Unexplained South: Interview with author Alan Brown

CC_Alan Brown

Speakers: Benjamin Morris & Alan Brown

Benjamin Morris (00:00):

Alan, welcome to Crime Capsule, and congratulations on your new book.

Alan Brown (00:07):

Oh, well, thank you very much. Yeah, it's a pleasure to be on your podcast.

Benjamin Morris (00:11):

Oh, we're delighted to have you. Now, we have had a number of experts here over the years, experts on respective topics. I dare say that you might be the most expertee of all the experts on your topic.

Benjamin Morris (00:26):

Because as I see it, you have published over 30 books over the course of your career, and your career has lasted, I guess around 30 years. So, we're talking something like almost a book a year as far as your output. I mean, that's incredible.

Alan Brown (00:44):

Yeah, yeah. Just about. And the cool thing is that my publisher, which is The History Press, the Arcadia Press, has taken some of my adult books and had me rewrite them for children.

Benjamin Morris (00:59):

Oh, that's fun.

Alan Brown (01:01):

So, I've got children's versions of some of my other books.

Benjamin Morris (01:05):

Are you writing these sort of ghost stories and mysterious disappearances and spooky caverns for kids?

Alan Brown (01:14):

Yes. I guess. In fact, my latest one is a children's version of Erie, Alabama.

Benjamin Morris (01:24):

Ooh.

Alan Brown (01:26):

Which is basically an unsolved mysteries type book, but it has ghost stories in it too. And so, this sort of thing is ... I'll tell you, writing a children's book is not as easy as one might think.

Benjamin Morris (01:41):

I can imagine it's actually much more difficult than one might think flat out.

Alan Brown (01:46):

It is, it is. You can just about say what you want in an adult book, but not with kids. Now, you got to be really careful. And you got to kind of put yourself in the mind of a child, which is not easy for a 73 old male.

Benjamin Morris (02:03):

Well, rare talent, rare talent indeed. Let me ask you this. You are from the Midwest originally, but you moved to the South. What first brought you down here, and then what sparked your interest in these stories of the ghostly, the spooky, the cryptographic, the paranormal, all the good stuff?

Alan Brown (02:26):

Okay. Alright. Well, I came down to the deep South in 1986. I was in need of a college teaching job. I'd been teaching high school for 12 years, and I'd had enough of it. And I had just gotten my PhD, and I thought it was time for me to move on to bigger and better things.

Alan Brown (02:49):

Well, I had two job offers. One was at the Livingston University, as it was called back then in 1986. And the other one was a university in Helena, Montana, which has an average of six feet of snow a year.

Alan Brown (03:09):

And so, I decided the South would be better. So, I guess that was the weather that took me down here. And living in Illinois, I was just sick and tired of shoveling snow anyway, and sliding off the road into the ditch. And so, I guess that's what brought me down here.

Alan Brown (03:29):

But once I moved down here, I discovered, first of all, the southerners love to talk. I can recall going to the gas station and trying to get directions. And after a couple of minutes, the gas station attended, finally got around to telling me the directions.

Alan Brown (03:48):

And while it was annoying at the time, I've discovered that, for someone who enjoys collecting stories, this is a gold mine. This is the ideal place to be.

Benjamin Morris (04:02):

Yeah. Our connection to our history down here is very, very strong. And I think that when you start traveling those backwoods and those country roads and so forth, you realize that every little patch of dirt, every little twist, and bend, and turn in the road has a story about it somewhere, somehow. And all you got to do is just find the right person who knows it and they'll share it with you.

Alan Brown (04:26):

That is a very good way of putting it. I got to know a lady named Captain Tucker Windham, who called herself a folklore writer, not a folklorist. But she was very good at digging up folk tales and rewriting them for a general audience. It's basically what she did.

Alan Brown (04:52):

And oh, she wrote a book called 13 Alabama Ghosts and Jeffrey. Jeffrey was the ghost that lived in her house. And so, that was the first one. And she wrote 13 Mississippi Ghosts and Jeffrey, 13 Tennessee Ghosts. Oh, I think she wrote about five of these.

Alan Brown (05:07):

And that's really the first thing that got me interested in this. But I can recall picking her up in Selma and bringing her down to Livingston for our Sucarnochee Folklife Festival every year. She would tell stories.

Alan Brown (05:26):

And as we were driving Highway 80, she would point out old graveyards, or old cemeteries, or old abandoned buildings and tell me the stories. I thought, “This is wonderful. This takes the ordinary and adds a new dimension to it.”

