Most bankers are spooked these days, but Garth Lovvorn more than most.

It’s not the economy that has Garth loosing sleep; it’s the restless spirit of a long-dead inhabitant of his home.

Pattie Vasser had experienced just too much tragedy in her young life when she reputedly slung a rope over an attic beam, fashioned the other end into a noose, slipped it around her neck and leaped from a chest Nov. 2, 1866. Her blood-curdling scream is said to reverberate through the stately Vasser-Lovvorn home on East Washington Street more than 140 years later.

Well, maybe.

Garth’s wife, Linda, remains skeptical.

“My husband believes it, but then anything that scares you as a child makes you a believer,” said Linda.

But alas, poor Pattie, some days nothing goes right. Early on the morning of Nov. 2, 1866, a messenger shows up at her door with a telegram saying her husband of just nine months, Lt. Robert McClure, has died during a visit to his family in Tennessee.

The shock of McClure’s death coming so close on the heels of those of her father, Richard Whitehead Vasser, and her brother, Harry, who both died during the Civil War, and the grievous war injuries of her brother, Joseph, is just too much to bear.

Pattie flees to the attic, locks the door and attempts to do herself in. Apparently, she survives the hanging attempt, because she later marries Charles Berry and has two children. She doesn’t get around to dying for real until 1892. She is buried in the Vasser plot in the old Athens Cemetery.

However, Garth, president of Bank Independent, says his encounters over the years with “something” in the house are as vivid to him as though they occurred yesterday. Is it Pattie’s screams of inconsolable grief that permeate the very timbers, bricks and mortar of the home?

Garth said he has observed that construction projects, both at his home and at the home immediately to the east, formerly owned by attorney John Plunk and now by accountant Charles Durham, which sits on part of the former Vasser property, seem to disturb the repose of long-dead Vassers and the hauntings begin all over again.

According to the late historian Faye Axford, construction on the home was probably begun by original property owner Thomas Vining in 1824. Vining died in 1826 and Joseph Wood bought the property in 1831. Wood sold the property to Dr. Jonathan McDonald in 1836 and McDonald, in turn, sold the property to Richard Whitehead Vasser.

Dorothy Gunter von Dreele was the last Vasser to live in the house. After she died, it was sold to Harold Newton Lovvorn, Garth’s father, in 1952.

That’s where we pick up the story. Garth said that from the time he was a kid the front parlor doors refused to stay closed.

“One night when my parents were away I had three high school friends over — we would have been 17 or 18 years old,” said Garth. “We were in the den in the back of the house. Then one of the guys, Jack Harper, went up to the front of the house to use the phone to talk to his girlfriend. But then all of a sudden, he screams like bloody murder and raced to the back of the house. He said a man was standing in the doorway.

“We all crept up to see and all three of us big football players left the house. And still, to this day, if you close that door at night, in the morning the door will be open. So we just don’t close it anymore.”

Further proof of Garth’s theory of construction shaking up the Lovvorn spirits occurred when he built an addition onto the back of the house seven or eight years ago.

“Due to my snoring I was put into the front corner upstairs bedroom,” said Garth. “I cut off the lamp, got in the bed and lay flat on my back. The bed started shaking and it scared me to death. But then, all of a sudden, it just quit.

“The next morning, first thing, I checked to see if there had been an earthquake. There hadn’t been one, but the next night the bed began shaking again only not as bad. On the third night when it started shaking again I cut on the light, got up out of bed and shouted, ‘Look here, make yourself known and let’s talk about this!’ Then the shaking stopped.”

Garth said the screams in the night from the attic have not been heard for some time, but he had a vivid dream about a month ago, that tells him Pattie might still be about.

“I had a dream about the new part of the house,” he said. “In my dream, a young girl dressed all in black tried to make her way into a closet. She’s pretty, a brunette. She looks back and then disappears into the closet.

“I thought, gosh, that must have been a dream about Pattie Vasser.”