Haunted Places in the American South

By Alan Brown

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1578064775
• ISBN13: 9781578064779
• Release Date: October 2002
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Length: 271 Pages
• Weight: 0.94 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

SCARE YOURSELF REAL GOOD!

This is based on my upcoming review in First Draft Magazine:HAUNTED PLACES IN THE AMERICAN SOUTH by Alan Brown. University Press of Mississippi Jackson. 2002. ISBN1-57806-477-5. This must have been one fun book to write, since it is basedwholly on things you can't prove and stories largely made up byimaginative people. Kind of like a book on Flying Saucersightings: the stories may be true, but how is anybody ever goingto be able to prove it? Reality aside, the reader can romp through the South,reading tales of things that go scary in the night, safe in theknowledge that it's only a book. Alan Brown takes us from Carrollton, Alabama's famous Facein the Pickens County Courthouse Window to Birmingham's DowntownLibrary ghost. Since just about everybody who is alert and bristling withcaffeine has seen things out of the corner of the eye, movementsin peripheral vision that can't be viewed head-on, this book cancompel and entertain. Since everybody's been frightened at onetime or another by a nightmare after a turbulent night trying todigest a spicy taco dinner, everybody can identify with theimplications of these ghost stories. You just have to be in themood. If this is your Day of Pragmatism and Reality Check, you'llbe bored. If this is a dark and stormy night with the power outand a candle illuminating an H.P. Lovecraft book, you just maywant to pull that copy of HAUNTED PLACES off the shelf and divein. If you're going to scare yourself, why not learn a littlehistory at the same time? --Jim Reed, author of DAD'S TWEED COAT: SMALL WISDOMS, HIDDEN COMFORTS, UNEXPECTED JOYS Learn more: jimreedbooks.com