Alan Brown (05:46):

And I think that's what writers like me try to do. We try to uncover these fascinating legends and narratives that you can find just about in every town, every small town, every setting. They're everywhere.

Alan Brown (06:06):

Well, actually, the first book I wrote was a collection of WPA narratives collected by a woman named Ruby Pickens Tartt in Levinson in 1937 and 1938. And there were basically stories that were told by elderly African Americans who lived out in the Red Clay hills of Sumter County, Alabama.

Alan Brown (06:32):

And these were fascinating. Some of these were ex-slave narratives. Some of them were life histories and they all had folk tales embedded in them. Even the ex-slave narratives had ghost stories in them.

Alan Brown (06:49):

And you could tell by the way they told them, they believed this. This was not just something that was passed down. They really believed it.

Alan Brown (07:00):

And I love collecting stories like that.

Benjamin Morris (07:03):

For our listeners who may not be aware of the WPA Writers Project that took place in this sort of '20s and '30s when the federal government paid folklorists and sort of regular people just to go and collect these stories.

Benjamin Morris (07:17):

Those are an invaluable resource, and you really get the kind of unfiltered, unvarnished accounts of what people knew about their local counties in ways that you just never find today. I mean, it's an extraordinary collection.

Benjamin Morris (07:35):

Sometimes they're a little tricky to track down, but they're worth it. They're worth the hunt. So, I'm so glad that you got to make use of those. That's fantastic.

Alan Brown (07:46):

A lot of them are online now, the ex-slave narratives are. They all are. But all state archives have those. And like I say, some of the state archives are online. Not all of them are.

Alan Brown (08:04):

In fact, I had to go to Washington, DC back in, oh, that was about 1992 when I started doing this to get to access these things. Now, you don't have to go that far. But you're right, these are wonderful.

Benjamin Morris (08:19):

Now, do you teach this material to your students at the University of West Alabama?

Alan Brown (08:26):

I do it intermittently. Occasionally, I will teach a folklore course. I have taught teacher seminars to help them incorporate folklore into their literature classes. In fact, next fall, I'll be teaching a course on ... oh, let's see. It's the King Arthur in legend and folklore-

Alan Brown (08:57):

... and in literature. So, I'm doing all that, and that'll be fun. Yeah, we don't have a folklore minor, I just teach folklore intermittently, I guess. Whenever I get a chance.

Benjamin Morris (09:14):

Absolutely. Well, there's so much of it, it's hard to resist. Now, let me ask you, this is about your 30th or so book, and I kind of reckon after 10 or 12, we can more or less stop counting, but how did this particular volume, how did Unexplained South come about?

Alan Brown (09:34):

Well, that particular volume came about because History Press asked me to write it. I'd been writing a number of unexplained books about states, and they wanted one about the entire South.

Alan Brown (09:47):

And I actually found that easier to do because the South is full of these stories. And I just basically had to pick and choose what I wanted for the book.

Benjamin Morris (10:00):

Yeah. It reminded me a little bit in art history, there's this term, the catalog resume. It's sort of like the big grouping of everything that we know about one particular artist's body of work.

Benjamin Morris (10:11):

And it kind of felt like you were doing a version of that for the entire south here. And we're talking hundreds of cases included in this book.

Alan Brown (10:20):

Yes. It's like a smorgasboard of statewide legends. I tried to get the ones that I thought were the most intriguing, the ones that I would've liked to read if I picked up a book like this.

Alan Brown (10:36):

And I'll say one thing about my method is that I'm like a lot of writers these days, in that I start with the internet. I do start with Googling things and trying to find out what these legends are.

Alan Brown (10:56):

But then I travel to as many as I can. Fortunately, my wife loves to travel. And so, we go to haunted bed and breakfast for example. We go to haunted restaurants and I call her my ghost magnet because I really think she's a sensitive.

Alan Brown (11:16):

She has experiences in these old antebellum homes and I don't, I just record it. She has them, and she tells me what happened during the night, and I grab a piece of paper and write it down. And some of those are in my books, too.

Alan Brown (11:32):

But whenever I travel, I always pick up ghost books or legends books always. In fact, last week, I was in Virginia, went to Williamsburg, and all went to Virginia Beach. And I picked up all these books that I put in my library down in my man cave, down in my basement.

Alan Brown (12:01):

And I tell you, I don't have to go very far to get these stories, but it's taken me years to accumulate them.

Benjamin Morris (12:12):

Well, what a treasure, what an archive, what a collection. I mean, what a gift, what a gift.

