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    Thirteen Mississippi Ghosts and Jeffrey: Commemorative Edition
    Thirteen Mississippi Ghosts and Jeffrey: Commemorative Edition
    Thirteen Mississippi Ghosts and Jeffrey: Commemorative Edition
    Ebook159 pages2 hours

    Thirteen Mississippi Ghosts and Jeffrey: Commemorative Edition

    By Kathryn Tucker Windham, Dilcy Windham Hilley and Ben Windham

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    A deluxe, commemorative edition of famed southern author and folklorist Kathryn Tucker Windham’s introduction to Mississippi’s thirteen most famous haunted houses and ghostly visitations

    For as long as Mississippi has existed (and then some), flocks of phantoms have haunted the mortal inhabitants of the Magnolia State. In Thirteen Mississippi Ghosts and Jeffrey, best-selling folklorist Kathryn Tucker Windham, along with her trusty spectral companion Jeffrey, introduces thirteen of the state’s most famous ghost stories.
     
    Although stories about Mississippi’s spirits seemingly outnumber the ghosts themselves, Windham observes that “Southern ghost tales are disappearing because people no longer sit around on the porch on summer nights and tell stories. The old folks who grew up with these stories are dying now, and the stories are dying with them.”
     
    Fortunately for us, Windham was a writer dedicated to preserving these tales in print. The veteran author spent many years tracking down these stories and chronicling the best ones. From the ghost of Mrs. McEwen still wearing her beloved cameo pin and keeping a watchful eye over Featherston Place, her home in Holly Springs, where, she swore, she would stay forever, to the ghostly visage fixed permanently on the bedroom window pane of Catherine McGehee, who searched the horizon ardently for her unrequited love to come to her as promised at Cold Spring Plantation in Pinckneyville, Windham’s stories cover the breadth and depth of Mississippi—at times more moonlight than magnolia.
     
    An enduring classic, this commemorative edition restores Thirteen Mississippi Ghosts and Jeffrey to the ghastly grandeur of its original 1974 edition.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity Alabama Press
    Release dateSep 15, 2015
    ISBN9780817388959
    Thirteen Mississippi Ghosts and Jeffrey: Commemorative Edition
    Author

    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.

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    Reviews for Thirteen Mississippi Ghosts and Jeffrey

    4.5/5

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    • 4/5
      I grew up enjoying hearing Kathryn Tucker Windham tell storied in my elementary classrooms! She got me hooked on storytelling, and maybe even on ghost stories too. Since I grew up in Alabama, this book was the first of Windham's that I read, so it holds a special place in my heart.
    • 4/5
      I have always loved this book since I was little. This book was legendary among schoolchildren in Alabama in the 70s and 80s. Such fun to read some of the ghost stories from state history.
    • 5/5
      Can I just tell you that I LOVE Kathryn Tucker Windham. Hers were the first ghost stories I ever read and had the distinction of being the only ones that earned my Mum's approval. This book was in my house growing up and was a favorite of mine. Ms. Windham has an amazing talent for making history come to life with her stories; I remember more history from her books than I do my Alabama History class. Maybe it was the touch of mysticism that found its way into her stories. Each story is well-written and vibrant and her talent shines through.

    Book preview

    Thirteen Mississippi Ghosts and Jeffrey - Kathryn Tucker Windham

    The Faithful Caretaker At Pontotoc

    The hunt had been disappointing. Though the dogs had treed once, heralding their accomplishment to the countryside, the coon had escaped. So around midnight, after a cold rain had begun to fall, the hunters left the woods and took a short cut across a pasture to the road where they had parked their pick-up.

    They were about halfway across the open pasture when they first saw the lantern bobbing toward them. At first they thought one of their companions had got separated from them in the dark and was trying to catch up. They stopped walking and called, Yoo-hoo! Yoo-hoo! Come on! We’re waiting! Come on!

    But though they shouted several times, there was no answer. The light kept moving closer, but its carrier was strangely silent.

    Suddenly the men were uneasy, filled with foreboding.

    Hey, one of the group whispered (he later was not sure why he had whispered instead of speaking right out). Hey—That’s not one of us. We’re all here—nobody’s missing. Let’s get out of here!

    They ran through the dark to their waiting pick-up, tumbled in, and sped toward Pontotoc.

    Once they had reached the safety of the town, their fears subsided, but even the brightly-lighted streets and the familiar buildings did not entirely erase their feelings of uneasiness, of strangeness.

    What was it we saw? they asked each other. What kind of lantern was it? And none of them had a satisfactory answer.

    It wasn’t fox fire—not a jack-o-lantern—I’ve seen that glowing in the woods plenty of times. It wasn’t that. I know it wasn’t fox fire, one of the men asserted.

    It was a lantern for sure. But it wasn’t right somehow. Something wasn’t natural. . . .

    The way it moved was scary. Made me think it was threatening me in some way, his companion interrupted. Sounds stupid to say I was afraid of a lantern—but I was.

