Alabama Ghost Stories!

For the past couple of weeks I have been working with the Honors Program at the University of Alabama on a Ghost Trail for Perry, Dallas and Wilcox Counties. They are three of the 11 counties on our tourism region. The reason they were chosen is because the program was housed at Judson College and that made these three easily accessible. This was in addition to the fact that Selma has developed a Haunted History Tour and has some Ghost Events leading up to Halloween on an annual basis.

This turned out to be a fun and fulfilling assignment for me, the students and the story tellers, I think it’s fair to say that once you start fooling with ghosts in the Black Belt, they start coming out of the woodwork. AS one resident of Marion told me “Anybody with a 143 year old house has at least one.” It seems like the houses don’t even have to be very old to have one. There are a lot of ghosts roaming around the Black Belt. As Kathryn Tucker Windham told us when we interviewed her, “I have been collecting ghost stories for years and I never heard about but two bad ones.” The ones we learned about were benign, but they get around to a lot of places.

The students working with me on the project were delightful and took their assignment seriously. Running into so many ghosts started them thinking. One asked “Why do you suppose there are so many around here?” we came up with several theories. One is that people just love rural Southwest Alabama so much, they hate to leave it, even in death. We always have known that we southerners love the land, we just didn’t realize we loved it all the way into the hereafter. Another theory we came up with as we talked to people was that southerners are superstitious. It comes from their ancestry and love of storytelling. There are a lot of southerners who have an African ancestry who brought legends of the supernatural with them to this country. A lot of others have Scottish or Irish ancestry where the “Sight” or ability to see things outside the realm of the physical is taken as a matter of course for those of Celtic Heritage. Living side by side with the loquacious storytellers of all the heritages, people learned to embroider the stories to make them more fascinating.

Some people who talked to us have really seen or heard the ghosts they speak of. These folks say they are not ghost stories, but ghost truths. There is little controversy in the general population as to whether ghosts exist. Everybody knows where one is or knows somebody who does. People loved to be scared. As Alfred Hitchcock said, “ If people didn’t like to be scared, why would they say ‘Boo’ to a baby?

I talked to one gentleman who had some reservations about ghosts because of his Christian faith. I explained my theory to him. I think of ghosts as energy imprints, in the same way a photograph has a negative, a departed body can leave an energy imprint around a place or event that they felt strongly about. In my thinking, there is nothing about being a ghost that prevents the spirit from going on the heaven. That is just my opinion. That is why I call myself the Front Porch Philosopher. I think about things. Lately, I’ve thought a lot about ghosts. I see them as a way to get people to come to visit rural Southwest Alabama. If ghosts will get them here, we can show them a lot of other things. Stay tuned to Alabama’s Front Porches for a Ghost Story Trail soon to be seen here.