Alan Brown (12:19):

Yes. In fact, I've got to figure out what I'm going to do with them after I expire because I don't want them to end up in a book. I think I'll donate them to a library. I think that's the proper thing to do.

Benjamin Morris (12:30):

Well, the other option, of course, Alan, is that you would just come back to haunt your own library and read these books in perpetuity, and then you'd be in pretty good shape.

Benjamin Morris (12:41):

Well, let's dive into some of these cases. I've got a little list of ones. I thought what we could do is maybe take one or two from each section of your book. You have them very neatly categorized into types of appearances or mysterious deaths and so forth. And I just wanted to run through it, a couple of ones that stood out for me.

Benjamin Morris (13:00):

First of all, in your section on unearthly images, you have some great cases in there. So, ones that's right up front is the Devil's Hoof Prints of Bath, North Carolina. What on Earth happens with the Devil's Hoof Prints?

Alan Brown (13:18):

Well, a lot of times when there would be some kind of geological or natural anomaly, people would try to ... their scientific knowledge was limited, so they would try to come up with what sounded like a logical explanation.

Alan Brown (13:46):

The devil's footprint. This is from Bath, North Carolina. And these are basically, depressions in the ground. Now, today, scientists say that these depressions are formed by salt veins. But of course, the folk of Bath, North Carolina didn't know about that.

Alan Brown (14:13):

So, they come up with this story of a young man named Jesse Elliot. We don't know where that name came from. But anyway, Jesse Elliot loved to race his horse, loved to bet, and he could outrun any horse in the county.

Alan Brown (14:33):

And then he talked to a stranger who again, said, “I'll bet my horse can beat yours.” They wagered a hundred dollars. And he had this sense that there was something wrong with this guy. And he informed his wife and told her about this race. And she tried talk him out of it. And he wouldn't, said, "No, I've got to do this."

Alan Brown (15:11):

And so, as he was putting his boots on and left, his wife shouted at the door, "I hope you'll be sent to hell this very day."

Benjamin Morris (15:20):

Goodness.

Alan Brown (15:20):

Well, yeah. I hope my wife never tells me that when I-

Benjamin Morris (15:25):

Yeah. Very supportive spouse there. Right.

Alan Brown (15:26):

... go to work.

Alan Brown (15:26):

So, they fired a shot, and the stranger and the rider took off, and Elliot explained, “Take me in a winner or take me to hell.” And all at once, his horse stopped dead in his tracks. Elliot flew over the horse's head, and he was smashed against the pine tree.

Alan Brown (15:50):

And of course, his friends ran up to him, but he was already dead. And a few weeks later, people returned to the scene of the race, and they found these hoof prints.

Alan Brown (16:05):

And so, yeah, I guess you could say that this is kind of a cautionary tale. A lot of these legends have what, warnings embedded in them. And I think this one is, first of all, don't gamble.

Benjamin Morris (16:22):

Especially with strangers. Yeah.

Alan Brown (16:23):

That's one of them. Especially with strangers, yeah. And listen to your wife.

Benjamin Morris (16:28):

That may be the most important lesson of all. Yeah, absolutely.

Alan Brown (16:33):

Maybe the most important one. Right. Yeah.

Benjamin Morris (16:36):

Good. Now, let me ask you this. Did you get to visit the site of this particular incident?

Alan Brown (16:42):

I have not. I did not. And I was in North Carolina. Well, we drove through it last week, and I was hoping we would stop there, but we didn't. Now, I have gone to some of these other places, like I don't know if you were going to talk about the face in the courthouse window of Carrollton, Alabama.

Benjamin Morris (17:01):

I was going to ask you about that particular face, because I actually looked up both of your incidences there. The one from Galveston at the medical center and the one in Alabama.

Benjamin Morris (17:10):

And I got to say, I pulled up some photographs of the one in the Galveston, and darn it, if that's not kind of spooky, you know what I mean?

Alan Brown (17:21):

That is really spooky. I took that picture. It's in my book. The one in Galveston. And well, I guess we should start talking about that.

Alan Brown (17:33):

There's a building called Ewing Hall on the campus of the University of Texas Medical Center. And on the coast there, it faces the ocean. And there are a couple of stories connected with it.

Alan Brown (17:56):

One is that there was an old man who owned property there. And he made his family swear that when he died, they wouldn't sell it. Well, after he died, they sold it to the University of Texas, and his face suddenly appeared I guess it's the south wall of the building.

Alan Brown (18:20):

Well, the other story, there was a man named Bigfoot Wallace. Bigfoot Wallace appears in a lot of Texas legends. He was a character, he was a Texas ranger, fought in the Mexican War. And as he aged, he wanted some kinds of compensation for his service. I guess, Sam Houston had promised to do this for him.

