Haunted Alabama

By Alan Brown

Alabama has a historic and haunted side. This book highlights the most interesting sites and stories, from Auburn and Birmingham to Tuscaloosa and Mobile.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Sep 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781455626458

Alan Brown

Alan Brown, is a freelance illustrator who has created artwork for Disney, Warner Bros. and the BBC, while continuing to provide illustrations for children's books and comics. Alan has worked mainly on children's books for kids who find it hard to engage and be enthusiastic about reading. These clients include Harper Collins, Capstone, Ransom, Franklin Watts and  Ben 10 Omniverse.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Haunted Houses

Baldwin Hill Livingston

Julian Ennis built the house on Baldwin Hill in 1901. Sometime in the first half of the twentieth century, people began telling ghost stories about the home. A poem written by Mrs. W. H. Coleman addresses the house’s haunted reputation. Using a maid as a narrator, Coleman highlighted some of the reported activity at the home. She mentioned that the porch swing moved back and forth. The ghost on Baldwin Hill also shakes de winders and knocks right on de do.

Lucy Gallman, the current owner of Baldwin Hill, moved into the house with her family in 1954. She was five years old at the time. She was nurtured on stories about the spooky house that she called home. The first tale she recalled hearing was about the previous tenants. Night after night, they heard a bouncing ball. A few seconds later, a spectral voice would say, Robert Ennis is dead. Robert Ennis was Julian’s nephew. Thinking that somebody was standing on the porch and talking through a window, the family sprinkled cornmeal on the porch, hoping to see footprints in the powder the next morning. That night, they heard the same creepy sounds: the bouncing ball and the ghostly voice saying, Robert Ennis is dead. However, when they looked out the front window, the cornmeal was completely undisturbed.

The haunted activity is not restricted to the main house. The little cottages down the hill may be haunted as well. In the late 1990s, a college student who was renting one of them threw open the door and ran up to the main house. When Lucy opened her door, she was greeted by the sight of her young tenant shaking uncontrollably. After she settled down, she told Lucy that she was in the kitchen washing dishes when a white figure floated across the floor and passed into another room. The girl was so terrified that she fled the house without even turning off the tap in the kitchen sink.

A female spirit roams the halls of Baldwin Hill, and it is very close to the Gallman family, especially Lucy’s husband, Ken. This is actually the truth, he said. We were moving. I looked up for a second and my [late] mother-in-law was standing in the door. It was not a glimpse but it was the clear image of her standing there inside the door. She wore a nightgown that was about forty-three thousand years old but it was comfy. Later on, Ken saw the face of Lucy’s mother staring at him through a window.

Strong family ties may also be responsible for Lucy’s father’s return from the other side. One day, Lucy’s granddaughter saw the apparition of an elderly man inside the house. Her description of the old gentleman’s appearance matched that of Lucy’s father. She said he had white hair, Lucy noted. Also, he was wearing a pale-colored suit.

The ghosts of family members have found it difficult to leave Baldwin Hill permanently. (Photo by Alan Brown)

The ghost’s attachment to Lucy’s family could be behind another paranormal incident that occurred during her niece’s wedding. Lucy’s father was supposed to attend, but he passed away suddenly shortly before the wedding. Following the ceremony, Lucy and Ken were looking at the photographs taken of the family. On close examination, orbs could be seen hovering over the heads of the newlyweds. To this day, the niece’s husband has no intention of ever sleeping inside the mansion.

The Beavers House Cuba

The tranquility of small-town life in Cuba was shattered on May 22, 1978, when two fugitives from an Oklahoma prison—Eugene Dennis and Michael Lancaster, both twenty-five—arrived. They had escaped at 1:45 P.M. on April 23. The pair signed out of their cell block to attend the prison’s nondenominational church. Apparently, they sneaked past the chapel and entered a small passageway leading from the old prison mess hall to a new building under construction. They broke their way through the three yards of concrete sealing off an abandoned utility tunnel. Once outside the power plant, they climbed two fifteen-foot chain-link fences and escaped. They stole a red Chevrolet Camaro in Waynesboro. Mississippi, and made their way to Butler, Alabama. On May 16, a Butler policeman named Dean Larsen Roberts spotted a car matching the description of a red Camaro that had been used in the break-in of a local drugstore. He pulled the Camaro over and stopped a few yards behind it. Suddenly, the passenger got out and fired a shotgun five times at Roberts’ squad car, blowing out the passenger-side window and hitting the officer in the arm. The escapees ditched the Camaro in a dense patch of woods in Choctaw County and walked over to the home of Emma Mae Williams. No one was there, so Dennis and Lancaster helped themselves to underwear, pillowcases, and canned goods. They also cut the telephone lines and ate dinner. The pair then went to the home of a neighbor, Isabell James, and stole her 1975 Mercury.

On May 22, a sixty-nine-year-old resident of Cuba, Stacey Beavers, arrived at the antebellum home where she lived alone. She parked in front of the house and, carrying a plate of food from the church social she had attended, walked in. Police believe that she was attacked by Dennis and Lancaster as soon as she set foot in the house. The men slashed her throat and left her bloody corpse lying in the doorway. When word of the horrific murder spread, panic swept through Cuba. People made jokes about sleeping with their shotguns.

On May 22, 1978, sixty-nine-year-old Stacey Beavers was murdered in the hallway of her home. (Photo by Alan Brown)

Not long after Stacey Beavers’ death, officers from Oklahoma drove to Alabama to assist Choctaw County Sheriff Don Lolley with the investigation. The fugitives remained in Alabama for four more days. Finally, on the morning of May 26, the state troopers learned of their location. Dennis and Lancaster stood their ground, killing three troopers before being killed themselves. By the time their reign of terror ended, they had killed eight people, including Stacey Beavers.

