In the late 1920’s, according to the Benton, Illinois newspaper, the Post-Dispatch, a "ghost chaser" named Hickman Whittington visited Hickory Hill one night. The story read "Whether ghost chaser Hickman Whittington expects to see a white or black ghost remains to be seen. He said he had recently learned that cries have been heard coming from the post where slaves were whipped for disobedience, and he intends to do something about it."

George Sisk told ghost writers Richard Winer and Nancy Osborn Ishmael in an interview that whatever happened to Whittington after coming to the house that night scared the life right out of him. "When he visited the place, he was in fine health," Sisk told them, "but just after he left here, he took sick, and he died in a small town nearby just hours after his visit…. .you might say that something scared him to death."

Winer then asked him what he thought that ‘something’ might have been and he had no answer. "I wouldn’t want to be the one to say," he told them, "but it could have been the same thing that scared those two Marines that tried to stay in the attic overnight in 1966. They had the good sense to leave before anything disastrous happened….they came flying down those stairs about one-thirty in the morning. Said they saw forms coming at them. They were in a state of shock. I really didn’t get to talk to them very long. They tore out of here in a hurry….didn’t even bother to go back upstairs to get their belongings."

In a longer account of the incident, the two Marines, who had seen combat in Vietnam, volunteered to spend the night in the house. They scoffed when they were told that others had tried to spend the night in the attic and had fled in terror. After several hours, they started to grow bored. They only light in the attic came from a kerosene lantern and just as they started to go to sleep, the lantern began to flicker. There were no drafts or air movement, but yet the lantern began to grow dimmer. Then, an agonized moan filled the air, seeming to come from everywhere at once. The moaning was followed by the sounds of other voices and the, just before the lantern went out, the Marines claimed to see swirling forms appear out of the darkness. Terrified, they fled the attic in a panic and never returned.

It wasn’t long after that before Mr. Sisk stopped letting thrill-seekers into the attic after dark. He explained to me that a small fire had accidentally been started by an overturned lantern.

In 1978 however, he relented and a reporter from Harrisburg named David Rodgers was allowed to spend the night in the attic as a Halloween stunt for a local television station. The reported managed to beat out nearly 150 previous challengers to become the first person to spend the night in the slave quarters in more than a century.

Sisk didn’t believe that he would make it through the night and announced that he probably wouldn’t last beyond one o’clock in the morning. "Other reporters before Rodgers had tried to stay the night, but none of them made it. They all said they heard shuffling feet and whimpering cries in the slave quarters at night," Mr. Sisk explained.

Rodgers admitted that he had felt "queasy" before going into the house and that his experience was anything but mundane. "I heard a lot of strange noises," he said, minutes after leaving the place. "I was actually shaking. The place is so spooky. The tape recorder was picking up sounds that I wasn’t hearing."

Rodgers admitted also that while he felt pretty good about himself, he "didn’t want to make the venture an annual event." He had gone into the house at 8:00 P.M. on Halloween night and emerged the next morning. To occupy his time, he had taken along a couple of books, but managed to make it through just one chapter of the first one. It isn’t hard to imagine why his concentration may have been otherwise occupied.