Origin Story.
Old Soul existed before it was a sanctuary.
In 2023, after a season marked by upheaval—a house fire, an eviction, and the end of a fifteen-year career—my teenagers and I found ourselves returning to a ten-acre homestead that had been in my family since 1985.
We arrived without a plan, but not without instinct.
Almost immediately, the family grew.
A kitten, for company.
A ten-year-old, arthritic grandmother Rottweiler, for “protection.”
A four-pound runt piglet—because sometimes the heart decides before the mind can object.
How Old Soul Came to Be.
And then more followed.
Sister goats.
Turkey hens.
Ducks who needed a place to land.
Two bonded donkeys escaping a yard that was never meant to hold them.
An abandoned dog.
A Great Pyrenees puppy in need of rescue.
More unwanted ducks.
And, along the way, a growing awareness of the thousands of animals—especially pigs—discarded when they no longer fit the stories people told themselves.
Life at the homestead taught us to move differently.
Weather, moonlight, frost and flood, snow clouds by night and sun by day became our teachers. We learned to work when the light allowed, to pause when it didn’t.
One afternoon, while building a fence, my son asked,
“What time will we finish?”
“When the sunlight is gone,” I replied.
He nodded. “I like that.”
By late summer, we were living in a place that was wild, dusty, enchanted, and entirely unpolished. Two teenage boys sat lazily in white rocking chairs on the porch, like old men swapping stories, looking out over an improbable kingdom: an RV, an outhouse, and thorned blackberry bushes thick as a fairy-tale hedge.
After a long, quiet moment, one of them said to the other, simply,
“This place is an Old Soul.”
And so it was named.
—
Old Soul Sanctuary was never something we built alone.
It was offered—by the land, by time, by the quiet insistence of care repeated every day.
—
Now a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit, Old Soul Sanctuary exists as a place where every leaf and nut, every daffodil and dogwood, every animal who lives and breathes—and every weary or hopeful traveler who crosses the threshold—is met with something rare:
A place of cherished belonging.
You didn’t find Old Soul by accident.
You were called.
And we are grateful to welcome you—here at Old Soul Sanctuary, North Carolina.