March winds will blow in ghost stories at LBW Community College in Greenville as Alan Brown, a member of the Alabama Humanities Foundation’s Road Scholars Speakers Bureau, presents “School Spirits: Ghost Stories from Alabama’s College Campuses” at 11 a.m. on March 5 in the Wendell Mitchell Conference Center.

Funded through a mini-grant provided by the LBWCC Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation, the event is free and open to the public.

Alabama’s colleges and universities have generated a body of ghostlore that reflects the state’s long history of higher education, war, and racial strife.  Indeed, many of the state’s signature ghost stories originated in late-story-telling sessions in college dormitories and apartment houses.

Every college campus has at least one resident ghost, but for the sake of time, this presentation will focus on Alabama’s most haunted colleges and universities: Springhill College – The Ghostly Math Professor; Walker College (Bevill State Community College) – The Ghost of Dr. Carl Jesse; Auburn – The Ghost of Sidney Grimlett; Athens State University – The Ghosts of Abigail Burns and Florence Brown; University of Montevallo – The Ghosts of President Reynolds, Dr. Trumbauer, and Condie Cunningham; University of West Alabama – Ghosts of the library, Webb hall, Bibb Graves Hall, and Brock Hall; University of North Alabama – Ghost of the Book Store; University of Alabama – Ghost of the Jason’s Shrine and the Tri-Delta Sorority House; Judson College – The Ghostly Organist; Huntingdon College – The Red Lady.

Dr. Alan Brown earned his B.A. in English at Millikin University in 1972, his M.A. in American Literature at Southern Illinois in 1974, and his Ph. D. in Rhetoric at Illinois State University in 1985. He started teaching English at The University of West Alabama in 1986.  Dr. Brown has been a member of the Alabama Humanities Foundation’s Road Scholars Speakers’ Bureau since 1990.  Since 1996, he has published a number of books on Southern ghost stories, including The Face in the Window and Other Alabama Ghostlore (1996), Shadows and Cypress (2000), Haunted Places in the American South (2002), Stories from the Haunted South (2004), Ghost Hunters of the South (2006), Ghost Hunters of New England (2008), Haunted Texas (2008), and Haunted Birmingham (2009).  He has also published two literary tour guides: Literary Levees of New Orleans (1997) and Literary Landmarks of Chicago (2002).

The purpose of the Alabama Humanities Foundation is to create and foster opportunities to explore human values and meanings through the humanities. AHF is a nonprofit organization funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (of which AHF is the state affiliate), as well as by corporate and individual donors. AHF conducts its own statewide programs, such as the Road Scholars Speakers Bureau, SUPER teacher institutes and SUPER Emerging Scholars for students, and awards grants, on a competitive basis, to nonprofit organizations for humanities projects. For more information on AHF and its programs, please visit alabamahumanities.org or call (205) 558-3980.

No reservation is required to attend the free event at LBWCC in Greenville. For more information, call 334-382-2133, ext 3211.