After spending 29 years in the real estate business, REO broker Elaine Simpson with McDaniel & Co. Realtors in Little Rock, Arkansas, did not hesitate when she received a great listing in a well-kept neighborhood. “On this particular morning, I wasted no time gathering up my camera and forms and headed out the door,” recalls Elaine. “I had no way of knowing I was about to meet my first ghost.”
While the neighborhood was in good shape, Elaine’s listing had faded gray on the outside and featured a swimming pool filled with black water. Despite the property’s lack of upkeep, Elaine loved the home for its potential and couldn’t wait to get inside.
She soon realized a bigger surprise was waiting indoors. “When I started into the kitchen, I heard voices,” Elaine remembers. “Very low mummers, like whispering. Frozen in my tracks, I listened intensely but could no make out a single word. The only thing I knew for certain was the voices were coming from the walls – I had a ghost in the house!”

Elaine began opening and shutting cabinet drawers to make the ghosts stop whispering. But the noises continued, and Elaine’s fears heightened when a loud thump from the attic echoed throughout the house. “Each time I entered the house I heard the voices and the same thumps,” says Elaine. “And, each time, I told myself you do not hear walls talking or things thumping in the attic!”
Finally, during a routine visit, Elaine noticed a honey-bee fly into a small hole in the home’s siding. As she stood there watching, a neighbor told Elaine the bees were no strangers to the neighborhood — they had been living in the walls for several years.
“Oh, my goodness,” Elaine remembers exclaiming. “If a queen bee can lay 200,000 eggs a year, this entire wall of the house is a giant hive and the other side of this wall is the kitchen.”
It turns out the bees were Elaine’s whispering ghost all along. Elaine eventually found an exterminator who removed the hive, the bees, and the honey from the wall. While he was at it, the exterminator found Elaine’s other ghost – a squirrel – hiding in the attic.
After all the drama, Elaine’s ghost story has a happy ending.
“Because of the location, the house was a great fixer-upper,” says Elaine. “It sold quickly to a buyer who wanted to repair and live in it. But, best of all, they liked my story and were not upset at all with the honey bees.”