Alan Brown (18:49):

He wanted land, and I guess he wanted this particular spot of land here in Galveston. He didn't get it. And so, they say his face appears as a I guess it's a kind of a vengeful sign. He did not want the memory of this injustice done to him to fade. And that's why the face appeared on the wall.

Alan Brown (19:13):

And a lot of people say it looks like Bigfoot Wallace's face. And so, I'm leaning toward that variant as being maybe the main one, the one that makes the most sense.

Benjamin Morris (19:27):

It's very strange when you look at it because you have this sort of brick exterior, which in every other respect, is totally uniform. I mean, you write that they've cleaned it in pain, and sandblasted, and pressure washed and all this kind of stuff.

Alan Brown (19:42):

Yes.

Benjamin Morris (19:42):

And you look at every other section of the wall, and then weirdly, there's this one little portion where the pattern just changes totally abruptly. And it does resemble somebody's face. I mean, regardless of who's it is, you can't deny that it's just totally out of keeping with the rest of the facade.

Alan Brown (20:04):

Well, now, I've done some research into this phenomenon, and psychologists say that there's something called pareidolia, P-A-R-E-I-D-O-L-I-A. It's the tendency of the human mind to want to instill order in chaos.

Alan Brown (20:22):

And this is why when you're a little kid and you lie on the ground, you look up in the sky, you'll see Mickey Mouse's face in the clouds, or a puppy dog, or why people see the face of Jesus in the potato chip.

Benjamin Morris (20:35):

Yeah, of course.

Alan Brown (20:37):

And sell those things for thousands of dollars. But that could be what's happening here. I'm looking at the picture right now, but I mean, there are two eyes, there's a nose, there's a face. This is just, I don't know-

Benjamin Morris (20:52):

It's spooky.

Alan Brown (20:52):

I think anybody who didn't even know the legend would see that.

Benjamin Morris (21:01):

Oof. Yeah, very straight. Now, the courthouse window, though, tell me about the courthouse window.

Alan Brown (21:07):

Yeah, yeah. Now, that one, Ripley wrote about that in his Ripley's Believe It or Not! column. It's very famous. I'll try to race through it here.

Alan Brown (21:19):

In 1865, union General John T. Croxton, he had just burned down University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. He burned down the courthouse in Carrollton, Alabama. Well, the people of Alabama pulled together their money and resources and had it rebuilt as a fine wooden structure.

Alan Brown (21:42):

Well, it burned down again on April 5th, 1876 and the people were angry. They wanted justice served here. Sheriff was under a great deal of pressure to apprehend a culprit. So, he placed the blame on a mirrored mean-spirited black man named Henry. Well, so Henry was no fool, he took off.

Alan Brown (22:02):

And while he was gone, (he was gone for a couple of years) they rebuilt the courthouse. This time, they rebuilt it out of bricks.

Alan Brown (22:10):

And he received word that his grandmother was ill. So, he returned to Carrollton, and the sheriff was waiting for him by his grandmother's house and arrested him. And they took him to the garrett, the attic of the courthouse.

Alan Brown (22:26):

And story goes that later that night, he was looking out the window. He saw a crowd begin to form around the trees. And after about a half hour, somebody produced a jug of whiskey. They're passing that around. And then somebody got a rope, and he knew he was in trouble.

Alan Brown (22:48):

So, legend has it that as he gazed down to the crowd, he said, "If you hang me, I will be with you always." So, of course, they couldn't hear him. So, they broke into the courthouse, dragged him down, took him out to the slam, and lynched him in form of a contrary.

Alan Brown (23:03):

Well, the next day, a couple of members of the lynch mob were walking by the courthouse, and they looked up and they saw this face. And guy pointed his buddy and said, "That's the guy we hanged, isn't it? Guy who lynched him says, "It sure is." They ran upstairs. There's nobody up there.

Alan Brown (23:22):

Well, over the years, they have tried to remove the image. They used soap and water, they used salt water. And one legend has it, in 1920, a hailstone broke every window in the courthouse, except that one. And it's still there.

Alan Brown (23:49):

And people inside the courthouse, they got tired of people coming in and saying, "Where's the face in the window?" So, if you look at the picture of my book, you'll see an arrow pointing down to this particular pane where you can see it now. I think it looks like a happy face, a smiley face, but it's definitely there. And it's been there for, what, over 140 years, 145 years.

