Kathryn Tucker Windham – författare

One of the best-known and widely shared books about the South, Thirteen Alabama Ghosts and Jeffrey has haunted the imaginations of generations of delighted young readers since it was first published in 1969. Written by nationally acclaimed folklorists Kathryn Tucker Windham and Margaret Gillis Figh, the book recounts Alabama’s thirteen most ghoulish and eerie ghost legends.Curated with loving expertise, these thirteen tales showcase both Windham and Figh’s masterful selection of stories and their artful and suspenseful writing style. In crafting stories treasured by children and adults alike, the authors tell much more than ghost tales. Embedded in each is a wealth of fact and folklore about Alabama history and the old South. “I don’t care whether you believe in ghosts,” Windham was fond of saying. “The good ghost stories do not require that you believe in ghosts.”Millions of readers cherish memories of being chilled as teachers and parents read them unforgettable stories like The Unquiet Ghost at Gaineswood about the ghost of Evelyn Carter, who fills this Demopolis antebellum mansion with midnight musical lamentations because her body wasn’t returned to her native Virginia, and The Phantom Steamboat of the Tombigbee about the wreck of the steamboat Eliza Battle, which caught fire on the way to Mobile and sank one February night in 1858. People who live along the river say the flaming steamboat wreck still rises on cold nights, its cotton cargo blazing across the waves while its terrified survivors cry for help from the icy water.The title’s “Jeffrey” refers to a friendly ghost who resides in the Windham home and who served as Windham’s unofficial collaborator in this work and the subsequent books in this popular series, all of which are now available in high-quality reproductions of their spooky originals.

Petrifying the Peach State, hosts of haints have beset the state of Georgia throughout its storied history. In Thirteen Georgia Ghosts and Jeffrey, best-selling folklorist Kathryn Tucker Windham, along with her trusty spectral companion Jeffrey, introduce thirteen of Georgia’s most famous ghost stories.Windham won hearts across the nation in her regular radio broadcasts and many public appearances. The South’s most prolific raconteur of revenants, Windham, giving new meaning to the phrase “ghost-writer,” does more than tell ghost stories—she captures the true spirit of the place.Evoking Georgia’s colonial era, “The Eternal Dinner Party” explains why the sounds of an elegant dinner soirée still waft from the grove of Savannah’s Bonaventure estate. At the onset of the Revolution, the Tattnall family abandoned Bonaventure and slipped away to England. Young Josiah Tattnall eventually returned to fight in the Revolution, restored Bonaventure, and later became Georgia’s governor. One holiday eve, when the mansion was bedecked with magnolia and holly and crowded with visitors, a fire too large to control swept through the old house. Tattnall, exhibiting his cool head and impeccable manners, ordered the massive dinner table carried out to the garden where he enjoined his holiday revelers to continue their stately meal. The melancholy strains of Tattnall’s dinner guests still echo through Bonaventure’s ancient oaks on moonlight nights.In The Ghost of Andersonville, Windham takes visitors near the woebegone Confederate prisoner-of-war camp. A plaque there still recounts the tale of Swiss immigrant and Confederate captain Henry Wirz. Convicted—many thought wrongly—of war crimes, Wirz’s restless ghost still perambulates the highways of south Georgia. Writing for the Georgia Historical Commission, Miss Bessie Lewis quips in her preface to this beloved collection, “Who should be better able to tell of happenings long past than the ghosts of those who had a part in them?”A perennial favorite, this commemorative edition restores Thirteen Georgia Ghosts and Jeffrey to the ghastly grandeur of its original 1973 edition.

Jeffrey’s Latest Thirteen: More Alabama Ghosts is 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.

Thirteen Tennessee Ghosts and Jeffrey is a deluxe, commemorative edition of famed southern author and folklorist Kathryn Tucker Windham’s introduction to the Volunteer State’s most enduring ghost stories.In Thirteen Tennessee Ghosts and Jeffrey, beloved and best-selling folklorist Kathryn Tucker Windham presents a spine-tingling collection of Tennessee’s eeriest ghost tales. Accompanied by her faithful companion, Jeffrey, a friendly spirit who resided in her home, Windham traveled from the mysterious muds of Memphis to the haunted hollow’s of east Tennessee to collect the spookiest collection of Volunteer State revenants ever written.  In these perennial favorites, Windham captures the gentle folk humor of native Tennesseans as well as fascinating facts about the state’s rich history. In “The Dark Legend,” Windham recounts the story of explorer Merriwether Lewis, who met an untimely end on the Natchez Trace 1809 and whose spirit, it is said, still treads through Tennessee’s forests. Windham also visits central Tennessee’s Chapel Hill, where people who know the town say those who stand on the train tracks on dark, lonely nights can often see a disembodied light floating along the tracks. Neighbors say it’s the ghost of a headless flagman who returns to cavort with night-time guests.  High in Tennessee’s Appalachian mountains, Windham encounters Martin, the phantom fiddler of Johnson County. Legend has it that in life Martin’s musical skills so mesmerized the snakes of the Stone Mountains that they would slither from their dens to listen tamely to his fiddling. Intrepid visitors to the rocky tops of northeast Tennessee’s mountains say you can still hear Martin’s ghost fiddling in the hollows.  This handsome, new commemorative hardback edition returns Windham’s suspenseful classic to its original keepsake quality and includes a new afterword by the author’s children.

