Alabama
1. Gaines Ridge Dinner Club
Built in 1827, the Gaines Ridge Dinner Club was originally called the Hearn Place. Its first owner, Ebenezer Hearn, was a soldier in the War of 1812 and a Methodist circuit rider. Betty Kennedy, the owner of the Gaines Ridge Dinner Club, says that Hearn is known today as “the Father of Methodism” in Alabama because he founded more Methodist churches than any other person there.
Ms. Kennedy’s great-grandfather purchased the house in 1898, and it has been in her family ever since. “My great-grandfather’s last name was Fail. When we opened for business in 1985, nobody thought we’d stay open for more than six months, so we really couldn’t call it the Fail Place with everyone thinking it was going to! He never really owned it though; my mother did. He put a lot of work into it.”
Some ghost experts might speculate that the spirits inside the old house were awakened when her father began remodeling. “The house has changed in appearance from when we first moved out here. My father was an engineer, and he changed the front totally. Originally, there was a little stoop of a porch in the front. It was just an old farmhouse with a one-story porch. Somebody gave him some columns, so he felt he had to put the columns up. If anything was left over from a work site, he brought it out here and added it to the house. The kitchen that we use is the original kitchen. At one time, it was detached from the house. My father jacked it up and put logs under it and rolled it over and joined it to the house. A lot of old houses were like that. They had a breeze-way connecting the kitchen because of fire and heat.”
The ghostly activity at the GainesRidge Dinner Club started up after the restaurant had been open for three or four years. “I was still working for the government and lived in Oak Hill and didn’t have my little house out here. I had come down to get ready for a party the next day. One of my cooks lived just up the road. She worked for me for about fifteen years. She was helping me that night. I don’t know exactly what we were doing. The two of us were in the kitchen working, and I needed a cook pot from upstairs. So I went up to get it. It’s a good ways from the kitchen. And while I was up there, she screamed and said, “Miss Betty! Miss Betty! Come quick! Oh, Lordy Jesus!” It just scared me to death. I thought she had cut herself or there was a fire. She screamed so loud that I dropped the pot and went flying down the stairs. I opened the door and just burst into the kitchen.
I said, ‘Maggie Belle! What in the world is the matter?’ She looked up at me. She was just calmly chopping onions. She said, ‘Miss Betty, I didn’t call you.’ I didn’t see anything.
It (the voice) wasn’t way off. It was as if she were just at the foot of the stairs. My great-grandmother’s name was Betty, so I don’t know if whoever was calling was calling her or calling me because she did live here briefly.”
A different ghostly sound was heard by Ms. Kennedy’s daughter one evening when the restaurant was almost filled to capacity. “One time, I was in the kitchen. (My daughter) came in the kitchen and said, ‘You’ve got to come out here. Somebody’s fallen in the ladies’ restroom, and we can’t get the door open!’
I went over there, and they were all standing around the door. They said, ‘We heard her fall, and her head hit the door, so we thought she was jammed up against the door.’ I finally just shoved it open, and there was nobody there, and nothing had fallen.”
Ms Kennedy says that the ghost occasionally reveals itself through a different sense, “My sister and I have smelled pipe smoke up in the front room, even though no one was smoking a pipe at the time. I haven’t smelled the pipe smoke in a long, long time. When we first opened, we could smell it. And sometimes when we would go up there, it would be very strong.”
A family tragedy dating back to the nineteenth century is probably responsible the most frequent manifestation in the GainesRidge Dinner Club. “One of my great aunts weighed 350 pounds, and she had thirteen children. Back then, particularly in the wintertime, babies slept with their parents for several months to keep them warm. One night, she accidentally smothered one of her babies. I think she rolled on the baby or placed her arm on him. My great-grandfather was instrumental in her not being tried for murder. I guess if I had thirteen children, I might feel like smothering one of them too. My mother told me this story when we were fixing up the house. She never told me when I lived here because she didn’t want me to be afraid to stay here by myself, and she never told my other two sisters either.” Sometimes, late in the evening, waitresses and kitchen help have heard the incessant crying of a baby coming from one of the upstairs room. The source of the cries has never been found.
Other reports of ghostly activity in the Gaines Ridge Dinner Club have come to Betty Kennedy’s attention over the years. Her son told her that he saw a white shape pass through the windows in a second floor room and come down the stairs.
