In this elegant, simple tale of a true incident, renowned storyteller Kathryn Tucker Windham reminds us of the endurance of love and the durability of the human spirit. Hiram, a poor farmer, approaches her father, a banker, for a loan of expense money for a journey. The background to Hiram’s quest encompasses love, loss, the terrible human costs of slavery, and the complex relationships between black and white Southerners. Hiram returns from his journey with a gift for his banker friend and a...

Spit, Scarey Ann, and Sweat Bees recalls small-town life in the 1920s and ‘30s, garnished with ruminations about folktales and superstitions. Mrs.Windham recalls how Thurza, her family cook, tucked a wooden match in her hair to cure a headache, and how her father spit in his hat when a rabbit crossed the road. She ponders the origins of old sayings and the creativity of children’s play before television and air conditioning. She affectionately recounts stories about family members, friends,...

Jeffrey, the ghost that has haunted Kathryn Tucker Windham’s house for 40 years is back. This time, he helped Mrs. Windham choose 13 of the best stories from her acclaimed series of Southern ghost stories. This new volume, with an introduction by the author, is filled with cameos by historical places, collecting the best of the stories from Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Georgia. Learn why a phantom witch relentlessly torments the Bell family and gasp as a farmer vanishes into thin air....

This slender book, the last of twenty-nine written by Kathryn Tucker Windham over her long and productive life, will be an exquisitely bittersweet read for many fans of the late storyteller and author from Selma, Alabama. Windham died shortly before the publication of the volume, but only over the last eighteen months of her life did she seem constrained by her advancing years. In She, which Windham was putting the finishing touches on when she died at age 93 in June 2011, the author describes...

On the occasion of the centennial of the public library in historic Selma, Alabama, beloved storyteller Kathryn Tucker Windham relates the true story of Ernest Dawson. When he was a boy in the 1930s, segregation laws had barred Dawson from using the Selma library. But his love of books and his eagerness to learn was strong, and he eventually became a teacher. Years later he bequeathed to the Selma library money for a new children’s wing so that other eager young readers of all races would...

Jeffrey was the resident apparition in the Selma, Alabama, home of nationally-known folklorist Kathryn Tucker Windham and the inspiration for Windham’s best-selling collection of macabre tales that reveal two hundred years of Alabama’s ghostly secrets, 13 Alabama Ghosts and Jeffrey. One of the most popular books ever published in the state, generations of Alabama children and students have been thrilled and chilled by Windham’s spectral legends. Following the overwhelming success of 13 Alabama...