Jeffrey Introduces Thirteen More Southern Ghosts is a commemorative facsimile edition of the beloved and best-selling second book in famed national folklorist Kathryn Tucker Windham’s southern ghosts series.Jeffrey was the resident apparition in the Selma, Alabama, home of nationally-known folklorist Kathryn Tucker Windham and the inspiration for Windham’s best-selling collection of macabre tales that reveal two hundred years of Alabama’s ghostly secrets, Thirteen Alabama Ghosts and Jeffrey. One of the most popular books ever published in the state, generations of Alabama children and students have been thrilled and chilled by Windham’s spectral legends.  Following the overwhelming success of Thirteen Alabama Ghosts and Jeffrey, Windham and Jeffrey began to journey across the South assembling a second collection of ghastly tales that repeat Windham’s winning combination of traditional folklore, Southern history and culture, and family-friendly story-telling. In Jeffrey Introduces Thirteen More Southern Ghosts, Windham’s disembodied friend roams the states of Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Florida to recall thirteen more timeless, spine-tingling tales of baneful and melancholy spirits that spook the most stoic heart.  Opening this volume is “The Girl Nobody Knew.” One midsummer night in the genteel Kentucky mineral spring resort of Harrodsburg, a beautiful lady arrived at the town’s grand hotel. The belle danced late into the night with the town’s smitten gallants only to expire suddenly with the notes of the last quadrille. The spooked residents of Harrodsburg guard a grave you can see to this day. Readers then visit the world-famous Bell Witch of Robinson County, Tennessee. Jeffrey also makes his first trip to old New Orleans to reveal a revenant in residence on Royal Street before continuing his ghostly progress across Dixie.  This new edition returns Jeffrey Introduces Thirteen More Southern Ghosts to its original format in jacketed cloth full of original, black-and-white illustrations in a handsome keepsake edition perfect for gift-giving and for families, folklorists of all ages, and libraries.

For as long as Mississippi has existed (and then some), flocks of phantoms have haunted the mortal inhabitants of the Magnolia State. In Thirteen Mississippi Ghosts and Jeffrey, best-selling folklorist Kathryn Tucker Windham, along with her trusty spectral companion Jeffrey, introduces thirteen of the state’s most famous ghost stories.  Although stories about Mississippi’s spirits seemingly outnumber the ghosts themselves, Windham observes that “Southern ghost tales are disappearing because people no longer sit around on the porch on summer nights and tell stories. The old folks who grew up with these stories are dying now, and the stories are dying with them.”  Fortunately for us, Windham was a writer dedicated to preserving these tales in print. The veteran author spent many years tracking down these stories and chronicling the best ones. From the ghost of Mrs. McEwen still wearing her beloved cameo pin and keeping a watchful eye over Featherston Place, her home in Holly Springs, where, she swore, she would stay forever, to the ghostly visage fixed permanently on the bedroom window pane of Catherine McGehee, who searched the horizon ardently for her unrequited love to come to her as promised at Cold Spring Plantation in Pinckneyville, Windham’s stories cover the breadth and depth of Mississippi—at times more moonlight than magnolia.  An enduring classic, this commemorative edition restores Thirteen Mississippi Ghosts and Jeffrey to the ghastly grandeur of its original 1974 edition.

In this memoir, a child's recollections of her family and warm home life are lovingly preserved in a front-porch ambience. Windham, who frequently participates in oral storytelling sessions around the country, grew up in a small Alabama town in the early part of this century. She was surrounded by offbeat adults in those years, among them a doughty aunt, who was the town's formidable postmistress, and a circuit-riding Baptist-preacher grandfather. They were fodder for legends within the family, as well as story-creators themselves. As Windham weaves her memories there are digressions into tales that mark the castes of a bygone South, tales that move in slow cadence and bring to life a family that accommodated all members in their entertaining oddities. The word ""serigamy"" is, according to the author, a family coinage, used through the generations to indicate ""a goodly number,"" and the word aptly applies as well to this charming retrospective.

This slender book, the last of twenty-nine written by Kathryn Tucker Windham over her long and productive life, will be an exquisitely bittersweet read for the many fans of the late storyteller and author from Selma, Alabama. In She, which Windham was putting the finishing touches on when she died in June 2011, the author describes how she woke up one day to find that she had an unwanted houseguest, an old woman who had suddenly moved into her home and was taking over her life. Windham referred to this interloper simply as She, and here the reader has been invited into the lively colloquy between the author—whose spirit has not changed—and her alter ego, who moves haltingly toward her earthly end. She will leave you laughing and crying, but also grateful and hopeful.

In her inimitable storytelling style, Mrs. Windham takes readers on a tour of the history, people, and places of the “heart of Dixie.” First published in 1975 and long out of print, Alabama: One Big Front Porch is now reissued in a handsome new edition. Alabama, they say, is like one big front porch where folks gather on summer nights to tell tales and to talk family. Everybody, they say, is kin to everybody else—or knows somebody who is. It’s a sprawling porch, stretching from the Tennessee River valley to the sandy Gulf beaches with its sides sometimes slipping over into Mississippi and Georgia. The tale-tellers don’t all look alike and they don’t all talk alike, but the stories they tell are all alike in their unmistakable Southern blend of exaggeration, humor, pathos, folklore, and romanticism. Family history is woven into the stories. And pride. And humor. Always humor.

This is the first anthology of the author’s own favorite ghost stories from the highly successful Jeffrey series of books that began in 1969 with 13 Alabama Ghosts and Jeffrey. Hundreds of thousands of these books have been sold. The present volume includes 13 of the best of Mrs. Windham’s stories, representing mysterious and supernatural doings from Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, and Mississippi. Most of the stories are related to historical places and sometimes to historical people.