Triad City Beat | In ‘House on Dead Man’s Curve,’ WS author transports readers to his paranormal experiences

The curve is not very sharp at all.

“But it’s blind,” says Jason Roach, author of Winston-Salem. “You can’t see anything coming your way, no matter what direction you’re coming from.”

And so the bend was nicknamed Dead Man’s Curve.

The stretch of road in Statesville was called that way back in the 1960s when Roach’s mother was growing up, he said. Now he’s used the nickname in the title of his new book, The House on Dead Man’s Curve.

Part autobiography, part fiction, and part haunted house tale, the book is Roach’s first foray into long-form writing, a story that places a character much like him at the center of the action.

“It follows a team of paranormal investigators conducting a lifelong paranormal investigation,” he explains.

The group stays at a haunted Airbnb; from there, the book dives into noisy kitchens, opening windows, dark silhouettes and noisy apparitions. All the experiences that happen to the characters in the book happened to him, says Roach.

The book is set in Statesville, where Roach grew up. In his twenties, he lived in a house on Dead Man’s Curve where he experienced myriad paranormal activity.

Once he and his girlfriend left the house for a few hours; when they came back in the evening, all the windows were open. A few weeks later, the same thing happened again. When they asked the owner, he told them he didn’t know.

On another occasion, Roach was sitting in his room reading a book when he saw someone enter his room.

“They didn’t say anything and I didn’t really recognize them,” Roach said. “They came into my room and looked at me.”

When he asked his partner why he entered his room, he replied that he didn’t know what he was talking about.

“I noticed the clothes he was wearing were a white shirt and tan shorts,” Roach says. “And I remember very well that the person who entered my room was wearing a purple shirt and jeans. The house is very small so he couldn’t have changed without me noticing.”

Other times, Roach said, they would hear noises in the kitchen and screens opening and closing.

“Sometimes I wonder if things aren’t specifically appealing to me to happen wherever I go,” he says. “It’s something I’m working on trying to figure out.”

In 2020, motivated by his experiences, Roach joined the Association of Paranormal Study, led by Alex Matsuo and based in Virginia. Currently, the organization has four members, two in Virginia and North Carolina.

Since his arrival, Roach says he has participated in a dozen investigations.

Her most memorable experience includes a visit to the USS North Carolina battleship stationed at Wilmington. Roach says that while the team was in the ship’s medical bay, they saw a shadow come through the door. Shortly after, the team heard the sound of the sirens going off through their Electronic Voice Phenomenon Recorder, or EVP.

“The theory is that the spirits can manipulate the words in the system and make different words come out of it,” says Roach. “That night we started discussing the torpedo that hit the ship in World War II, and instead of words out of the system, we had a real replay of the sirens that went off when the ship went off. been touched.”

All of this, according to Roach, was documented on the crew’s camcorders.

Her favorite experience was at the Trivette Clinic in Hamptonville. According to Roach, it was a medical clinic in the 1930s turned into a supper club, a nursing home and then a private residence. It is currently empty.

“There are said to be over 80 spirits that come and go from this place,” Roach says. “I’ve probably been there six or seven times and we’ve had paranormal activity every time.”

And that means something because Roach says the team is actually made up of skeptical believers.

“One of the things I’ve learned is that not everything is always what it seems,” he says. “Not everything is paranormal. Ninety-five percent of the time there are logical explanations for things and that’s why we try to come back to the scene a few times to see if we can make things happen. things happen again and again. Once you have established a pattern, you can have something.

Although his book has just been released, Roach says he is already working on a second one. And next year, he plans to start his own LGBTQ+-focused publishing house. In the meantime, he will continue to conduct further investigations.

“I do it because I like it,” he says.

Learn more at authorjasonroach.com and by following Jason Roach on social media at @JasonRoachAuthor. Learn more about the Association of Paranormal Study at associationofparanormalstudy.com.