Like many restaurants, the Gaines Ridge Dinner Club has tried to capitalize on its haunted reputation. From Betty Kennedy’s point of view, the ghosts are almost as big an attraction as the food. “When they read the ghost story on the back of the menu, people are always really interested in it. I call it my ghost truth because it is what really happened to me. We serve a lot of groups here, and they all want to hear about the ghost. I do embellish the stories a bit when I tell them to children, though.”

2. Bibb Graves Hall
The University of West Alabama is located in Sumter County, one of the most rural counties in the entire state. Founded in 1835 in the small town of Livingston, the University started out as Livingston Female Academy. By the 1920s, the small college had undergone a name change—State Teachers College at Livingston—and an ambitious building campaign. In 1928, the college was authorized to construct a two-story building with twenty-five rooms, five classrooms, three laboratory rooms, one lecture hall, several offices, and an 800-seat auditorium. Because of budgetary problems, the new building was completed in 1931. It was named after David Bibb Graves, the fortieth and forty-second governor of Alabama. In 1962, the Natural Sciences and Mathematics wing was completed, making Bibb Graves Hall the largest building on campus. Fittingly, the president’s office was located on the first floor of this imposing structure. Since the 1980s, sightings by students and faculty indicate that one of the university’s past presidents is not ready to leave.
The first paranormal activity in Bibb Graves Hall was detected in the Natural Sciences and Mathematics wing of the building. In 1989, biology instructor Becky Graham had some very unsettling experiences in one of the laboratories on the first floor when she was a student: “My youngest child was three months old when I went back to school. One of the first classes I took was genetics. I’d put her to bed at about 9:00 or 9:30, and then I would come back here and count flies. I’d be here all by myself. Every now and then, a security officer would come through. I might be up here until 11:00 or 12:00. Some nights, I would hear the elevator, and I would immediately think it was the security guard, but when I went out in the hallway, there was no one there. I had both of the doors open, and I could hear the elevator go up and own. Of course, that could be a malfunction of the elevator, but I’ve never known that to happen during the day.”
The weird, unexplained sounds continued after Becky became a professor at the University of West Alabama: “I’d be sitting at my desk late at night, and I’d have the door open, and I could hear footsteps coming down the hall. I’d think it was one of the graduate assistants coming up to do some work. (I’d hear someone) walking through the back part of the building. The footsteps would stop right at the copier. I’d go back and look, and there’d be nobody there.”
Becky’s daughter also heard the footsteps. “She’d be in my office, sitting at the computer doing her homework when she was enrolled here. She told me one day, ‘Mama, there are some strange noises (in the building). I could swear I heard footsteps.’ Then I told her, ‘It’s happened to me, too.’”
In 1998, a 23-year-old graduate student and former football player nicknamed “Cadillac Jack” had an even more terrifying encounter in Bibb Graves hall. Chairperson John McCall recalled the incident. “Jack was working late at night. He was on the phone, and he heard what he described as a ‘ghoulish’ laugh outside in the hall. He said it was in the stairwell area in the center of the building. He said it sounded like someone going up the stairs. I asked him if it could have one of the security officers, and he said no. There was no one there but him. So he went back—he was a little bit unnerved at this point—and got back on the phone. He sat back down, and he heard the laugh again. It was much closer and louder this time. He said at this point, (he had had enough), and he left that building.”
Later that same year, Becky Graham was working on a project in the zoology lab late one night when she received a phone call from Jack, asking if he could come by. “When I talked to him on the phone, Jack said he was getting gooseflesh just from remembering what had happened to him. He said this was a very real experience. He called me because he had left the gells still running earlier in the day. He said, ‘Ms. Graham, I am not going back in that building by myself.’ He asked if I would come back with him, and I said, ‘No, I won’t, because I have already experienced things there myself at night.” Jack was so reluctant to enter the building alone that he talked his girlfriend into returning with him.
Although the ghost of Bibb Graves Hall has never been positively identified, long-time librarian Neil Snider believes the disturbances might be caused by the uneasy spirit of a former president, Dr. Noble Franklin Greenhill. Dr. Greenhill was president of the college from 1936 to 1944, when he resigned after not being able to keep student enrollment levels up during World War II.
