An Alabama Haunting
Many have reported seeing him, an old man bathed in a bluish light. He carries a shovel over one shoulder and holds a lantern in his other hand, searching for his lost gold. At other times he is on the second floor of King House, seen from outside as he travels from window to window. Sometimes he waves kindly at passersby. Those who know say the old man is Edmund King who died in 1863.
Edmund King built what slaves called Mansion House in 1823. It now sits in the center of The University of Montevallo which is held by paranormal experts to be one of the most haunted locations in Alabama (just behind Sloss Furnace, old Bryce Mental Hospital and the Pickens County Courthouse). Twenty-eight campus buildings are on the National Register of Historical Places. The King House is credited with being the oldest and perhaps the most haunted building in the college.
A Brief History
According to Nellie Kimball Murdoch, an author who wrote a history of the King House, Edmund King was born in 1782 in Virginia. He became a planter in Georgia, but life was still unsettled in the aftermath of the Revolutionary War. Wanting peace for his growing family, he headed west.
William Weatherford, Chief Red Eagle of the Creek Nation, led King to what is now Montevallo in 1817. He purchased the land from the Creeks and the United States Government. After building a log cabin, he returned to Georgia for his wife and children. King brought his small family, a nurse, and 15 slaves back to the cabin. Together, they carved out a new home from the wilderness.
In 1823 the Mansion House was built with almost all materials coming from the surrounding area. Lumber for the house was cut from the land. Clay for brick was cut from Shoals Creek. The house boasts being the first built from brick in the entire state and one of the first to have glass windows.
King loved money: making it and counting it. But, he was no miser. His neighbors could count on him when there was a need. Many orphans took shelter in King House.
According to legend, when the Civil War broke out it 1861, he buried his hard earned gold in a peach orchard.
The Confederates used Mansion House as head-quarters first. Later, the Union would do the same, reported by Harold Schulz of Alabama Sunday Magazine. By the time the Union came, all the men of the house were at war or dead. Only the King women and the female slaves were present. It’s interesting to note that Union soldiers wrote home describing good treatment from the women of the house.
The Haunting
Cynthia Shackleford, former Dean of Public Relations for the university, said supernatural phenomena exhibited itself early in King House. At some point during the war years, a whole pig was cooked and lay waiting to be eaten on the table. When one of the family stuck his fork in the animal, it squealed.
Another early instance occurred at a wedding reception. One of the slave women was reportedly a bad mother. Her mistreatment of her children was well known. The week of the wedding, her son died, and she did not seem to be concerned. She was working at the reception. A dark shape began to form in the room. The buzzard-like creature attacked the child’s mother, pecking her on the neck and head. Shackleford stated that legend has it that the creature was the son taking vengeance upon his wicked mother.
Since that time there have been numerous reports of the unexplained around Mansion House. Most of these involve Edmund King himself. He is usually looking for the buried gold, but he is often upstairs looking out one of the windows.
In the early 1980s a group of girls attending cheer leading camp at the university reported seeing such a man. “I didn’t see him, but the other girls were scared to death. They saw something,” Gina Helms, one of the cheerleaders, recalled.
When speaking of the campus in general, Pam Logan, who worked in Palmer Hall said, “I have seen things that cannot be explained.”
Proof?
With the advent of ghost hunting equipment, Montevallo has become a place of interest to paranormal investigators. Shackleford hosted 12–15 teams of investigators from all over the United States in the years she was been employed by the university. Prior to this job, she said she had no interest in the paranormal; however, this changed during her employment. She learned some interesting things from her time with the ghost hunters.
“The spirits need a lot of energy to manifest,” Shackleford said. “They take the energy from anything they can.” Electrical appliances, the air, and even people can supply this energy. “I saw one team run through 138 batteries in one night. When the spiritual activity is high, they drain batteries.”
Overwhelmingly, these investigations come up with startlingly similar conclusions. Although there are various entities throughout the house, investigators tend to agree that the parlor is the most consistently spiritually active place, inhabited by no less than five spirits. These include: an old man thought to be King, a young woman, a young man, an adolescent boy, and a Union soldier who has been seen crouching in the corner.
One night when Shackleford hosted a team, the investigators told her there was a “power bleed” in the house. Something electrical in the house was malfunctioning and had to be turned off or their readings would be corrupted. The group determined it was the HVAC unit.
Shackleford had the only key to the house. The front door was dead bolted. She and the whole team went outside to turn off the breaker. The back door was open, and every person was in her sight. When they went back into the parlor, the heavy pieces of furniture were stacked on top of each other. No one could have gone into the house.
A couple of years later another team had a “sensitive” with them. A “sensitive” is a person who can either see or hear these entities. While they were reviewing the results of that night’s investigations, the sensitive was asked what, if anything, she had seen. She described the usual characters that others describe in the parlor.
“Did you communicate with any of them?” She was asked by another investigator. “Yes,” she said. “I spoke with the Yankee soldier that’s crouched in the corner. I asked him, ‘What are you doing here?’ And he said, ‘I move furniture.”
Some of the entities are not quite so benign. On one fateful night, a sensitive, who was a sophomore from Birmingham Southern, came flying down the stairs of the house. He was visibly shaken and refused to return upstairs. “I’ll never go up there again,” he said.
The young man explained that he saw a bat-like creature with a concave face hanging upside down in a corner of one of the bedrooms. When it saw him, it fell to the floor and began crawling towards him on what appeared to be its elbows.
Within moments a second sensitive in another bedroom came downstairs after her own disturbing encounter. She had seen a young girl, between the ages of 7 and 9, with long blond hair. The child sat on the edge of the bed, dangling her feet. The entity looked up at the young woman and said, “You have to go now, for he is coming.” And the young woman did.
Perhaps encounters such as these explain why some at the University of Montevallo will not talk about their own experiences. A person who prefers to remain anonymous explained, “I’m sorry. I just can’t talk about it.”
Why the University of Montevallo?
Certainly, the University of Montevallo is a beautiful old place, full of that atmosphere which lends itself well to the idea of ghosts. Setting foot on campus is in a sense stepping back into time. But, it is a question that may not ever be answered. Until then, wave at kindly gentleman on the second floor, but leave that bat in the bedroom alone.
