Sturdivant Hall

Sturdivant Hall is the finest of Selma’s antebellum houses, a Greek Revival mansion begun in 1852 and finished in 1856. It was designed by the architect Thomas Helm Lee for Colonel Edward T. Watts, and a later architect, Edward Vason Jones, called it one of the best Greek Revival houses in the Southeast. The Watts family left for Texas in 1864, and the house was sold that year to a local banker, John McGee Parkman, for $65,000.

Parkman’s story is the heart of the legend. After the Civil War he headed the First National Bank of Selma, which suffered heavy losses in cotton speculation. Reconstruction authorities seized the bank, and Parkman was arrested and held at Cahaba. In May 1867 he was killed while trying to escape. The house was auctioned in 1870 to the merchant Emile Gillman for $12,500, and his family lived there until 1957, when the City of Selma bought it with a bequest from the estate of Robert Daniel Sturdivant for use as a museum. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973.

The folklore picked up speed in the 1960s, when the Selma storyteller Kathryn Tucker Windham included “The Return of the Ruined Banker” in her 1969 book 13 Alabama Ghosts and Jeffrey. In that telling and in the version still repeated by the museum, Parkman promised never to leave the house until his name was cleared. The museum’s executive director, Manera Sercy, has told Alabama Public Radio that she hears footsteps pacing the second floor when no one is there, that objects get moved, and that staff and visitors have also heard children running through the building. A local retelling adds two little girls at an upstairs window, taken to be Parkman’s daughters, and a man in a top hat on the second-floor balcony.

Sercy says the museum does not mind the ghosts, which help draw some 1,500 visitors a year, and Selma’s haunted-history tours have included the house along with Old Cahawba and Live Oak Cemetery. Even so, nothing in the story has been investigated in a way that could support it. The historical record shows a banker ruined by his times and a family tragedy, and the ghost is best understood as the community’s way of remembering him.

Footsteps pacing the second floor, doors opening and closing, objects moved, the sound of children running, two girls at an upstairs window and a man in a top hat on the balcony.

The second floor, the upstairs windows and the front balcony of the 1850s mansion.

The house features in Selma’s annual Haunted History tours, in Windham’s 13 Alabama Ghosts and Jeffrey and in Alabama Public Radio’s Alabama Ghost Trail series. It is also used for the city’s military and social events.