"Montevallo By Night"

Ghostly Campus Tour

*Note: Some of the stories I?m going to tell you come from a website written by Dr. Frank McCoy. Also note this tour is better taken when there are very few people out roaming the campus and after 10pm.

Palmer Hall = "Trummy"

Palmer Hall is a huge building. It has an 1100 foot auditorium. As far as the students are concerned, their contact with the ghost occurred on college night. College night was recognized by the Smithsonian Institute this year as having the longest-running continuous student-produced and directed student show in the country. It is a really intense rivalry. You declare that you are gold or purple (the school colors). Then you go through various athletic competitions followed by debates. Then it culminates in a series of nights beginning on Wednesday and ending on Saturday. Each group writes, produces, choreographs, and acts in a production it has written. Then on Saturday, a winner is declared. Probably no more then ten days a year do students have an interest in Palmer, but during that time, the rivalry and intense emotion are raucous on College Night.

The ghost of College Night is Trumbauer. They affectionately call him Trummy. He liked theater and he liked the University of Montevallo. There is a Trumbauer award given by the theater department every year. Supposedly, Trummy was miffed because his name was left off the outside of the building. He had something to do with designing it. So upon his death, he decided to get even with the people who used the hall, not in a malicious way, but more in the spirit of College Night, which is intense but fun. So Trummy will wander backstage and appear and disappear as students are getting ready. Most of these students have never appeared on stage before and certainly not in front of 1100 people with bands playing and cheerleaders and that sort of thing. So the fact that they would see an apparition in the labyrinth below the stage is understandable. Every once in a while, he gets really mischievous and determines the outcome of the competition by spinning one of the statues, and where it points toward the gold side or the purple side wins the award for the year.

Bloch Quad = Lady on the Stone and her suitor

Main Quad = Yellow Lady

Main Hall =Condie

Condie Cunniham's is a tragic story . The telling of it has all the elements of a Friday the 13th or one of the more recent horror movies. It seems that at the turn of the century, she was a student living in main Residence Hall. It was and still is today a female residence hall. She and some of the other girls were fixing a hot chocolate over a burner and it tipped over. Condie's gown caught fire. As the fire marshal tells us, the worst thing you can do when you are on fire is run, and that is exactly what Condie did. She ran down the hall. Subsequently, she died at the local hospital.

The legend of Condie flows from that, and it becomes more bizarre as students began to see in the wood grain panel to the door to her room the image of a woman screaming. Her hair was on fire, and the flames were shooting up. There were maintenance people who claim that they have seen the image too. It wasn?t just students who saw her. A few years ago, somebody decided to put the door in storage to put the school at ease. What happened was, the ghost reappeared in the new door. So it?s a classic kind of story. Even today, you can talk to students who swear that Condie came into their room. She's been known to go into the shower areas and scream her head off.

Some students have felt wind when the windows were closed. They have seen the carpet on the threshold of her room ripple as if someone walked into the room. Or they'll tell the story of a door opening, and there won't be anyone there. Now there is probably a rational explanation. It's an old building, and it is probably settling. There are images in clouds called pseudo morphs, and if the brain is looking for something, it will see it. And another person comes along, and they believe you. The girls say when she roams the hall, she doesn't do it quietly. She runs and screams through the halls as if she is still on fire. One student said Condie is coming back because she is trying to livie vicariously through the young students in the hall.

It's a scary building if you approach it at night. According to everybody that's seen it, the image is still on the door. I saw it twenty years ago. The girls often will hold initiations, and one part of it is you?ve got to go see Condie's door, and it's leaning against the wall in a storage closet. It happened in the central part of the building. The wings were added later. Nobody lives in that room now because of Condie. From the standpoint of fire hazards in the early 20th century, I would say yes. From my experience teaching in various colleges, I would have to say that most female dorms have ghosts. I?m not sure if there is any proof or not.

**I?m not saying I believe in ghosts, but I did hear a scream from the fourth floor at 4:45am that sounded almost human but something was off about it. It wasn?t a jovial scream.**

Reynolds Hall = the Colonel

The University of Montevallo has quite a few ghosts, but one of the most interesting is the ghost of Colonel Reynolds. He was one of the first presidents. When Julia Tutwiler helped get this  institution established as a girls' training school, Reynolds became the first president and made a go of it. He owned a store downtown, and kids had to buy whatever they needed from him.

During the Civil War, Reynolds was a colonel in the Confederate Army, and it was his job to supervise Reynolds Hall, which had become a hospital for Confederate soldiers. He learned that Sherman was about to attack the Briarfield Iron Works, which was a very valuable smelting facility for the Confederates, so he decided to go 8 miles from Briarfield and participate with the troops. Unfortunately, he left eh wounded soldiers in Reynolds unguarded, and when the Union Army came through, they massacred the wounded in Reynolds. Reynolds came back from Briarfield and was anguished over the fact that he had not died on the battlefield. He regretted not staying in Montevallo to protect the wounded men, so he never left. He said he?d never go from Reynolds Hall again.