Benjamin Morris (24:24):

Yeah. You can see something kind of smooshed up against the pane there. It wasn't quite as sort of jarring or alarming as the one in Galveston when I was looking at it. But you can definitely make something out. I mean, there's something there.

Alan Brown (24:37):

Yes, you can. And they have set up a telescope on the street corner facing the window so that you can actually get a better look at it.

Benjamin Morris (24:48):

Oh, how gracious of them. Let me guess, but got to drop a quarter on the slot.

Alan Brown (24:54):

No, no, no, no. It's free. They say seeing is believing, and that's why these face stories are so ... I don't know, they're unsettling.

Benjamin Morris (25:07):

I'm just thinking that the county might be missing out on a little opportunity for some revenue there that they could use to patch the streets up in the area. But who knows?

Benjamin Morris (25:17):

Alright. Let's turn over to another category in your book. We will let our listeners go and visit these places and decide for themselves what they see.

Benjamin Morris (25:25):

But let's turn over to a case in your disappearances section, which we're going to travel sort of right split in the middle between Texas and Alabama, where we just were, to St. Landry Parish in Louisiana.

Benjamin Morris (25:41):

And I've lived here in Louisiana for a number of years. I will confess, this is the first I'd ever heard of this particular story. But as soon as you have the sort of the twist at the end, or the reveal, I started asking like, "How have we not talked about this before? How have I not come across it?"

Benjamin Morris (26:02):

Anyway, Bobby Dunbar. Oh, Bobby Dunbar. And this is a really curious one, because all of this here actually does dwell fairly comfortably within the realm of fact. This is much less about legend and myth and folklore than it is about just what the hell happened, Alan?

Alan Brown (26:22):

Yes. And the more facts you can find in a legend, the better it is. Because a legend is based in fact, but over the years through various retellings, that facts have become embellished and changed.

Alan Brown (26:38):

But you're right about this one. This one reads like it's from a newspaper. In fact, I think I got some of this information from newspapers.

Alan Brown (26:46):

But it begins with a little boy who was four years old. He lived in Opelousas, Louisiana, and he and his parents and his brother were going on a trip to Swayze Lake in St. Landry Parish. And he wandered off and they couldn't find him.

Alan Brown (27:06):

And the police at first thought that an alligator had gotten him. So, they opened up several of the reptiles, and he wasn't there. And they finally said, "Well, maybe he was kidnapped. That's a possibility."

Alan Brown (27:26):

So, they broadened their search, and after eight months, they located a man named William Walters, who had been seen walking through Hub, Mississippi. He was walking through town with a little boy.

Alan Brown (27:44):

Well, Walters explained that his name was Charles Bruce Anderson, that he was the son of a woman named Julia Anderson, who worked for him. And that she had basically given him custody of the boy. Well, the police didn't believe this story.

Alan Brown (28:03):

And so, the Dunbars traveled to Hub, Mississippi to retrieve their son. And his mother, she bathed him and recognized several identifying scars and moles. And so, they returned to Louisiana with this boy.

Alan Brown (28:24):

Of course, now, if this happened, we would take DNA tests and that sort of thing, but it was just enough for her to say, "That's my boy." So, they took him home. And then Julia-

Benjamin Morris (28:34):

We're like in the 1910s, right? I mean, we're talking almost over a 100 years ago at this point. Yeah.

Alan Brown (28:41):

Yes. I guess it was 1913. So, yeah, they did ... well, I guess they had fingerprints back then, but that was about as advanced as forensic crime science went. But anyway, Julia found out that her son was gone.

Alan Brown (28:59):

She went to Opelousas to claim him, and the police put the boy in a lineup, and she couldn't identify now.

Alan Brown (29:09):

And so, Walters was tried for kidnapping, and he spent two years in jail. But finally, the county just let him go. And so, nothing happened until he died. Bobby Dunbar died in 1966. In 2004, the Dunbar children said, "Let's see if he really is a Dunbar."

Alan Brown (29:36):

You'd think they would have tried to do this early. But anyway, so they did. And they had his DNA sample compared with that of a cousin, and the samples didn't match. So, we still don't know what happened to little Bobby Dunbar.

Benjamin Morris (29:55):

Well, we don't know what happened to little Bobby Dunbar, and we also, don't know who the hell was this child that just ended up being plucked out of the thin air from Hub, Mississippi.

Benjamin Morris (30:04):

And suddenly, you lose one kid, you find another, but neither of them are who you think you're looking for. And you just sort of like, "What on earth is going on here?"

Alan Brown (30:16):

Right. Well, what we're assuming that the faux Bobby Dunbar had a good life with the Dunbars, at least we hope he did. But that doesn't make up for all the injustice that was done here.