    Next morning when the hunters met for coffee at a Pontotoc cafe, their experiences of the night before still filled their thoughts and conversation. They re-told the events, much to the amusement of other coffee-drinkers who chided them with questions about what they had been drinking and teased them about their fears.

    While the teasing was going on, an elderly man rose from his table at the rear of the cafe (after fifty years of regular patronage, he had become as familiar a part of the decor as the chrome napkin holders or the heavy sugar bowls with their hinged tops) and interrupted the chatter to ask,

    Where were you when you saw the light? Out near Lochinvar?

    Why yes. We were taking a short cut across the pasture there. But how did you guess?

    It wasn’t a guess, the old man replied. I’ve been listening to you all talk, and I was pretty sure you’d seen the Lochinvar light. I’ve seen it, too. More than once. But it has been a long time since I’ve heard anybody talk about seeing it. I figured the light had gone away, vanished for good. I’m sort of glad to know that old Uncle Eb is still on the job at Lochinvar, he chuckled.

    Uncle Eb? Who’s he?

    He—his ghost, that is—was carrying that lantern you saw. Ebenezer Gordon, old and trusted slave of Colonel James Gordon. Still protecting that fine place just like his master told him to.

    For a moment nobody spoke. The men looked at each other, stared at the old man, then looked away. Then one of them asked,

    You mean to say we saw a ghost—a real ghost—last night? Man, that’s hard to believe! He turned to his friends for reassurance.

    Reassurance did not come though, at least not from the man seated beside him. That man looked straight at him and said slowly, I believe it. I purely believe we saw a ghost, Uncle Eb with his lantern.

    Uncle Eb’s story is so closely entwined with Lochinvar it is almost impossible to separate the two.

    Lochinvar is the home built by Robert Gordon, the Scotch adventurer, in the late 1830s as a gift for his wife, the former Miss Walton of Cotton Gin Port. The two had been married in a triple wedding ceremony which saw Mr. Walton give three of his daughters in marriage.

    Where do you want your house? he would ask her. Where would you like to live? And he would describe for her possible home sites on the thousands of acres of land he owned in northern Mississippi. A shrewd speculator, handling money in a way that would have brought pride to his Scottish ancestors, Gordon at one time owned a strip of land stretching all the way from Pontotoc to Aberdeen, sixty miles away.

    Aberdeen was Gordon’s own town. He founded a trading post there in the early 1830s and named the place Dundee in honor of the town he loved in Scotland. But the way the natives pronounced the name, giving it such a slurring drawl that no true Scotsman would recognize it, irritated Gordon. He changed the town’s name to Aberdeen.

    Before Gordon had trained the settlers to give Aberdeen the proper Scottish accent, he moved northward to Pontotoc where the government land office had been established. The Chickasaw Indians had ceded their lands, and speculators were congregating in the area.

    It was near Pontotoc that Gordon found the site for the house he planned to build. The location he chose was the home of a Choctaw chieftain, Chinubi. As soon as he saw the wooded ridge, Gordon knew it was the perfect place for his grand house, and he determined to get ownership of the land. So not long afterwards the aged Chinubi was removed, and Robert Gordon began building Lochinvar.

    Slaves from the Gordon plantation felled giant pines and hewed them into sills, joists, beams, and boards. Artisans fitted the timbers into place, following sketches provided by Robert Gordon.

    The four tall Doric columns to support the portico were shipped from Scotland (some Pontotoc residents said they came from a real castle) to Mobile and were brought overland by ox carts to Pontotoc. Spectators from all over the countryside came to watch those massive columns raised into place.

    When the house was finished, Mr. and Mrs. Gordon invited their friends to come to a party, a social christening for Lochinvar. That party with its music and lights and feasting and dancing and laughter was one of James Gordon’s earliest memories.

    The little boy, only child of Robert and Mary Elizabeth, was dressed in a velvet suit with a ruffled shirt, and he was allowed to stand beside his parents as they greeted the guests. His parents introduced James proudly, and the lad behaved with charm and courtesy befitting the future master of Lochinvar.

    It was Ebenezer, James’ personal servant, who prepared James for the night, Ebenezer who saw that James’ suit fit perfectly, that his long curls were smoothly brushed, that he remembered to shake hands with the men and to bow to the ladies. And it was Ebenezer who, hours later, carried a sleepy little boy upstairs to bed.

    Looking back, James Gordon could not remember when Ebenezer had not been a part of his life. Ebenezer taught him to hunt and to fish, told him stories about de critters, supervised his manners, and, when he was old enough, packed his trunks and watched him leave for the University of Mississippi at Oxford. That was in 1851.

    It was hard to tell exactly when Ebenezer became old, but sometime during those years when James was growing up, Ebenezer slipped past the invisible but inflexible time line that marks the arrival of old age. Having reached that milepost, he became known as Uncle Eb. Though he knew the title signified affection and respect, Ebenezer winced the first few times he heard himself called Uncle, and he found it particularly upsetting to have James Gordon, his young master, call him Uncle

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