 In 1989, the movie Still Magnolias hit theaters all across the nation. This movie has now become a classic. It's a story of women in the South and the Deep South in a small town. It's a story of their lives and their relationship with each other. But as any person who grew up in the Deep South can tell you, this story or the concept of this story is far from fiction. In fact, my mother, just like mothers all over the Deep South, had a group of women that she has spent most of her life with. Now here in the Deep South, manners are very important. We say yes ma'am and no sir, we put our napkins in our lap. And growing up for me with my friends' parents, I always refer to them by their married names. However, with this particular group of women, not once did I ever refer to them by their married names. I always called them by their first names. And they do say that it is a village that raises a child. The women that my mother was close to, the women that she had spent most of her life with, were a huge and significant part of my childhood. These women are women that I trust, just as I trust my own mother. I told you in a prior video about my family's heritage in the low country of South Carolina. My mother's family, the Bryces, where I get my name from, were doctors. They've been doctors for generations. Well, my grandfather was recruited first to Atlanta and then to a small town called Rome, right outside of Atlanta. My mother was five years old when they moved to Rome. This was around the time that she met these women, who were also at that time around the age of five as well. And as I've mentioned in previous videos, even though the South is known as the Bible Belt, even though we are a very evangelical and Christian area, we're also an area of magic, of folklore. We're also an area of ghost. Most people I know, including myself, have had many experiences with ghosts or hauntings. I told you in a previous video, my mother was the first person to tell me my first ghost story, and that was the story of the Gray Man of South Carolina. Well, Beth was the second person to tell me a ghost story when I was a child. Only the story that Beth told me, and then eventually her children shared their experiences as well, deeply affected me. In fact, the story stayed with me all of my life, something I always remembered. And it is my honor and privilege to have Beth on this channel today for part one of the story of Annie Laurie. You see, in my opinion, the story of Annie Laurie Hoyt is one of great significance. There is a lot of evidence, which we'll see in part two, of Annie Laurie's existence. Annie Laurie's story is also not just a story of a ghost, but a story of the human spirit and the resilience of an 18-year-old girl who just wanted to live her life. But before we go any further, please remember to hit that subscribe button and go ahead and give this video a like. Now, if you hit the bell, you will be notified for part two when it drops. Welcome to Esoteric Atlanta. My name is Bryce, and today we're going to talk about Annie Laurie and the Hoyt family. Have you two known each other, been friends? Well, since we were five. We were fifty-five. Beth, I knew her as Beth Hoyt. Now she's Beth Balsam. Beth, when I moved to Rome at age five, we went to the club. I told you about the club. That was the one place that you went to swim in the swim pool. And we were swimming, and I came. Mama, mama, I met a good friend. And her name is Beth, and guess what? What? That we figured out about each other. We had the same birthday. Yes, we were happy. April 21st. Yes, we won't tell the year, but I figured out. So we need to tell the year. So we have been friends since then, and still loving and adoring each other. Very proud to be a fourth generation Roman. My family came here by way of Colonel Wade S. Cochran. He came from Abbeyville, South Carolina. Back in, I believe it was 1848, came to Rome. He was a very rich railroad tycoon, entrepreneur, owned some steamboats. And then in 1867, his daughter, Anna, was to marry Robert Hoyt, who was a up and coming druggist in the town. And as a wedding gift to Anna and Robert, he had a beautiful southern home built for them. That is the home that I grew up in, the home that was in the Hoyt family since 1867. At the same time, he himself planted the magnolia tree that grew to be a huge tree, one of the biggest magnolia trees in Georgia. The house was named Nemophila, which is a Greek word meaning love of nature. And it's also the name of a very small, beautiful blue and white flower, that trail. So they gave the home the name. When the house was built, the front of the house faced the river. And that is so they could sit on the front porch and watch the steamboats go by, because at that time, steamboats were all the rage. It was later converted to change the front of the house to face Broad Street, because that was the big street at the time. So they actually switched the whole house to make the back of the house face the river the front faced Broad Street. There was a big fire, but the rest of the house was rebuilt and was brought back basically to its glory. There was also a separate kitchen that was away from the house, which was common in those days, and also a barn for the horses, which of course by the time I was born, the kitchen and barn no longer existed. So Anna and Robert had six children, one of whom was my grandfather, Wade Hoyt Sr. and one was Annie Laurie, who we will learn about a little bit later. Robert passed away at a fairly young age and left Anna with the six children to raise, and she did the best she could. She sold off some land, and the children all lived there until they... some died young, unfortunately, which happened back then, some moved away. Wade Sr., my grandfather, lived with her and then he married Bertha Clemens and they lived in the home. They had two children. One was Elizabeth, my namesake, and one was my father, Wade Hoyt, Jr. An interesting side note is Wade Sr., my grandfather, was a first cousin of Ellen Louise Axon, who became the wife of President Woodrow Wilson. And there are many, many letters between my grandfather and President Wilson, and those have all been