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Heavily Investigated

They say she only plays when no one's listening. Visitors report piano notes drifting through Gaineswood's empty music room — a melancholy tune that vanishes the instant a door opens. Heavy footsteps on vacant upper floors are another reported signature. The spirit is believed to be Evelyn Carter, a young Virginia woman who came south for a cold Alabama winter and never made it home. She fell gravely ill and died before the earth thawed enough to bury her — and when it finally did, some say she'd already decided to stay. Her remains went back to Virginia. Witnesses say her ghost did not.

Gaineswood started as a log cabin built by Indian agent George Strother Gaines on land tied to Choctaw cessions negotiated with chief Pushmataha. In 1842 General Nathan Bryan Whitfield bought the 480-acre tract and spent nearly twenty years raising a Greek Revival showpiece displaying all three classical orders — Doric, Ionic, Corinthian — executed by enslaved artisans from his own designs. Now a National Historic Landmark and house museum, Chippendale furnishings intact. Folklorist Kathryn Tucker Windham codified the haunting in her 1969 collection, locking Evelyn into the Southern ghost canon.