Haunted Mobile: Apparitions of the Azalea City

by Arcadia Publishing

Overview

Haunted Mobile is a chilling collection of ghostly tales from this Alabama city.

What unknown spirits lurk among the living in the Azalea City? Mobile native Elizabeth Parker brings together the spookiest of her Mobile Ghosts: Alabama's Haunted Port City and Mobile Ghosts II: The Waterline to create an updated version guaranteed to send shivers down the spine. How do priceless heirlooms at the Mobile Carnival Museum mysteriously disappear and then reappear just in the nick of time? Who still protects Oakleigh from intruders, years after the Yankee occupation? Who is the little girl who keeps watch over the city from her attic window? Complete with an eerie new story, Haunted Mobile: Apparitions of the Azalea City is a chilling read that no ghost enthusiast should miss.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781596297135
Publisher:	Arcadia Publishing SC
Publication date:	06/16/2009
Series:	Haunted America
Pages:	128
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Elizabeth Parker has previously self-published two very successful titles on Mobile ghosts (Mobile Ghosts: Alabama's Haunted Port City and Mobile Ghosts II: The Waterline), which she has revised, updated, and combined to make up this book. She is a freelance writer and copywriter, and she is currently working in business and technical writing. She has been a volunteer at the Bragg-Mitchell Mansion, and has written documents detailing the history of both the Thayer Families Association and the Bragg-Mitchell Mansion.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

THE MOBILE CARNIVAL MUSEUM

The smoke machine was ready, the music was cued up and an expectant Mardi Gras queen waited on pins and needles to be "tapped" when a docent at the Mobile Carnival Museum hurried up to Mrs. G., the director, at almost exactly 6:59 pm.

"I need to talk to you a minute," she said urgently.

Distracted, Mrs. G. waved her off. "There were things I had to do," she remembers. "A whole bunch of things had to happen right at 7:00. This had been carefully orchestrated."

"I really think," the docent emphasized, "you need to come right now."

Water was leaking — "And I don't mean it was a little trickle," Mrs. G. says. "It was a like a waterfall"— in the one of the rooms. Pouring from the ceiling, it came down the rapidly saturated wall behind the display to pool on the hardwood floors. Mrs. G. darted back to hold off the festivities planned to start that very minute, calmly asking the Infant Mystics Mardi Gras Society to wait briefly. She and the docent then scooped up armloads of irreplaceable Mardi Gras trains — each one over a dozen feet in length and encrusted with jewels, embroidery and embellishments — and dragged them from the room.

With the trains out of harm's way, the Infant Mystics proceeded to conduct their grand party in another part of the building, with none the wiser.

"This museum was usually closed on a Saturday night," Mrs. G. says. "We have many events now, but we didn't back then. It was the first Saturday night that we'd had something here in weeks." While the Infant Mystics partied into the night, Mrs. G. and her staff frantically searched for the source of the flood and ultimately shut off the entire water service to the house. The problem was eventually identified as a broken overflow pipe from the central heating and air conditioning system, located right above the MAMGA room. They were aided by a gentleman who, after the problem was discovered, held the broken overflow pipe up in the air for an hour until the repair crew could come.

"Had we not been there, there would have been a tremendous amount of loss. This would have gone unchecked and unnoticed until nine o'clock Monday morning, and by that time that water would have seeped into those trains. It would have been into the floor. It's just unimaginable the amount of damage that would have been done." As it was, it took an entire month to repair the ceiling and walls.

"I don't know," Mrs. G. muses. "Maybe they knew there was a problem with that system and said, 'Now's the time to do it.' That night when I closed up I said, 'Whoever you are, thank you' ... Strange things happen in this building."

The Mobile Carnival Museum, located at 355 Government Street in the historic Bernstein-Bush Home, is the happy result of a long-anticipated dream of the Mobile Carnival Association. The Bernstein-Bush Home was built in October 1872 by Mr. and Mrs. Bernstein, from Bavaria. The beautiful town house — two parlors down, four bedrooms up, all with working fireplaces — remained their home for over twenty years and was sold to the Bush family. Mr. Bush served as the mayor of Mobile, and his son was once King of the Carnival. It was a center of social activities and parties, and Mardi Gras featured prominently in the life of Mobilians.

