The Bride of Annandale

The Chapel of the Cross stands in Madison County, Mississippi, on the former Annandale plantation. Its builder was Margaret Johnstone, who started the project after the death of her husband John T. Johnstone in 1848; the church was consecrated on 19 September 1852. Its bricks were made on site, largely by enslaved people, a part of the history that is often left out of the ghost story.

The Johnstones’ youngest daughter, Helen, met Henry Grey Vick, a descendant of the founder of Vicksburg, in December 1855. They became engaged in 1857, and their wedding was set for 21 May 1859, Helen’s 20th birthday (state archives give her birth as 21 May 1839; some accounts say her 21st). On 17 May 1859 Vick was killed in a duel in Mobile, Alabama, according to the church’s Wikipedia history; a state archives finding aid adds that he was compelled to take part and was travelling to New Orleans. His body was brought home and buried in the churchyard on the day he was to have married. Helen later married a clergyman, the Reverend George Carroll Harris, and the Archives’ papers show their marriage on 20 August 1862. Both are buried near Vick.

The ghost story, which seems to be 20th-century, appears in Kathryn Tucker Windham’s “The Ghosts of Annandale” (1971), in Norman and Scott’s Historic Haunted America (1995) and in a local booklet, Shadows of a Chapel (1994). It says that Helen, “the bride of Annandale,” can be seen weeping at Vick’s grave, sometimes in a wedding dress. A second legend involves Annie Devlin, a governess said to haunt the Annandale mansion until it burned in 1924.

No firsthand witness has been identified in the sources. The real history is the better story: a wedding cancelled by a duel, a mother’s memorial to her husband, and the enslaved craftsmen who built the church that still holds services.

A woman seen weeping at a grave and a bride figure near the churchyard, according to later folklore.

Henry Vick’s grave in the churchyard behind the Chapel of the Cross and, in the legend, the nearby site of the Annandale mansion.

The legend appears in Windham’s ghost stories and in guides to Mississippi’s ghost lore; the church is on the National Register of Historic Places (1972).