donated to Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey, but they are very, very interesting, and even as a young girl, I thought that was just really cool. When Ellen Axon Wilson passed away, my grandfather was in charge of a funeral and he met the train from Washington, DC and escorted the casket to the church and later to Myrtle Hill, where she was buried. So we are very proud of the fact that we do have a first lady in our family. So my father, Wade Hoyt, Jr., married my mother, Eleanor Barnett, and they resided in the home as well. They did live with my grandmother, who was still alive at that time, Anna. They had four children. They had Wade, twins, Nat and Bob, and me. And we grew up in the home as well. I was about three years old, according to my parents. I don't remember a whole lot about that. When I started talking about my friend, Mary Beth, who lived in my mirror and came to visit me at night, they assumed I had an imaginary friend because that was not unusual. You have an imaginary friend. They thought it was kind of cute. Then I began to tell them things about her, that she died at age 18, that she had pneumonia, that she died in the home, things that I probably would not have known at that early age. But they still thought maybe I had just made it up. I was just telling stories. They didn't think a whole lot about it until I just kept on. After a while, I remember they started to get worried. I even remember them taking to the pediatrician, talking to him. He said, well, maybe she's just making up friends because her older brothers are at school and she is bored and needs to make up stories. But after a while, my father, he became a little concerned and he actually got out our family history and started looking it up and discovered that his aunt, Annie Laurie, who I named Mary Beth because I liked the name, I was little, I thought Mary Beth was a cute name, but her name was actually Annie Laurie. She actually did die at 18 of pneumonia in the house. At that point, my parents were, as I said, a little freaking out because they were like, how did you know this? How did you know this? And I said, I don't know. She comes to me in my mirror and I guess she tells me these things. I don't know. And then there was a full-length mirror with a sliding door and if you opened that door, there was one of only two accesses to the attic which no one had ever been in the attic since it was built. And I said, she appears to me in the mirror. She has a long white gown, she has long hair and she talks to me. Well, needless to say, that caused a little bit of concern too. My parents kept insisting they'd never seen a ghost. They'd never heard of a ghost. They didn't know anything about a ghost. But as time went on, they began to talk about things that maybe they had heard and maybe they didn't realize. My mother especially was like, well, remember that time when we heard this and that and my father still was like, I don't believe it, I don't believe it. But I just kept talking about it and the older I got, the more stories I had to tell about as I knew then, Annie Laurie. And I was really excited to find out she was actually related to me. She was actually, you know, in my family. And the interesting thing about that is she was actually a very accomplished painter. And there were many paintings hanging throughout our home that Annie Laurie had done. All through the hallway, all through the living room. Of course, she died so young she didn't get to, you know, become famous, but I think she would have. The paintings were beautiful. But my brothers actually had experiences also with her that they didn't want to talk about until later. But they finally admitted there were times when they heard talking. They heard actually parties going on. They would come home late at night. My house was, you had to go down a long hallway to get to our bedrooms, which is the oldest part of the house. They would come down the long hallways and would actually hear voices, music. They were teenagers when they finally admitted that that was a little bit scary, a little bit creepy. And I will tell a really funny, quick story. One weekend, my brothers were at University of Tennessee and one of my brothers, Nat, brought home a good, good friend. My other brother, Bob, stayed there. He had to catch up on work. But Nat brought home a friend. They were sleeping in their bedroom between beds. The next morning, the friend is white as a sheet. He comes out, he's like, oh my gosh, there was a white vision leaning over my bed staring at me. It scared me to death. I didn't know who it was. I didn't know what was happening. And me, I think I was 13 or 16, I said, that's Annie Glory. She knew you weren't Bob, so she's looking to see who you were. And then he was freaked out. He was like, oh my gosh. So as time went on, more things happened in the house that it was hard to ignore. That Annie Glory was definitely a presence in our home. One of the more interesting things I thought was, my parents had a very old, old, old, long bookcase in the hallway which had the glass louver doors, which I guess that was the style back in those days. As we went exploring into the books, we found a very slim novel that was given to Annie Glory on her 12th birthday by my great-grandmother, Anna. And it was inscribed in the front of the book to Annie Glory, Mary Christmas from Dada, that she was called Dada. So Annie Glory's book was very precious to me. And I made sure I put it back in the same place every time I took it out, put it right back in that bookcase. The interesting thing about that book is it would move around. Sometimes we'd find it in the living room on the table. Sometimes we'd find it on top of the bookcase. Sometimes we'd find it in the dining room. It moved around, and even my parents could not really explain how that might happen. Of course they'd ask me, did you move that book? I didn't know. Annie Glory's moving that book. So we kept that book very dear and very close to us. I mean, I have so many stories about things that she, how she communicated to me. It was, I would be walking down that long hallway at our house, and I would feel her behind me. And I could