It is, it is. And occasionally, I have always found ... all of my legends books have that category in them, because people disappear all the time. And sometimes they're found and sometimes they're not. And they make really good stories.

Benjamin Morris (31:08):

Well, let's stay on the same wavelength of weird here, because I mean, there are things that we can easily categorize as drunk redneck out in the field, see something, and comes back and tells us about it, and we're just not really sure.

Benjamin Morris (31:27):

And then there are those ones where you have some documentation, you have like a formal investigation. You have evidence and procedures that are followed, and we're still kind of left scratching our heads.

Benjamin Morris (31:38):

And I wanted to ask you, in the strange, mysterious deaths section, you have a very unusual case, which is even a bit more recent than the Bobby Dunbar case coming out of St. Petersburg, Florida. There's a lady named Mary Reeser.

Benjamin Morris (31:53):

And I read this and you have a number of different types of cases in the mysterious deaths, some of which seem to be criminal, some of which seem to just be bizarre. And this one struck me as kind of the apex of the bizarre cases.

Alan Brown (32:11):

Yes.

Benjamin Morris (32:12):

And I just had to ask you about it because my grandfather was a chemist in Florida. I wish he were still with us to ask him about these sorts of things. Because I wonder if he would've had some insight into what might have happened in this particular incidence. But tell us about Mary Reeser.

Alan Brown (32:35):

Okay. Well, she was a 67 year old widow, lived alone in St. Petersburg. And pretty ordinary older lady.

Alan Brown (32:50):

Well, on July 1st, 1951, her landlady came to her apartment to talk to her. And she was Mrs. Carpenter, had smelled something coming from Mary Reeser's apartment. So, they decided they’d check it out.

Alan Brown (33:18):

And turns out that about three hours later, a telegraph boy came to Mrs. Reeser's house. And she didn't answer the phone, so he went to Mrs. Carpenter. Mrs. Carpenter signed for it, and then went to Mary's apartment, put her hand on the doorknob, and it burned her fingers.

Alan Brown (33:49):

And so, she asked a couple of house painters to go down the street and help open it up. They opened the door, and what they found was I don't know, a 10 pound glob or charred mass. This woman weighed 170 pounds, and that's all that was left of her.

Alan Brown (34:12):

Her liver was fused to her vertebrae. And the corner where her chair had sat, it was basically unscathed by the flames. But there were two candles on a table that were just totally melted. Now, the light switches were melted. Her skull seemed to have shrunk to the size of a teacup.

Alan Brown (34:44):

And for lack of a better explanation of fire chief said, "Well, maybe she just fell asleep with a cigarette in her hand and set herself a fire. But that didn't explain everything that happened. Well, this is a classic example of spontaneous combustion. [Crosstalk 00:35:09].

Benjamin Morris (35:09):

I just want to linger on that phrase there. This is a classic example of spontaneous combustion. I just want to hold that thought in mind that there is such a thing as a classic example.

Alan Brown (35:21):

Yeah. I use that term as if everybody knows about it. But people like me who explored the weird and strange are very familiar with it. Charles Dickens wrote about it in his book, Bleak House back in the 1860s. And so, it's been around a while.

Alan Brown (35:46):

This one though, this is the one, everyone who talks about spontaneous combustion or write about it, they go to this one.

Benjamin Morris (35:56):

Oh, really? Oh, interesting.

Alan Brown (35:58):

Yeah, because it's so terrible. And of course, scientists now, think, "Well, maybe her body fat caught on fire." But that still doesn't explain why it burned the way it did.

Benjamin Morris (36:13):

Because it sounds to me like from your description ... and forgive me if I didn't quite understand it, it was a little tricky to kind of keep track of the sequence of events here.

Benjamin Morris (36:21):

But it sounds like whatever ignited this flame started at a certain hour and then the flame built in intensity. It must have maybe suffocated her in her sleep. So, hopefully, she didn't suffer at all.

Benjamin Morris (36:36):

But the flame grows and grows and grows. And it basically sort of leads to this almost like a sort of part cremation, but strictly within the confines of the apartment. And that when the investigators opened the door, it released this sort of fireball of pent up heat that had never escaped the room. I mean, that's just remarkable.

Alan Brown (37:07):

The way you described it is much more detailed than a coroner's report. I have read that and it's very sketchy. Because they just didn't know, the coroner didn't know, nobody knew very much about this phenomenon. And there have been other cases reported since then.

