Jeffrey's Latest Thirteen: More Alabama Ghosts, Commemorative Edition

By Kathryn Tucker Windham, Dilcy Windham Hilley and Ben Windham

A deluxe, commemorative edition of a beloved collection of ghostly stories from famed southern author and folklorist Kathryn Tucker Windham’s home state of Alabama

Accompanied by her faithful companion, Jeffrey, a friendly spirit who resided in her home in Selma, Alabama, Kathryn Tucker Windham traveled the South, visiting the sites of spectral legends in Mississippi, Georgia, and Tennessee, among other places. In Jeffrey’s Latest Thirteen: More Alabama Ghosts, a sequel to her landmark Thirteen Alabama Ghosts and Jeffrey, Windham introduces readers to thirteen more of Jeffrey's ghostly acquaintances, each with the charm and universal appeal that has created hundreds of thousands of Jeffrey fans.
 
Among the other hair-raising tales in this collection, Windham spotlights the apparitions of academia. From the three Yankee soldiers who haunt the University of Alabama’s Civil War–era Little Round House to the Confederate soldier who resides in the University Chapel at Auburn University, Alabama’s institutions of higher learning seem to have more than a few paranormal pupils.
 
Photographs of the sites about which Windham writes are one of the best-loved features of her series of “Jeffrey the Ghost” books. Jeffrey’s Latest Thirteen features the image of a beautiful child who, though not photographed in life, reappeared long enough to be photographed with his bereaved father's borrowed camera. Bewitched readers will find the startling photograph of the child in the next-to-last chapter, just pages before he book’s photograph of Windham’s own spectral muse, Jeffrey.
 
This commemorative edition returns Windham’s thrilling classic to its original 1982 keepsake quality and includes a new afterword by the author’s children.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9780817389819

Kathryn Tucker Windham

KATHRYN TUCKER WINDHAM (1918-2011) grew up in Thomasville, Alabama. She graduated from Huntingdon College in 1939, married Amasa Benjamin Windham in 1946, and had three children before being widowed in 1956. A newspaper reporter by profession, her career spanned four decades, beginning in the shadow of the Great Depression and continuing through the Civil Rights Movement, which she observed at ground level in her adopted home town of Selma. In the 1970s, she left journalism and worked as a coordinator for a federally funded agency for programs for the elderly. She continued to write, take photographs, and tell stories. The storytelling was an outgrowth of her 1969 book, 13 Alabama Ghosts and Jeffrey. More volumes of ghost stories, folklore, recipes, and essays followed; she has now published more than twenty books. Her reputation as a storyteller led to thirty-three appearances over an eighteen-month period on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, which introduced her to an even larger audience. She has written, produced, and acted in a one-woman play, My Name Is Julia, about pioneering social reformer Julia Tutwiler, has narrated several television documentaries, and is a regular interviewee for national and international journalists visiting Alabama in search of the Old or the New South. It is a testament to the good humor, keen intelligence, and life-long curiosity of one of the region’s best known public citizens that she can guide visitors unerringly to either mythical place.

Book preview

Windham

The Piano

Dr. William Mudd Jordan was a fascinating man. His portrait, hanging now in the home of his grandson, Dr. Walter Jordan Brower, shows his white hair (neatly parted and combed across his high forehead), straightforward eyes, and firm chin. His black bow tie is tied with a surgeon’s precision. Only a quizzical lilt of an eyebrow and a hint of a smile at the corner of his mouth betray the sense of humor, the zest for living, that marked his life.

His pipe is missing from the portrait, and that seems a pity. Friends recall that his pipe was ever present, and when he shifted it from one side of his mouth to the other, the movement signaled the start of one of his famous stories.

Many of his stories were about fishing, for fishing was his favorite sport, and he was so successful that tales of his exploits were only slightly exaggerated.

I’ve had a lot of practice fishing, he used to say. I know how. And he did. He retired from the active practice of surgery somewhat earlier than he had intended to: he became allergic to the soap used in scrubbing and had to leave the familiar operating rooms in Birmingham. So he took up fishing.

