You must come to where the spirits linger to feel them tingle in your bones. Into a Charlotte house built in 1815, where sadness dwelled, and slaves were kept. Into the dark. Into your fear.

I got a call last week from my friend Debby, who mentioned there'd been ghost sightings at Historic Rosedale in NoDa. I called Andrew King, a member of the board of the old plantation, and asked if I could visit the house. He arranged for a Charlotte intuitive (many dislike the term psychic), Catherine Crabtree, to come along. Stephanie Burt Williams, the author of "Ghost Stories Of Charlotte And Mecklenburg County" and "Wicked Charlotte," happened to be available. Radio personality Anthony Michaels from 107.9 the Link, and his wife, Melissa, also came along.

At 11:30 p.m., we drove through the gates and up to the old white house on North Tryon Street, where three stories of dark windows peer over the deserted grounds.

We huddled on the porch as King unlocked the door. "Are you ready?" he asked. "Let's just all stay together."

Inside it was dark and cold. Most of the house doesn't have electricity. We all followed the path of King's small flashlight.

In a bedroom with an old feather bed and a dresser, Crabtree suddenly said, "Oh, they're pranksters."

She sensed boys, two of them, playing. There seemed to be a burst of joyous youth in the room.

There was a hollow darkness at the top of the stairs. A void into which we climbed. On the top floor was a schoolroom with slates set out on benches.

Slave children had sometimes been taught here - which was against the law. But children also had been treated badly, Crabtree said. "You can feel the heavy sadness."

"I have a headache," said Williams, the author. We all did. It was stuffy, confining.

In the corner was a crawlspace. A small double door opened out. Inside was a despairing depth of black.

"There is such sadness in there," whispered the intuitive.

"Yes, you can feel it," said King. "Like a moan."

"I want to go," said Williams.

"So do I," Anthony Michaels said.

Our heads throbbing, we descended the stairs. But we were met with the oddest thing:

The smell of jasmine. A light, floral fragrance that hadn't been there when we went upstairs, and there was no jasmine to be seen.

"That's not unusual," Crabtree said. "Someone may be trying to comfort us. Because of upstairs."

We had one more room to visit. In the white-walled basement is the old house's kitchen. It is a warm room, where generations of meals were cooked. Here slave women cared for children, black and white.

"Cherry's here," said the intuitive. Historical documents show that Cherry was a slave woman, a nursemaid who helped run the house for decades. As much as anyone, she cared for Rosedale.

"What would you like as documentation of her presence?" Crabtree stunned me by asking.

I didn't know what to ask for.

King was at the ghost sighting I'd been called about a few days earlier. He said, "The bunches of herbs hanging from the ceiling turned last week. Ask her if she will do that again."

"Can we have the herbs move, please?" Crabtree asked. A large bunch of rosemary turned, slowly, but quite noticeably.

"What about this one?" I asked. The rosemary stopped moving, and a different bunch of herbs turned. The others bunches of herbs were still.

"Why is she here?" the author asked.

"Cherry wants the house to be well taken care of. She's cared for it for a long time. And she would like the children in the attic to be freed."

Crabtree climbed the dark stairs back up to the attic, and burned sage in a large clay saucer. She closed her eyes and told the children it was OK for them to leave. And, she said, they did.

"A huge whoosh of pain seemed to flow up and out of the house," she said.

The intuitive suggested that was it: The reason we'd been called.

"Will Cherry leave now?" Williams, the author, asked.

"Cherry would like to stay a little longer," the intuitive said. "She loves this house. She likes it when other people do, too."

That night I returned home with a tingle inside: A feeling that I was not alone.

I stretched out on my bed, and slept better than I had in months.