Halloween is fast approaching, and it’s always a time for ghost stories. Many ghost stories are simply fictional stories concocted to entertain children and adults, but some have at least a grain of truth in them.

The Horned Serpents of Tibbee Lake

The Mississippi prairies and forest north of Tibbee Creek are the homeland of the Chickasaw Indian Nation. As with all ancient peoples and nations, their heritage includes special sacred sites and stories. What is one of the oldest of these sites to have survived is Tibbee Lake near West Point.  Although it is near the creek for which it is named, it appears to be an oxbow remnant of a prehistoric stream once even larger than the Tombigbee.

The story may go back almost 1,000 years. It tells of how in the distant past a Chickasaw family once camped by a fallen tree in Tibbee Swamp. In the early morning the mother and father departed to search for game or other food while leaving their young son and daughter at the campsite. Upon returning in the afternoon, the parents were horrified to find the ground around their campsite had caved in, forming a huge lake. There where the lake covered the fallen tree and the place where their children had been left were two horned serpents swimming together. In fear of the cataclysm that had apparently turned their children into serpents, the horrified parents fled, and the lake was “shunned” from that day on.

In excavations at the Moundville site near Tuscaloosa, Indian pottery vessels dating back to as early as A.D. 1200 have been found. One of the designs found on several vessels was that of a horned serpent such as the Chickasaw children were said to have been turned into.

Prior to the removal of the Chickasaws, in the mid-1830s, records indicate that a Chickasaw by the name of Anny McGee lived near the lake. The circumstances of her life and disappearance from all records imply that she might have been an “aliktche” which was a witch or “shape shifter.” Anny is long gone and Tibbee Lake is now a private hunting and fishing club. However, it is still a place with a primeval and haunting feel.

The strange loss of the steamer James T. Staples

The ghost story of the steamboat the James T. Staples is a story that began in 1908 when Norman Staples of Mobile decided to construct the most palatial boat built on the Tombigbee since the Civil War. He named the boat after his father. By late 1912, Norman Staples was having severe financial problems, and in December he lost his steamboat to creditors.

Staples could not accept the loss of his steamboat, and in early January 1913 took his own life with a shotgun. The boat’s new owners directed that her captain ignore the former owner’s funeral and proceed upriver from Mobile on the boat’s regular run. Rather than be disrespectful, the captain declined and told the owner to find a new captain for the trip as he was going to the funeral. After several unusual occurrences, including Staples’ ghost being reported on board, most of the crew also quit.

With a new captain and crew, the Staples steamed out from the Mobile Wharf and headed up the Tombigbee. Norman Staples had just been buried at Bladon Springs Cemetery near the river. It was Jan. 9, exactly a week since his death when the James T. Staples reached the place on the river described in the Jan. 13, 1913, Columbus Commercial “as near to the grave as it was possible for the boat to go.” At that point its boilers exploded, killing 26 people and sinking the boat.

Among those killed was the new captain hired for the trip. Those who were rescued were taken to Mobile by the John Quill, a Columbus-Mobile river trade packet boat.

Unlike most ghost stories, several very unusual circumstances surrounding the Staples’ loss were picked up by news media, including the AP. The Columbus Commercial carried a front-page account of the loss of the Staples, which actually commented that “rivermen regard with awe” the strange circumstance surrounding the disaster. The best ghost story account of the James T Staples can be found in Kathryn Tucker Windham’s book, “Jeffrey’s Latest 13: More Alabama Ghosts.”

The ghosts of Black Creek

The oldest published ghost story in the area is of the haunting of the Military Road (Highway 12) crossing of Black Creek four miles northeast of Columbus. In 1851, Joseph Cobb wrote a book titled “Mississippi Scenes” which contained the story “The Legend of Black Creek.” It is the account of a traveler on Military Road going to Columbus and his frightening late-night experience attempting to cross Black Creek.

Cobb wrote that “It is a forbidding spot, shaded by huge willows and swamp-oaks, whose thick foliage imparts an aspect of gloom and terror sufficiently ominous to put a suspicious or superstitious soul on his guard, independent even of the ghostly associations connected with its history.”

There was a story told by an old army veteran of how, “Old Hickory, having arrived on the banks … rashly ordered two young dragoons (mounted soldiers) to try the depth of the ford, and how both of them were swept away by the swift current, and never seen more.”

Cobb told other accounts of persons being murdered there or drowning while crossing the creek when it flooded. He told of the horrible murder of a man there in “183_” and how, on the anniversary of that evil deed, “…anyone with the misfortune to be at Black Creek would first hear the sound of horses’ hooves and a man whistling,” followed by a gunshot with a pistol flash lighting the scene where a “rider dropped from his horse, a man rushed out and rifled him in a trice, and then, mounting a huge black horse, which stood a little way off, breathing fire and flames from his nostrils, both vanished in a whirlwind which happened to meet them just at the top of the hill.”

On other occasions travelers “beheld two men on horseback, with plumes in their caps, and great crooked swords dangling at their sides, rearing and plunging through the air about the height that the creek usually rises to in high flood, whilst a great white figure darted up suddenly, with a shriek, out of the dark pool, and then fell back heavily again, as if pulled down with a dead weight.”

Is there a historical basis for Cobb’s “Legend of Black Creek”? Not far north of Black Creek on a hill overlooking Howard Creek, I recall seeing the grave of a U.S. soldier who died there around 1818 during the construction of the Military Road. How he died is not recorded, but he might well have drowned crossing a flooded Black Creek, his story surviving as a ghost story. There was also a horrible robbery and murder at the crossing in 1839 that resulted in a large posse being raised at Bell’s Tavern in Columbus. The posse chased the murderer into Alabama, but he was never caught. Cobb’s story is built on actual events that occurred at or near the Black Creek crossing.

Rufus Ward is a local historian.

Rufus Ward is a Columbus native a local historian. E-mail your questions about local history to Rufus at [email protected].

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