Dr. Jordan and Ab Sagere, his employee and friend, raised their own bait in elaborate worm beds around his home at 2772 Hanover Circle. He reportedly had the finest worm beds in all of Alabama. When the two men decided their supply of worms was adequate, they loaded Dr. Jordan’s car with supplies and headed for the Gulf Coast. Dr. Jordan drove. Ab, who bore the title of chauffeur, rode in the back seat, an arrangement which pleased Dr. Jordan as much as it puzzled his friends.

We’ll be back as soon as our supply of worms gives out, Dr. Jordan would tell his wife, Augusta Sharpe Jordan, as he waved good-bye. She would smile and wave and blow him a kiss. Looking back at her, standing on the steps and waving to him, Dr. Jordan felt a surge of tenderness and pride: his wife was the loveliest, most beautiful, most gracious woman in Birmingham. Many, many people, less prejudiced than he, agreed with him. Too bad, he thought, she didn’t enjoy fishing.

With each fishing expedition, Dr. Jordan’s store of tales increased, but, though they laughed over his new stories, it was his telling of the old family tales that his listeners most enjoyed.

Sometimes he would tell stories he had heard from his father, Dr. Mortimer Harvie Jordan, Jr., about the cholera epidemic which invaded Birmingham in the summer of 1873. The elder Dr. Jordan was one of the heroes of these terrible times, joining with other pioneer physicians who worked day after sleepless day to minister to the sick and to try to curb the spread of the fearsome killer.

Will Jordan heard his father tell stories of that epidemic often as a boy (some family members thought those stories shaped young Will’s desire to become a doctor), and in later years he read with admiration and interest his father’s official account, written at the request of the federal government, of those awful days.

Sometimes his father would laugh and say to Will, You and the cholera came to Birmingham the same year—1873—and the combination was almost more than this town could endure! So the cholera epidemic was almost a personal thing to young Will, linked as it was with the year of his birth.

He heard stories, too, of his father’s experiences as a Confederate soldier with the Forty-third Alabama Regiment during the War Between the States, stories he recalled years later during the long months he served as a major with the medical corps in France during World War I.

And he listened to accounts of the earliest days of Birmingham, of the exploits of men who founded the city. As he grew older, Will Jordan wished he had listened more intently to the tales his father told, that he had written the anecdotes and the trivia that formed the colorful background of Birmingham’s early history.

Many of those stories were told on the wide front porch of the Jordan home on the corner of Twentieth Street and Fourth Avenue, North (later the site of The Tutwiler Hotel and presently the site of First Alabama Bank). Dr. Jordan and his wife, the former Florence Earle Mudd, delighted in having guests in their home, and their warm cordiality made the Jordan home widely known for its hospitality.

It was likely in this big house that Lalla, oldest of Dr. and Mrs. Mortimer H. Jordan’s six children, first began her study of music. Both Dr. and Mrs. Jordan appreciated good music, and they were determined that their children should take advantage of whatever cultural opportunities the young industrial city offered. So, as soon as she was old enough, Lalla, who was a year older than Will, began to take piano lessons.

Lalla, her teachers discovered, possessed unusual musical talent, and they urged her to continue her studies. Perhaps it was about this time, when her parents recognized and wished to encourage Lalla’s musical gift, that she acquired the massive Steinway and Sons Patent Grand piano. Perhaps it was later, after she had married, that the piano became hers. In any event, she spent long hours at the keyboard of that fine instrument preparing for a career as a concert pianist.

I like to hear you play, Lall, Will used to tell his sister. To tell the truth, I’m a little envious of you; I wish I could play the piano.

You could, Will, if you would practice, even a little bit. You’re busy with other things, but you really should learn to play. It would give you a lot of pleasure. Maybe you need a piano of your own. Maybe I’ll give you this one when I’m through with it! Lalla laughingly told him.

Lalla did become an accomplished pianist, but she chose marriage and a family rather than devoting her life to music. She never stopped playing though, and her music was a joy not only to her family but also to hundreds of other listeners. If, after her marriage to Ignatious Fenwick Young and after their two daughters were born, she ever wished, however fleetingly, that she had continued her musical career, nobody ever knew about it.

Lalla was only thirty-four years old when she died in 1906.

The piano, the Steinway grand she had loved, went to her brother, Dr. Will Jordan, whom she also loved.

Dr. Will was busy with his practice of medicine, too busy to take time to play the piano. He still wanted to play though, and occasionally he paused by the piano long enough to pick out a tune or two with one