Benjamin Morris (37:26):

It's something. I mean, I'm not trying to sort of delve into the macabre aspect of it. It's just sort of like an engineering physics and chemistry mystery as to kind of what might have happened to leave this grizzly scene behind of just how does that even take place? You got me.

Alan Brown (37:47):

It is a mystery. Well, like Shakespeare said, "There's much in heaven and earth as it is outside of our philosophy." And that is true. We don't know everything about ... we pride ourselves on our scientific knowledge, but there's some gaps there that have not been filled. And this is one of them.

Benjamin Morris (38:10):

Well, we hope that she's resting in peace now, for sure. It's a really, really unusual case.

Benjamin Morris (38:16):

Let's take a look at some of your legendary graves. There is a really intriguing section here where of course you write that grave sites have always been magnets for people who are seeking certain kinds of experiences or thrills, and the sort of cemeteries as a destination sites. That's been with us for a long time. We know that.

Benjamin Morris (38:40):

But here you have a case out of Harrisburg, Kentucky, which was very evocative. I mean, there's a sort of a whiff of romance, there's a whiff of elegy. There's sort of a whiff of a lot of different elements in this particular story.

Benjamin Morris (38:59):

And I was just wondering if you could tell us about this young woman who ... well, we don't really know that much about her, do we? But we only-

Alan Brown (39:08):

This is one of those stories that my friend Kathryn Tucker Windham wrote about. And she was drawn to stories like this, like you say, that have this supernatural, romantic, mysterious quality to them.

Alan Brown (39:26):

And it goes back to the 1840s in Harrisburg, which was a resort town. They had a spring there that supposedly had curative waters. And actually, the Livingston, Alabama, where I teach, it was a resort town, and it has what they call bode well, and people would spend lots of money to drink these curative waters from the mineral springs.

Alan Brown (40:09):

Well, like most of these resort towns with mineral springs, there were hotels there. One of these was a Harrodsburg Springs Hotel at Graham Springs.

Alan Brown (40:28):

And they had a big dance hall in their ballroom. And people would come there on the weekends and hopefully, get better from drinking this water in the spring houses. But they would also, dance and socialize.

Alan Brown (40:49):

And one day, this was probably in late 1840s, early 1850s, there was a young woman who signed into the hotel as Mary Virginia Stafford of Louisville, Kentucky.

Alan Brown (41:05):

Well, very pretty girl. And she said, of course, everybody wanted to talk to her. Well, she explained to the Grahams, the hotel owners that her parents were coming, but that she wanted to have some fun while she was there.

Alan Brown (41:24):

So, she changed into an evening gown. And danced with just about all the eligible bachelors there. And by the end of the evening, she had danced with so many people that she collapsed in the arms of the last young man and died. So, I guess she danced herself to death.

Benjamin Morris (41:51):

Yeah. Just right on the spot. Just, I mean, she …

Alan Brown (41:54):

Right on the spot. Yeah. Well, the hotel manager did an investigation of her personal belongings, couldn't find any ID. And so, the hotel management paid for the funeral and arranged it. And the young men she had danced with became her pall-bearers.

Alan Brown (42:20):

And she was buried outside of the hotel in what is now, a park. And the metal marker above the concrete slab reads, “UNKNOWN - Hallowed and Hushed be the place of the dead. Step Softly. Bow Head.”

Alan Brown (42:45):

And there are a number of ghost stories connected with this tragic event. In the 1960s, a nurse was walking by the Spring house. And this girl in a white dress, came up near the Spring house and said, "Please help me. I was attending a ball at the hotel, but now, I can't find my way back."

Alan Brown (43:17):

And the nurse said, "Well, the hotel burned down." And the girl buried her face in her hands started weeping and dissipated and vanished.

Alan Brown (43:28):

And no one really knew much about who this person really was until 2003, when there were rumors that she may have been a girl named Molly Black, who was the estranged wife of a man named Joe Sewell.

Alan Brown (43:51):

But no trace of her was found, that this has not been substantiated, that this really was that girl. So, it's still a mystery.

Benjamin Morris (44:06):

Have you been to visit that particular park and seen her grave site?

Alan Brown (44:12):

I have been there, yes. And it's really there. It's unsettling. Again, I hate to keep using that word, but if somebody's stories just make your flesh crawl, it's just, oh my. Could these things really have happened?

Benjamin Morris (44:30):

It's a lot to take in when you kind of read as many of them at once as you have. But this one just stood out for that sense of there was some germ of truth to some part of the story.

Benjamin Morris (44:43):

And we really are searching for that even years later in that just the romance involved leaves us in a different place than if it was just somebody who fell down a well and we never saw them again. That sort of thing.

