that it must have been a holy ghost since it 
was in the churchyard.

   In 1901 Cameron Certain died at the home of Mrs. Clara Shine Moore near 
Warsaw.  His last request was that he be buried in an old Faison Cemetery 
next to his friend, Thomas Faison.  

   The hearse was drawn by horses and on the way to the grave the horses ran 
away, turned the hearse over and the coffin was thrown into a deep ditch.  
The coffin was placed overnight in the store of Mr. Ed Mann at Turkey and 
the burial was on the following day.  

   For years persons working in the store alone late at night alleged that 
they heard the sound of a piano playing classical music coming from the 
direction of the attic.

   Many years later some coon hunters were hunting and the dogs chased what 
they thought was a coon into the old Faison Cemetery and as they approached 
Cameron Certain’s grave they caught sight of a dwarf dressed in a black 
velvet coat entering the hollow of a giant mulberry tree.  

   The hunters fled and told their neighbors what they had seen.  Farm hands
plowing near the cemetery at almost dark have related that they had heard 
the most unusual sound coming from the direction of the Certain grave.

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File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by
Barbara Kawamoto <bakawamoto.earthlink.net>

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