Mississippi University for Women, Columbus antebellum homes, Waverly Mansion in West Point and Mississippi State University are just a few of the “haunted” historical places that appear in Alan Brown’s new book “Ghosts of Mississippi’s Golden Triangle,” which he discussed during a book talk at the Columbus-Lowndes Public Library Monday.
The English professor at the University of West Alabama is a lover of Southern folklore and a part-time ghost hunter – the better to hear ghost stories, he said. “Ghosts of Mississippi’s Golden Triangle” is the latest of his books featuring ghost stories from around the South. Brown’s not entirely sure he believes in ghosts, but after 15 years of visiting allegedly haunted buildings around the South, he keeps an open mind.
Mostly, though, he likes to hear ghost stories and put them in historical context for audiences.
“I have taken the approach that ghost stories are more convincing if you give the historical background first,” he said during his talk. “Then when you start telling ghost stories, there’s that line between fact and fiction that kind of blurs. And that’s when goosebumps rise up on your arm and you ask yourself, ‘Hmm, can this really have happened? Is this possible?'”
Though the book technically covers all of the Golden Triangle, most of its stories come from Columbus, thanks in part to the Columbus library, Brown said. The library preserves historical documentation, he said, while the owners of antebellum homes keep the history alive for tours and the annual Columbus Pilgrimage. Brown has visited many of the homes, taking pictures and talking with the owners who tell him their own tales of clanking noises, displaced objects and ghostly people who appear suddenly and then vanish before the witness can get a closer look.
On Monday, he recounted a story Sid Caradine, owner and curator of the Amzi Love House downtown, told him. Caradine’s neighbor had been walking his dog by the house one day when he saw a blueish-white woman come out, walk across the yard and enter the Lincoln Home next door. The neighbor hurried to tell Caradine what he’d seen.
“Sid asked if he had been drinking, and he said, ‘Not yet,'” Brown said.
Many of Brown’s stories centered around the Civil War era. He told the story of Mary, the famous ghost of a Civil War nurse who has haunted Callaway Hall at MUW since she hanged herself from the bell tower because the soldier she fell in love with died in battle. Confederate soldiers are said to still haunt Friendship Cemetery, Brown added.
The stories from MSU are more recent. A group of students used the top floor of Montgomery Hall to conduct Satanic rituals in the late 1960s, Brown said. No one uses that floor anymore, he said, so no one really knows if it’s haunted or not, but professors have seen the Satanic symbols carved into the wall.
George Hall at MSU was used as an infirmary during the influenza epidemic after World War I, Brown said. Students were treated on the second floor, and after they died they were embalmed in the basement.
“Needless to say, [there’s said to be] a lot of poltergeist activity there,” he said.
The stories went on, from tales of widows walking along railroad tracks looking for their husbands to stories of ghosts moving pictures or causing noises during dinner parties and gruesome legends of dismemberment behind Three-Legged Lady Road.
The stories are an important way for people to get in touch with their past, Brown said after his presentation. That, in part, is why they’re so common around the South.
“I think Southerners are proud of their past,” Brown said. “And this is one way to keep the past alive.
“Especially with kids,” he added. “Kids might not care about a Civil War battle that happened close to their town, but … if you put it in the context of a ghost story, they’ll remember it.”
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