turn around, and she always appeared as the same long white gown, long hair, an 18-year-old who passed away way too early, which is what I believe kept her in that house. She was going to be an aspiring artist. She was supposed to go to New York, and of course never got to fulfill those dreams. So I think she reached out to me because I was young and accepting, and I just felt like she was a part of me. I wasn't the only one, or my family, the only one who felt her presence. I had friends come over and spend the night. One particular friend who was one of my best friends, we were, I don't know, eight years old, maybe. And we spent the night in my room, and she was sleeping beside me in her bed. And the middle of the night, she is shaking me. I feel her shaking me, waking me up. And I'm like, what? What is it? She goes, oh my gosh. She goes, did you touch my shoulder and shake me? And I was like, no, I would sound asleep. She said, well, something was shaking me and trying to wake me up. And I thought I saw someone and I said, that was Annie Laurie. She's just checking on you. She's just making sure everything's okay. Well, needless to say, she was a little bit, you know, she was a little bit put off by that, but we had been friends forever and we grew up together. And so she began to accept, okay, if I spend the night with my good friend Beth, I'm probably going to see Annie Laurie or feel her presence at some point. And she was fine with it. We all began to accept her as part of the family and what she was until I moved away. And even after that, even after I graduated college, got married, moved away, I could still come back to my room which my parents had kept very much the same as it was. The mirror was still there. I could still come back to that room. I could sit in front of the mirror and I could talk to Annie Laurie. And she was still there. She was still there. And there were many times where I had friends over and we would... I don't want to call it a seance. That's not what it was. It was a communication. It was a reaching out. We would sit in front of the mirror and just speak to Annie Laurie and she would show us in many ways that she was still with us. And I've gotten lots of stories about that and lots of friends who can verify that. It was a very cool experience. We were scared. We were just happy, excited that she was still there and reaching out to us and communicating to us. So I do have other people who can verify this. So I talked about others who have experienced Annie Laurie's presence. One great example is my husband, Greg, who was very skeptical. Not a big believer in paranormal, if you want to call it that, experiences. But it was very interesting. One night, this has been some years ago, he was in the very front part of the house, the oldest part of the house, big bay window, which was original to the house. And he was painting the room. We were going to have my daughter Keely's bridal shower at that house. And my mother wanted things spruced up a little bit, so Greg volunteered to paint the bay window room. So I wasn't there, I was at home. This was probably 8.30 or 9 o'clock at night. My mother was in the back part of the house, which was the newer part of the house. Greg was up in the front of the house by himself. And he's painting, it's dark, but he's painting in the bay window room. And as he described to me, he began to feel a little tingly feeling, began to feel a little uneasy, wasn't sure why. He was up on a ladder because the ceilings are 15 feet high. And he's up on the ladder and just starts to feel very uneasy. And then starts to hear some rumblings. He can't quite describe what he's hearing, not exactly words, not exactly conversations. But he's hearing things. And he just starts to get very, very uncomfortable. And he said, Beth, I'm telling you at that minute, I got down that ladder, I grabbed that paint bucket, and I got out of there. He said, I told your mom, goodnight, I'm out of here, and he came straight home. And when he got home, he was pale. He was, he told me that story. And I said, I've been telling you all of this time and you didn't want to believe it. And he said, well, I'm not going back there anymore by myself after dark. So I won't be painting any more rooms at dark. So I thought that was pretty funny. I don't know, are you really? I don't believe it. But he became a believer that night. He said, there's someone, or more than someone in that house. So we live in what is called the Bible Belt, which I've spoken a lot about on my channel. I've also spoken about how we have a lot of ghosts here. But I get a lot of questions about people like you and myself and others who've experienced ghost or other paranormal phenomenon. How do you live in a very Christian or evangelical environment and have these experiences? What has this done to your faith, to your beliefs? I believe that we cannot possibly understand everything about the afterlife or where these spirits might go. I'm a very devout Christian and was brought up in the Presbyterian church. I don't have definitive answers about that other than to say, I do believe there are instances in our lives where perhaps someone dear to us may be communicating, may be reaching out, may be, as I said about Annie-Laurie earlier, an unfulfilled life, taken too young, dreams unfulfilled. How do we know that they are not... their spirit is still not there, trying to reach out to us, trying to maybe make us understand that there is a spiritual plane, definitely, where they can coexist with us. Like I said, I'm a very devout Christian but I still can accept that maybe these spirits can coexist. Now, can we help them to reach heaven? Can we help them to reach, you know, another plane where they should be, to be united with God Almighty? I would hope so. I know a lot about Annie-Laurie and my experiences with her and my growing up with her but I would really love for you to hear my daughter, Keely's, stories about Annie-Laurie because she has quite a few to tell and some of them are very, very interesting and she is going to be telling you some really cool stories that you're really going to like and she'll be coming up very soon. So enjoy.