public

Heavily Investigated

Something lingers in the Tutwiler — and by most accounts, it keeps its own hours. Guests swear they've heard firm, deliberate knocks on their doors in the dead of night, only to open them onto an empty hall. Lights flip on in locked rooms; doors drift open on their own. A bartender once swore he'd killed every light before locking up — and came back to find the whole bar blazing. Staff eventually decided negotiation was more practical than investigation: each night at closing, they began saying aloud, "Good night, Colonel" — and the disturbances, they say, quietly stopped.

The original Tutwiler opened in 1914, bankrolled by Robert Jemison and Major Edward Magruder Tutwiler with one specific ambition: lure the American Iron & Steel Institute convention to Birmingham. It worked. The hotel became the city's social engine — 343 rooms, a grand ballroom for 1,200 — before it was unceremoniously imploded in 1974 to make way for a bank. The current Tutwiler, which opened in 1986 inside the former Ridgeley Apartments, is technically a different building entirely. Whether the Colonel noticed — or cares — is apparently still under debate.