The purpose of the house changed completely in the 1920s when it became the Roche Funeral Home. After many years in that location, the business moved out to west Mobile, and the beautiful house was left empty and untended for several years in the 1960s.

"The wrecking ball was headed its way," notes Mr. L., the curator of the Mobile Carnival Museum. "But the city saved it." After a few years, the restored house opened again as the City of Mobile Museum, which eventually grew to hold fifty thousand artifacts of Mobile history. In 2001, the museum was moved into a fine new facility, and the Mobile Carnival Association soon took possession, opening the Mobile Carnival Museum in 2005. The museum is nonprofit and is supported by the Carnival Association, event rentals, visitors and fundraisers like the very popular Mobile Murder Mystery Dinners.

After years of little or no ghost reporting from the Bernstein-Bush House, the Mobile Carnival Museum experienced unexplained activity before it even opened its doors. Mr. P. was one of the first docents to come on staff and worked with other volunteers to set up the museum.

"We were down here working with the mannequin in the front parlor. I had a heck of a time getting his arm on," Mr. P. says. Mr. P. and another volunteer had to wrestle the mannequin into an elaborate young man's costume worn one year in the royal court. It took some doing until they were satisfied that "he" was dressed properly and positioned just right.

"The next morning we walked in, and he was laying there on the train. So we got him straightened up. The second morning, he was laying on the train. The third morning, he was laying on the train, and I finally turned to my friend and said, 'Do we have some little friends running around here that we don't know?'"

His patience exhausted, Mr. P. yanked the mannequin firmly back into place, used "a couple of strong adjectives" and ordered, "Stay there!"

"And he's been there ever since."

That particular mannequin may have been abandoned, but recently a docent came in on a Saturday morning to open up and found the feet on another mannequin both rotated sideways. Notes Mr. P., "There have been a number of things we've found turned over, laid on the floor. One of our crowd decided to name him [the ghost] Ralph."

Mrs. G. started with the museum as its director in June 2006. "I was only here a day or so before I was informed about Ralph." She was treated to tales of lights coming off and on by themselves, items falling over, doors unlocked and things disappearing only to reappear later. "For the most part," she remembers, "I thought it was due to technology." The house has been carefully wired and retrofitted to support the spotlights and audio/visual needs of the Carnival Museum's spectacular displays and the jazz music that plays throughout on the sound system.

"Then I did observe some of that myself. I would close down and notice the lights were off in different parts of the building, then the next day I would come in and lights would be on. One day I came in and the music was on. I knew I had turned that music off, because I had switched out the CDs." Mrs. G. had been the last one to leave the night before.

The sound system requires several steps to operate, as does the video display. The power supply to the video equipment is completely turned off at night from a central location, as are the lights.

"We've come back in a couple of times and the video has been on! The power to it has been turned back on," Mrs. G. says.

"I work on Friday," Mr. P. adds. "And Mrs. G. and I closed up one particular afternoon. My job usually is to go upstairs, get all our lights off or leave whatever we leave on, on. I came back Saturday morning and Mrs. G. opened up with me. I went upstairs and when I got off the elevator, every cotton pickin' light on the second floor was on! I asked Mrs. G. if she had come back in the night before, and she hadn't. Those lights! That threw me, when that elevator opened."

If the lights made an impression on Mr. P., the "crown incident" is what pushed Mrs. G.'s theory of technical difficulties onto a back burner. The museum displays many Mardi Gras crowns, some on pedestals where they sit with their accompanying scepters on pillows. This allows museum visitors an up-close look at the extraordinary beauty and workmanship of the crowns, several of which are family heirlooms on loan to the museum. All are one-of-a-kind, very expensive and impossible to recreate.

"A monarch that year wanted to use a family crown we have on display," she remembers. Mrs. G. went to get it, "and the crown wasn't there." The matching scepter was still neatly balanced on the pillow. Nothing else was missing from the room. Mrs. G. searched everywhere for the crown, and over the next few days the staff looked high and low for it, heartsick at the thought that it had been lost or stolen while in the museum's care. When there were literally no more places to look, Mrs. G. realized that she would have to call the family and give them the bad news, and she resolved to do it when she came in first thing Monday morning.

