Southern Ghost Girls founder Lesley Ann Hyde may be from Cullman, but she said she’d love to lead regular paranormal tours in Athens. If ticket sales for her first tour with Boneyard Antiques are any indication, Athens would love to have them.

After months of customers and staff reporting odd activity in the store, Boneyard Antiques on the Square announced it would host Southern Ghost Girls Tours for a paranormal group tour Oct. 24. For some, the activity may come as no surprise, since the building at the corner of Jefferson and Washington streets was originally home to McConnell Funeral Home.

“We’ve had things moving, we’ve had people come up and tell us that they saw an item slide across a table — we have a lot of people who come in and talk about having a kind of sixth sense, and they felt certain things in places we know there’s been activity,” said Wendy Yarbrough, who owns Boneyard Antiques with her husband, Andy.

One of Yarbrough’s strongest experiences occurred during a power outage one evening. The lights went out inside the store, and she and her husband went outside to see lights out all over The Square. However, when they walked back inside, a single light was flickering on and off in what was once the funeral home’s walk-in cooler.

Eventually, one of the store’s vendors reached out to Southern Ghost Girls.

“I have done paranormal investigations for probably 20 years, and I’m an empath/psychic person, so I love going on tours in other cities,” said Hyde, adding she founded SGG Tours about a year ago. “… The really neat thing about our tours is we let them be very interactive, and we supply them with any paranormal electronic equipment they need to see if there’s any ghosts or anything like that. We let them decide.”

Hyde said SGG Tours works with local historical societies to make sure they can provide an accurate history of the tour venue to participants. They then provide the equipment so participants can join in the investigation.

“They make their own conclusions,” Hyde said. “… It gives them the opportunity to use the equipment they see on TV.”

However, unlike most paranormal investigators on TV, Hyde and her fellow tour guides dress in clothing reminiscent of the time period associated with their investigation.

“It’s like (the spirits) relate to us more,” Hyde said. “It may sound crazy, but it’s true.”

Within weeks of announcing the Oct. 24 event, tickets sold out. Hyde and Yarbrough said they were surprised by how quickly the 55-member tour group filled up. Tickets went on sale Friday for a second event to be held Jan. 18.

“I just wanna know what’s there, who’s there, why they feel the need to hang back,” Yarbrough said of the activity inside Boneyard Antiques.

She believes there might be a child or childlike spirit downstairs, calling it “silly and playful.” Upstairs, however, is a different story.

“There may be something upstairs that’s a little darker that I don’t want anything to do with,” Yarbrough said.

No matter what they find inside in the store, Hyde hopes the tour group is energetic enough to greet it.

Visit “Southern Ghost Girls Tour and Paranormal Investigations” on Facebook for information about other upcoming events and https://bit.ly/BoneyardSGGTours to purchase tickets for the Jan. 18 investigation.