Mississippi and Alabama are filled with ghost stories. We usually think of the places where the stories take place as some dark and spooky landscape. In reality, many of our area’s most haunted spots are anything but dark and spooky. They are actually picturesque places where one would more likely think of a summer picnic than a ghostly tale.
With Halloween approaching, I was asked what my favorite local ghost story was. That makes for a difficult choice as there are several. There is the legend of the ghost of Black Creek, the tragic story of the Eliza Battle, the little child at Waverly and there is the spooky story of Mrs. Munroe’s crypt at Friendship Cemetery in Columbus.
Rufus Ward is a local historian. Email your questions about local history to him at [email protected].
Friendship Cemetery
I first heard the story of Mrs. Munroe from my grandmother when I was a small child. It is the local must-tell ghost story for children, for it always happens just as the story says. You walk up to the crypt and in a loud voice ask through the wrought iron: “Mrs. Munroe, Mrs. Munroe, what are you doing?” She will without fail say; “Nothing, nothing at all.” Every single time I have taken children there, that is exactly what she has said.
Waverly
A couple of years ago, Uncle Bunky told me of the time he had taken his daughter, Sandy, to see Waverly. Restoration work was going on at the house at the time, and the steps of the grand staircase were covered with a film of white plaster dust. On the second floor stairs, Bunky suddenly noticed a fresh set of very clear footprints leading up four or five steps and stopping. But no one was there.
It was the prints of the bare feet of a small child. He pointed them out to Sandy, who immediately wanted to leave. Bunky said he shook his head, looked at the prints again and realized they had no beginning and ended in thin air. He quickly agreed it was time to go.
Black Creek
It was here the Military Road crossed Black Creek in 1818, and it was here that as early as 1851 the road’s crossing of the creek was said to be haunted.
In 1851, Joseph Cobb wrote a book, “Mississippi Scenes or Sketches of Southern and Western Life.” One of his stories was “The Legend of Black Creek.” It is the story of the haunting of the Military Road’s Black Creek crossing. The Military Road was constructed between 1817 and 1820 under orders from Andrew Jackson to provide a direct route from Nashville to New Orleans. As the story goes, two U.S. soldiers drowned crossing a flooded Black Creek, and their ghosts thereafter haunted travelers along that stretch of the Military Road. The road, now Highway 12, has been straightened and the old crossing is in the woods nearby.
Tombigbee River
It was here on the lower Tombigbee River that the steamboat Eliza Battle burned and sank while steaming from Columbus to Mobile in 1858.
The steamboat carried about 100 passengers and crew when, in the middle of the night on a flooded freezing river, she caught fire and burned during an ice storm. Even today, fishermen on that part of the river tell of nasty winter nights when a glowing fog bank will drift down the river and from it come first sounds of old music followed by screams.
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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