Mrs. G. arrived at the museum after the weekend, opened the door to her office and there was the crown, sitting right in the middle of the black visitor's chair by her desk.

"When everybody came in, I started asking when they had found the crown, and they all said they didn't!" No one knew where it had come from, and it certainly had not been in the chair for the many days that Mrs. G. had searched for it.

"That's what really made me a believer," she says. "I would have had to call the family that day." Perhaps for emphasis, another crown later pulled a similar trick. This crown was stored with other items, or it was until the museum needed it. Hatboxes provide the right size and sturdiness in which to keep the crowns. This particular crown disappeared from its hatbox and could not be found. It had not been put in another box by mistake, because Mrs. G. and the staff checked every single one and additionally took apart all other places it could have been mislaid.

"One last time, I was looking in here, and I saw it," she says.

"In the box!" Mr. L. grins, remembering.

"And Mr. P. said, 'Yes, that's exactly where I put that crown,' but it wasn't in the box when we were looking for it," Mrs. G. says.

In the past year, a large silver bucket disappeared from a fundraiser, where it was needed to hold tickets for a drawing. The volunteer in charge of the event could not find it anywhere and asked Mrs. G.

"She told me," the volunteer remembers, "that these things happen all the time and it would come back. Sure enough, the silver bucket reappeared right where we'd left it."

Mr. L. says that the fire dogs are what give him pause. Due to the floats' unfortunate habit of catching fire in the days when they were illuminated with torches and flame reflectors, a fire truck always comes at the end of every parade. The Carnival Museum has a fire truck display in the big carriage house, and in the driver's seat sits a mannequin of a firefighter. Beside him a pair of Dalmatians, one large and one smaller, ride along.

"The little one is always cockeyed," he remarks. "I'll straighten it, then two weeks later it's down on the floorboard again." Although the fire engine is clearly marked with a sign that prohibits climbing on it, the museum does have children through there on tours. It's possible someone could hoist themselves up on the truck, reach in and smack the little dog off the seat. But Mr. L. still finds it puzzling because it happens so consistently.

"It's not easy to get into, either. It's way up high. Those things are continually messed up."

Another interesting thing that may or may not be attributable to Ralph is the strange disappearance of food. It's common after events for the caterers to wrap up the leftovers and leave them in the museum's kitchen refrigerator. Rather than go to waste, the food is eaten up by staff and volunteers.

"For example," explains Mrs. G., "Sunday we have a party, they put food in there, the Monday morning crew comes in expecting it for lunch and it's not there! And nobody has been in." Sandwiches, sweets, cake, half a roast, soft drinks and, for a while, garbage bags have all vanished. A cake left out on a table after an event was found the next morning, transferred to the refrigerator.

"Only one person comes in after hours, to clean. We trust him, and everytime he's wanted sandwiches or things leftover, he's said, 'Are those just going to be thrown away?'"

"I don't know," she finishes. "I do consider it a quirk of people being together, but all I can tell you is we've had stuff put in the refrigerator and it's gone the next day."

The strange activities in the museum also manage to happen without setting off the building's very sensitive alarm system. Although, when she first started there, Mrs. G. remembers many a night when she and her husband had to come down there after a call from the alarm company, when motion had been detected in the house.

"It went off at least once or twice a month for the first four or five months I was here. We've never found anything ... I've always said I don't believe in ghosts," Mrs. G. states. "I can only tell you what I've witnessed. My assumption is that if there is such a thing, whoever or whatever this is likes what we are doing and is friendly."

"We like him," Mr. L. says. Ralph is one of the family, and the staff and volunteers don't hesitate to tell him to cut it out when he gets rambunctious.

Someone who plays practical jokes, commits minor acts of naughtiness, may crawl up in the fire truck to play with a stuffed dog, raids the refrigerator and drinks cans of soda; someone who gets lonely at night and turns on the videos, the music and the lights — if there is a spirit at the Mobile Carnival Museum, is it possibly a child? And if so, did he arrive with some of the amazing Mardi Gras artifacts and clothing — most of them donated or loaned from families in Mobile — and can't find his way home? Or did the transformation of the house from somber funeral home and dignified city museum into the magical, bright celebration of Mobile's tradition of play and revelry wake a long-dormant little spirit?