Alan Brown (44:59):

You're right, you're right. But it's still a cold case. And that also, intrigues people. That's why a lot of these television shows like Dateline deal with murders that are unsolved, and we want to know why.

Benjamin Morris (45:17):

Well, let me ask you a little about a slightly happier grave site that you have. One which there's a little bit more to not just to go on in terms of fact, but in which the story itself just brings a little bit more sort of pride and joy and admiration into what the resident of this particular grave site was able to achieve in their lives.

Benjamin Morris (45:39):

Very famous resident of Huntsville, Alabama, Miss Baker. And of course, I was so charmed to see you include Miss Baker in this particular compendium, because we know a lot about some of Miss Baker's esteemed animal colleagues, her fellow animal astronauts, but maybe not everybody knows about her. So, tell us about Miss Baker.

Alan Brown (46:05):

Well, I had never heard of Miss Baker until my son-in-law told me this story. He and my daughter live in Huntsville, and he works at Redstone Arsenal. And he had seen her tombstone. This has to do with the space race of the late '50s.

Alan Brown (46:28):

And oh, geez, I was seven years old when this happened in 1957. And I remember the space race though, and I remember how nervous people were that those commies are going to pass us up in space and take over in the United States eventually and that sort of thing.

Alan Brown (46:52):

But I guess they wanted to send monkey knots up first before they send people to see if they could withstand the stresses of being catapulted out in the space.

Alan Brown (47:10):

And so, she was chosen from 14 suitable candidates, and they outfitted her little jacket and a helmet, and it was lined with rubber. And she had a respiration meter and was placed in a small shoebox-size capsule. And she had an oxygen bottle and a pressure valve.

Alan Brown (47:38):

And there was another squirrel monkey that went with her. Her name was Miss Abel. So, we have Abel Baker here-... going together, of course.

Alan Brown (47:51):

And so, they were launched from a Jupiter rocket from Cape Canaveral to a height of 300 miles. Flight was 16 minutes long. And they landed near Puerto Rico. And they were fine. Both monkeys withstood the force of 38 times the pull of gravity, but they didn't exhibit any kind of physical injuries.

Benjamin Morris (48:21):

That's great. Mission successful. Mission accomplished.

Alan Brown (48:25):

It was successful mission. Now, Miss Abel died from cardiac fibrillation produced by the anesthesia she had been given. So, she died just a few days later.

Alan Brown (48:38):

But Miss Baker lived a long time and eventually she became a celebrity at the U.S. Rocket & Space Center in Huntsville. And school children loved to see her and they celebrated her birthday every year. And she finally died of kidney failure at Auburn University in 1984. But she is married in Huntsville.

Alan Brown (49:18):

And I guess I see nothing wrong with that. One thing, it commemorates a historical event. Yes, it's a little strange, but history's strange, very strange. Which is why I love history.

Alan Brown (49:38):

I love these little footnotes like this little squirrel monkey who became just as famous as ... well, she paved the way for John Glenn and the other astronauts.

Benjamin Morris (49:53):

I was first thinking of course, of Laika, who has served as the inspiration for character in some recent films that have come out in the sort of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But, yes, for human space flight as well.

Benjamin Morris (50:06):

My favorite part of this story, Alan, it's not a throwaway comment, but it's just this one little side detail that you offer. Which is that after the completion of her mission, several years after she back from her flight, she got married, this little monkey got married.

Benjamin Morris (50:28):

And she now, rests side by side with her monkey spouse. And I just thought that was the best thing.

Alan Brown (50:37):

Yep. Yeah, I guess she had a husband named Norman, which is my middle name.

Benjamin Morris (50:51):

There you go.

Alan Brown (50:53):

And yeah, but it's a cute story. I couldn't resist it after my ... and I was very appreciative to my son-in-law for telling me about this story.

Benjamin Morris (51:05):

That's wonderful. And of course, in the grand tradition of Grave Sights, you say that people are still bringing her little gifts and presents and leaving little tributes at her headstone. Which is just absolutely delightful. Lots of bananas placed on top of the marker. It's great, just great.

Alan Brown (51:24):

Yeah.

Benjamin Morris (51:25):

Well, we are going to end this week on that high note. That is such a happy place in which to end the first journey through the weird, and the wild, and the uncanny of the South.

Benjamin Morris (51:37):

And we will pick up right here next week where we will get back into some of the unsettling, and the strange, and the spine tingling.

Benjamin Morris (51:46):

So, thank you so much for joining us, Alan, and we will see you again very shortly.