Jeffrey Introduces Thirteen More Southern Ghosts: Commemorative Edition
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About this ebook
Jeffrey was the resident apparition in the Selma, Alabama, home of nationally-known folklorist Kathryn Tucker Windham and the inspiration for Windham’s best-selling collection of macabre tales that reveal two hundred years of Alabama’s ghostly secrets, Thirteen Alabama Ghosts and Jeffrey. One of the most popular books ever published in the state, generations of Alabama children and students have been thrilled and chilled by Windham’s spectral legends.
Following the overwhelming success of Thirteen Alabama Ghosts and Jeffrey, Windham and Jeffrey began to journey across the South assembling a second collection of ghastly tales that repeat Windham’s winning combination of traditional folklore, Southern history and culture, and family-friendly story-telling. In Jeffrey Introduces Thirteen More Southern Ghosts, Windham’s disembodied friend roams the states of Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Florida to recall thirteen more timeless, spine-tingling tales of baneful and melancholy spirits that spook the most stoic heart.
Opening this volume is “The Girl Nobody Knew.” One midsummer night in the genteel Kentucky mineral spring resort of Harrodsburg, a beautiful lady arrived at the town’s grand hotel. The belle danced late into the night with the town’s smitten gallants only to expire suddenly with the notes of the last quadrille. The spooked residents of Harrodsburg guard a grave you can see to this day. Readers then visit the world-famous Bell Witch of Robinson County, Tennessee. Jeffrey also makes his first trip to old New Orleans to reveal a revenant in residence on Royal Street before continuing his ghostly progress across Dixie.
This new edition returns Jeffrey Introduces Thirteen More Southern Ghosts to its original format in jacketed cloth full of original, black-and-white illustrations in a handsome keepsake edition perfect for gift-giving and for families, folklorists of all ages, and libraries.
Kathryn Tucker Windham
KATHRYN TUCKER WINDHAM (1918-2011) grew up in Thomasville, Alabama. She graduated from Huntingdon College in 1939, married Amasa Benjamin Windham in 1946, and had three children before being widowed in 1956. A newspaper reporter by profession, her career spanned four decades, beginning in the shadow of the Great Depression and continuing through the Civil Rights Movement, which she observed at ground level in her adopted home town of Selma. In the 1970s, she left journalism and worked as a coordinator for a federally funded agency for programs for the elderly. She continued to write, take photographs, and tell stories. The storytelling was an outgrowth of her 1969 book, 13 Alabama Ghosts and Jeffrey. More volumes of ghost stories, folklore, recipes, and essays followed; she has now published more than twenty books. Her reputation as a storyteller led to thirty-three appearances over an eighteen-month period on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, which introduced her to an even larger audience. She has written, produced, and acted in a one-woman play, My Name Is Julia, about pioneering social reformer Julia Tutwiler, has narrated several television documentaries, and is a regular interviewee for national and international journalists visiting Alabama in search of the Old or the New South. It is a testament to the good humor, keen intelligence, and life-long curiosity of one of the region’s best known public citizens that she can guide visitors unerringly to either mythical place.
Read more from Kathryn Tucker Windham
She: The Old Woman Who Took Over My Life Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Thirteen Alabama Ghosts and Jeffrey: Commemorative Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Thirteen Georgia Ghosts and Jeffrey: Commemorative Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Spit, Scarey Ann, and Sweat Bees: One Thing Leads to Another Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Jeffrey's Latest Thirteen: More Alabama Ghosts, Commemorative Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Jeffrey's Favorite 13 Ghost Stories: From Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, and Mississippi Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThirteen Tennessee Ghosts and Jeffrey: Commemorative Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Thirteen Mississippi Ghosts and Jeffrey: Commemorative Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
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Jeffrey Introduces Thirteen More Southern Ghosts - Kathryn Tucker Windham
Windham
The Girl Nobody Knew
JEFFREY INTRODUCES:
KENTUCKY
At the edge of the city park in Harrodsburg, Kentucky, a white picket fence encloses a single grave. The metal marker above the concrete slab is inscribed,
UNKNOWN—Hallowed and Hushed Be the Place of the Dead. Step Softly . . . Bow Head.
Here is buried a girl, young and beautiful, whose name no one knows, whose story can only be pieced together with sketchy recollections, suppositions, and speculation.
Today the city of Harrodsburg cares for her grave, just as it has for more than one hundred and twenty-five years. And today children playing in the park pause beside the fence, read the flaking inscription and ask, Whose grave is this? Who is buried here?
just as children for generations have asked. If these inquiring children are persistent in their questioning, this is the story they will hear:
Back during the 1840’s, Harrodsburg was famous as a resort for fashionable summer visitors who came to drink the water from its mineral springs. From May until October, hundreds of visitors came to vacation in this middle Kentucky town: some came hoping to be benefited by the waters while others were attracted by the social life—the parties, banquets, plays, horse races, concerts, gambling, dances, and masquerade balls.
On a tree-shaded hill near the edge of town stood an imposing brick hotel, The Harrodsburg Springs Hotel. Dr. and Mrs. C. C. Graham, owners of the establishment, had spent a fortune developing their hotel into one of the finest in the entire country. Winding paths, bordered by shrubs and flowers, led to the mineral springs where guests could sit on curved benches inside the latticed spring houses as they shared conversations and drank the healing waters.
The hotel’s ballroom was so large and so elegant and so famous that the simple remark, I attended the ball at Harrodsburg Springs,
was enough to establish a social reputation. The dining room was nationally known for its splendid meals, and service throughout the hostelry was unsurpassed.
But it was its ballroom which brought Harrodsburg Springs Hotel its greatest fame. Even during the daylight hours when the room was quiet and empty, its very size gave visitors a sense of grandeur and awe. And at night, when the mirrored walls reflected the graceful images of the bowing, gliding, whirling dancers, there was not a more colorful spectacle in all Kentucky.
Servants lighted the ballroom’s crystal chandeliers and the lamps, more than one hundred of them, each night after supper. Then by the time the guests had changed into their evening finery, the Negro musicians, trained by Dr. Graham and outfitted by him in splendid uniforms, were at their places on the raised platform ready for the dancing to begin.
As the dancers took their places on the ballroom floor (many a romance flowered at Harrodsburg Springs), spectators sat in chairs along the walls or paused in doorways to watch the graceful kaleidoscope of rhythm and, perhaps, to whisper about who was flirting with whom.
It was on such a scene of carefree pleasure that the heroine of Kentucky’s story of mystery made her brief appearance.
Her story, as pieced together by recollections of people who were there and then handed down from one generation to the next, began late one summer afternoon, shortly before supper time. Many of the hotel’s guests were seated in rocking chairs on the wide gallery exchanging bits of gossip and enjoying the easterly breeze that had just sprung up. They ceased their rocking and their talking when a carriage stopped at the entrance and out of it stepped a girl so lovely that afterwards the people who saw her arrive could never adequately describe her