Mobile's Mardi Gras is unique in its family orientation; the city has always worked with the carnival societies in a cooperative effort that begins and ends with amazing cohesion and quality, year after year. The museum showcases the buoyant spirit of Mobile's carnival; the immense energy, joy and creativity that suffuses the annual celebration is reflected in every room of this oneof-a-kind museum. What young ghost wouldn't consider it an ideal place to linger?

"When we walk out in the evening and slam the door," says Mr. P., "who knows what goes on?"

CHAPTER 2

THAT MUST BE OUR LADY

On any given weekend, the exquisite Bragg-Mitchell Mansion hosts a grand party, an elaborate wedding or social event in fine style. Brides pose on the curved staircase, and guests in formal clothing fill the rooms with laughter and toasts. The Greek Revival–and Italianate-style home is shown to perfection, achieving the builder's goal of a home designed for entertaining and hospitality.

Turning off Springhill Avenue into the driveway of the Bragg-Mitchell Mansion is literally stepping back in time, so well preserved is this house. The antebellum mansion sits within a grove of oak trees. (The grove, chopped down during the war to allow Confederates a clear shot at approaching Federal troops, was replanted by Judge Bragg in 1865 from acorns that he had saved.) The home is meticulously preserved. Though it sat empty for fifteen years in the 1970s and '80s, no vandals broke in to ruin the interior, nor did thieves strip the house of its architectural treasures or antique furnishings. Some speculate that the house's haunted reputation kept thieves away, or that the ghosts themselves protected it.

Several families have lived in the eighteen-room mansion. The Bragg family who built it, and the Mitchells who bought it in 1931 and lovingly restored the home and gardens, are the owners most associated with the house.

Judge Bragg was a circuit judge and in 1852 was elected to the U.S. Congress. It is assumed that his brother, noted Alabama architect Alexander Bragg, designed the grand home. Construction began in 1855 with an eye toward presenting the best of Alabama hospitality and fine living — a place where the congressman could entertain guests from around the nation in style, proudly representing the thriving port city.

The Civil War devastated the fortunes of Judge Bragg, and the family never regained the success and lifestyle of the prewar days. Mrs. Bragg died in May 1869, and Judge Bragg died in 1878. The house became rental property and changed residents regularly for many years afterward.

When the Mitchells purchased the house, it needed a great deal of care to restore it to its original beauty. The Mitchells lived in the mansion until their deaths in the 1960s, and then the home sat, abandoned but untouched, until 1986. The City of Mobile bought it and began restoration. Over $1 million were spent to make the home as close to its antebellum condition as possible, following clues left under many coats of old paint and historic guidelines of the period.

Many owners — living through wars, economic disasters and individual joys and sorrows. One house — irresistible in its beauty and history. Who has stayed behind, unable to leave the long hallways and high-ceilinged rooms, cared for and preserved so attentively by the staff? Who mingles, unseen, among the party guests?

"There is supposed to be a lady here, lamenting the loss of her lover. One of those typical stories," says Virginia McKean, manager of "the Bragg" for two years. "And it was reported that Mrs. Mitchell may have seen the cat."

The cat was first mentioned in a newspaper article written in the 1970s.

"I've never had any experience with the ghost cat," says Mrs. McKean. "I've worked here at night a couple of times. My office used to be upstairs, and I've heard sounds come from one of the bedrooms. Like voices. But there was no one here but me; the house was empty."

She had just checked the rooms and turned off the lights for the evening prior to going up to her office each time, and she knew that she was alone.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Haunted Mobile"
by .
Copyright © 2009 Elizabeth Parker.
Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

The Mobile Carnival Museum,
That Must Be Our Lady,
The Ghosts of Oakleigh,
The Richards-DAR House,
The Ghost at Junior Miss Headquarters,
The Laughing Owl Ghost,
Is That Where You Keep Your Ghost?,
Nothing But Peace Around Her,
A House of Spirits,
My Sister, Arruzia,
The Ghost on Palmetto Street,
The Blue Bedroom,
We've Been Here a While,
Peggy's Window,
The Chairlift Ghost,
The Ragged Exhale,
Thy Charities on All,
Him Again,
In the Rafters, Hidden,
Hello, Mrs. Mitchell,
Stay,
Afterword,
Acknowledgements,