Haunted Mobile: Apparitions of the Azalea City

By Elizabeth Parker

Stories and photos that reveal the unknown spirits lurking among the living in this Alabama city . . .
 
Mobile native and local history expert Elizabeth Parker combines the spookiest stories in Mobile Ghosts: Alabama’s Haunted Port City and Mobile Ghosts II: The Waterline to create an updated volume that will 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 16, 2009
• ISBN: 9781625842695

Book preview

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.

The Mobile Carnival Museum.

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