Haunted Places in the American South

Before Alan Brown wrote Haunted Places in the American South, only the locals knew what was lurking in these locations. Slamming doors, eerie lights, and Confederate soldiers' ghosts kept some folks too scared to talk with outsiders. Above Peavey Melody Music in Meridian, Mississippi, children may be heard giggling and running down an abandoned hallway that turns icy cold. At the Jameson Inn in Crestview, Florida, an apparition appears on surveillance tapes after filling the lobby with sweet-smelling cigar smoke. Seldom told and rarely--if ever--printed stories such as these join tales from haunted inns, mansions, forests, ravines, and prisons to create Haunted Places in the American South. The book collects ghost stories from fifty-five historically haunted sites in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. Alan Brown gathered these stories from newspapers, magazines, museum directors, archaeologists, hotel managers, and many others who shared their disturbing experiences. Most of these stories have never appeared in book form, and some, such as the haunting of Peavey Melody Music, have never been published at all. Haunted Places in the American South differs from most other collections of southern ghost stories, for the featured sites include more than just haunted houses. Bridges, forts, governors' mansions, prisons, hotels, woods, theaters, cemeteries, and even a large rock are included as focal points for these tales. The book provides directions to the sites, notes, and a bibliography that will be useful to folklore scholars and to travelers seeking that cold and creepy brush with the supernatural. Alan Brown is a professor of English at the University of West Alabama. His books include Literary Levees of New Orleans, The Face in the Window and Other Alabama Ghostlore, and Shadows and Cypress: Southern Ghost Stories (University Press of Mississippi).