According to Dr. Snider, the “re-appearance” of Dr. Greenhill might have something to do with his missing portrait. In July 1943, Dr. Greenhill enlisted in the Army. Following a period of training at Fort Custer, Michigan, he received his commission as a major in the Army Specialist Corps. “The student body and the alumni wanted a portrait of Dr. Greenhill,” said Dr. Snider, “so they asked local artist Virginia White Barnes to do it. That portrait hung in the waiting room of the President’s Office in Bibb Graves Hall. When I was chair of the presidential portrait committee, I called Dr. Greenhill’s grandson, and the first thing he told me was that he knew the portrait was still there in the late 1960s. It is my theory that the ghost in Bibb Graves Hall is Dr. Greenhill, looking for his portrait.”
Evidence also suggests that Dr. Greenhill’s spirit still haunts his former office as well. The evening of April 23, 2005, I conducted a ghost tour of the town of Livingston as part of the Sucarnochee Folk and Heritage Festival. The tour ended on the front steps of Bibb Graves Hall, where I pointed out that the office now occupied by Teacher Certification Officer Nancy Taylor used to be former President Greenhill’s office.
That Monday, I received the following e-mail message from Ms. Taylor, who had participated in the tour along with her daughter: “I think you got the ghosts stirring in Bibb Graves after the tour Saturday night. When I got in my office this morning, I noticed that some books on the shelf had fallen over—they have never done this before—and the book facing up is titled Ghost Fox by James Houston! Coincidence?” One can only wonder.

3. Rice’s Miracle Cross Garden
For nearly half a mile along both sides of a secondary road near Prattville, Alabama, you can see thousands of signs, crosses, wrecked cars, and mailboxes festooned with barbed wire. These forbidding and obsessive emblems are bad enough, but each of them bears a sign with such forthright messages as “Everyone in hell from SEX USED WRONG WAY” and “Hypocrite You Will Die”). This is the work of William C. Rice, who calls it the Miracle Cross Garden. As Rice explains it, the Lord told him to do it in 1976, and when some of his neighbors complain that it is an eyesore that lowers property values, the Reverend claims he is only doing God’s work. The insides of W.C. Rice’s house and chapel are decorated the same way. Now approaching seventy, Rice continues to work on his Cross Garden and to tell visitors of the divine inspiration that led to its creation, reminding them that “Hell is Hot, Hot, Hot!”
Alabama’s House of Crosses
In Autauga County, Alabama, there is the house of crosses. It looks really weird when you ride by. The story is the man lost his wife and son in a horrific car accident and every day since the day of their death, he has put up a cross for each of them. Now it has been years, so when you ride up there are crosses everywhere

4. Ava Maria Grotto
Brother Joseph Zoettl was a Benedictine Monk who spent nearly 50 years, from 1912 to 1958, creating the miniature stone city known as the Ava Maria Grotto on the grounds of the St. Bernard Abbey in Cullman, Alabama. A Bavarian born hunchback, Brother Joseph was able to stoop down and faithfully recreate 125 religious and otherwise significant buildings including the Vatican's St. Peter's Basilica and the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Some of the other tiny replicas included in the four-acre hillside constructions are the Tower of Babel and, oddly enough, the Alamo!
Brother Joe’s real job at the Abbey was to work in the power plant, but his hobby of grotto building soon became an all-consuming passion. His diminutive city, sometimes call "Jerusalem in Miniature" is constructed of concrete and decorated with all manner or junk, from marbles and costume jewelry to seashells and ceramic tiles, much of which has been donated by visitors from around the world.
he Grotto is probably best described on the site’s official web page, which states:
The gift shop provides entry to a forested trail, winding down past several miniature building clusters and junk-bejeweled shrines. Round a bend, and you see it-an entire hillside packed in urban splendor with cathedrals and famous building. One half of the hillside features building and scenes from the Holy Land. There's also a central artificial cave-the Ave Maria Grotto.
Among the numerous replicas which elicit admiration and wonderment from the visitor are the famous buildings of Jerusalem and the Holy Land,familiar to all from the Bible; Roman Landmarks, as St. Peter's and the Colosseum; the famous Spanish Missions of the American Southwest, and replicas of the famous Shrines of Our Lady, Fatima and Lourdes.
Brother Joseph continued his work for over 40 years, using materials sent from all over the world. He built his last model, the Basilica in Lourdes, at the age of 80, in 1958.
Brother Joseph died in 1961 and is buried in the Abbey cemetery a short distance from the Grotto gift shop. The Ava Maria Grotto is still lovingly maintained though, and open to the public on all days except Christmas. It is located at 1600 St. Bernard Dr. S. E. (off US 278), just east of Cullman, Alabama.