I have been over to Reynolds on nights when maintenance people will swear that Reynolds? portrait has been moved. They will take it down and move it back to its proper place. No one has ever been caught moving it, but it does in fact move around the building. Every now and then, a gust of wind will blow across the stage when the doors aren't open, so it's very easy to imagine that there's someone else in the room. He's a ghost who is sorry for what he did in life, and he is trying to compensate for it after death.

[Lund head towards King's Cemetery and let Drake talk about hauntings on campus putting in your two cents every now and then point out the President's House]

Art Facility Alleyway = this is were more foul natured things have been felt and cat's have been known to congregate in large groups

King's Cemetery = Civil war era people are buried within those stone walls, several who have been here late at night have said to either have felt strange things or have said to have seen the ghosts of those buried here.

King's House = King's House without a doubt is the most talked about of all the haunted places on campus. It is said if you come here late at night and stay a spell you will feel the urge on a later date to come back right here where you left.

The legend is that Edmund King came into this area in the 1820's when Indians, of course, occupied the place, and he carved, quite literally, a homestead on top of a hill.

And then he built what was certainly the most magnificent house in the county, and possibly in the entire state. For example, when you walk in the front door, you will notice the ripple glass in the walls, which a 19th century sort of architectural touch.

The story is that King was a wealthy man, and his ghost will show up periodically in one of the upstairs windows, where you can see him counting his money. At times, he will lose money or can't figure out why his books won't balance, and the he starts roaming the inside of the house, and people see him walking past the windows. Then he will go outside, and. Of course, it's dark outside, so he carries a lantern and a shovel. And he's really looking at a building just behind the King House, where there was once an orchard. Supposedly, he buried his gold in the orchard so that Sherman's army coming through wouldn't get it.

"My first encounter with the ghost actually was a realistic one. It was my first year here, 1976, and I was hired to come here by President Kermit Johnson, who had already retired from being a principal and superintendent in Birmingham. He seemed to be really old to me back then. The students would tell you that they had seen the house's ghost, and we decided to stake out the place. My office was in Brock Hall right across the street. And we decided to wait after nightfall to see if we could se ehim. And sure enough, we looked up one night, and we saw this shadowy figure walking around outside of the house, and everywhere this figure went, it suddenly got very dark. He went to another place, and it got very dark again. The third time it got dark, I realized it was the president. Kermit Johnson was going around turning off all the lights to keep the utility down. The lights were on the ground, and he had to bend over."

The students still tell the story, but there is an interesting phenomenon that you will find at small colleges. Back in the '70's and '80's, there were much closer connections between students and faculty. That connection came because they didn't know that we didn't know everything, so what developed was the faculty perpetuated many of the ghost stories on this campus. They would have the students at their homes, and what are you going to talk to an 18-year-old about over dinner? You are not going to talk about math or science or art history; you?re going to talk about campus life, and there are few things more interesting that talking about ghosts, so it became almost traditional that faculty would tell students about the ghosts, and some faculty would really embellish those stories. This is not done so much anymore because there are fewer students living on campus. Back in 1976, almost all students lived on campus. Now there is probably only one third of the student body on campus. In 1976, the faculty was required to live within a few blocks of the institution. Today, many of them live within a half hour drive of the place. So many of those student/faculty relationships have not been continued.

I'll wait to tell the rest

That is the story you will more then likely hear of about King's but there's also one of a little girl who can be seen in the courtyard. And then a dark, more sinster one in regards to the kitchen. One I'm leary to talk about. Very few people aren't unnerved at walking by the kitchen late at night. I don't think anything has acctually been sighted as far as the kitchen goes but it most certainly has been felt. And whatever it is is not afraid of making its prescence known. It has been known to tell intruders to "Get out!" Other's you can even force inside the building as if by doing so you would be sentencing them to a fate worse then death.

Before ever hearing about the kitchen being haunted, I was off the Carmiceal Library from Bloch late at nightI had had a good night and I was still slightly zoned out from my art. Well I crossed the street not really paying attention to anything about three steps in I looked up at the kitchen because I felt like someone was staring at me. The closer I got the more malicous it felt. I couldn't seem to stop staring into one particular window. Right as I got parallel to it I felt like running screaming from the kitchen into Carmicheal for reason my brain couldn't comprehend. I never saw anything but I couldn't shake the feeling that I was being watched the whole time I was near the kitchen.

It's an almost ungodly feeling coming from that place at certain times during certain nights. Strange things happen around it to. Like for a week and a half whenever I had to be out at night there was always a dog if not a pack of dogs roaming not far away from King's, eventually I stopped going out the front side of Bloch and would of walked the backway to Comer if I didn't have a few buddies that were walking with me to College Republicans at that one night. Also, once when Drake and I were walking around campus we note this one guy who, whenever we got near King's house, would start kinda following us. It creeped us out. But whoever it was left us alone even if he did follow us around King's.