Charlie and Linda Munoz purchased the Beavers House and the forty-eight adjoining acres at auction for $72,000 in 1978. They suspect that price was low because of the home’s reputation. They had not lived in it for very long before people began driving up their long drive, hoping to catch a glimpse of the murder house. Linda was shocked when she heard that Stacey Beavers’ niece was the one who cleaned the blood splatter off the walls of the entranceway.

Charlie and Linda learned about the early history of the house by conducting research and talking to longtime residents of Cuba. The house was built in 1850 by Steve Potts, Charlie told me. It was the first plantation in Cuba, which was called Clay Station back then. A dentist named Dr. Beavers bought the house in 1898. He changed the lines of the house to make it more Victorian. He was a traveling dentist. His office was in a little room upstairs. Stacey Beavers was born in the house.

The first indication Charlie and Linda had that their home might be haunted was strange smells. One night, I woke up, and the smell of strong perfume was right next to my head, Linda said. It was so strong that it woke me up. I can’t tell you what kind of perfume it was. I just know that it was something that I don’t wear. I nudged Charlie and said, ‘Charlie, do you smell that? Do you smell that?’ He woke up, but the smell had drifted away. He would get up in the middle of the night because he thought I had left candles burning. He would walk up and down the halls looking to see where the candles were burning. A year or so after that, one of Stacey Beavers’ nieces came to the house and asked, ‘Have you ever experienced anything here?’ I said, ‘Yeah, we would get up in the middle of the night thinking that candles were burning. I have smelled the scent of strong perfume.’ The niece got a very strange look and said, ‘My aunt loved splashy perfume, and she burned candles all the time.’

Charlie and Linda soon discovered that Stacey Beavers’ spirit may have attached itself to one of the objects in the house. One of the first pieces of furniture they acquired for the home was a piano once owned by Stacey Beavers. When we first bought the house, Mrs. Brock [a resident of Cuba] was waiting for us in the hall, Linda said. Mrs. Brock bought the piano with the intention of giving it back to whoever bought the house, and that’s how we got Stacey’s piano. It came from a bar in Kansas City, the town where she worked as a music therapist. The piano was involved in the most dramatic supernatural incident inside the Beavers House.

The first really scary event happened about twenty-five years ago [1991], Linda said. My son was not born yet, and my daughter was little. I was working at the hospice at the time, and I had been dealing with a really difficult family. The patients were wonderful. It was always the families that gave me the problems. It was a very difficult time. I had been driving night after night from Cuba to Livingston. I was exhausted, and I had promised my daughter that I would have a Halloween party for her. Our friends had children the same age as our child, so we always had family parties: adults and children. Whenever someone came over, they would want to go upstairs. There used to be a belvedere on the top of the house, but now it’s just a wall. We had taken a couple up there to see the sky. My husband and I used to watch the stars. A friend of ours from Columbus [Mississippi], Eric Loftis, was playing honkytonk music on the piano while we were walking upstairs. Suddenly, we heard what sounded like a gunshot. We ran back down the stairs, and Eric was standing there with a shocked look on his face. We checked over the house to make sure that none of the children were hurt. Then we noticed that the armoire had fallen over, right next to the piano. We up-righted it and were surprised to discover that none of the glass on the armoire was broken. I took my daughter upstairs to put her to bed. Five minutes later, I went downstairs, and no one was there except Charlie. I asked Charlie, ‘Where is everybody?’ Charlie said, ‘Gone.’ Linda suspects that the armoire fell over because of Stacey Beavers’ dislike of honkytonk music.

Stacey Beavers may have expressed her disapproval of changes made in the house during a New Year’s Eve party in 2000. We had a really bad termite infestation, Linda said. The carpenter working in the kitchen was having to tear out walls and replace sheetrock and the ceiling in the kitchen. He had nailed the boards up and was getting ready to leave just before the party guests arrived. Eric had come from Columbus and had sat down to play piano. When he started, the boards just collapsed onto the kitchen floor! The carpenter said there was no reason for them to fall because they were nailed securely.

During another party, Stacey Beavers may have expressed her displeasure at remarks made by her great-niece. We sat at the drop-down table, Linda said, and it had the ends raised up. The subject of Stacey Beavers came up, and her great-niece said, ‘Everyone talks about how wonderful Stacey was, but she wasn’t perfect.’ She went on to talk about disagreements she had had with her great-aunt. Well, after a while, I got up and went to the bathroom, and she went into the kitchen. All of a sudden, the end of the table fell down, and everything that was on it—plates, silverware—fell to the floor. That had never happened before, and it hasn’t happened since.

Linda Munoz’s nephew, Ed Snodgrass, is an experimental psychologist at the University of West Alabama. He had an experience inside the old house that came into direct conflict with his scientific view of the world. My family and I were living in Meridian [Mississippi] in a house we restored, Ed told me. We added a child. The place had one bathroom. We had to sell it in 2008. We sold the house, did well, and about that time, my aunt Linda told me that she and my uncle Charlie were going to move up to the Mentone area, where they had a house. Supposedly, they were going to live there for a while, certainly for a year, and she wondered if we would be interested in housesitting her house on Old Livingston Road—the Beavers House. I’ve always loved that house.

Ed and his wife, Michelle, moved in and had a great year there. Several months after moving in, they discovered they were going to have their third baby. Cuba is miles from hospitals, and it would have complicated