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Once a year Old Cahawba opens its gates to the public and every year several ghost hunters and history lovers who are brave enough make the journey to Alabama’s first capital city walk through those gates.
Hunters, history buffs and those just interested in an interesting night climbed aboard a converted cotton trailer Friday. The roomy open-air cabin moved in the quiet, starry night. The headlights cut through the darkness, which enveloped the passengers behind.
The first stop on the tour was the New Cemetery, which was created in 1851. Luminaries lit the path to the tour’s first stop.
“There are messages left behind in this landscape by the people who lived here,” Linda Derry, site director, said. “Some of those messages are out in the open and are happy, but some you have to look for and are quite sad.”
Derry pointed out a monument to the Bells. One side reads J.R. Bell and the other remembers J.A. Bell. They were father and son who were killed in a shoot-out in the main street of Cahawba. The Bells' deaths were the ultimate conclusion of a long feud, which accused the family of making their slave steal keys from people, or was it?
Derry first experienced a ghostly encounter at Cahawba about 20 years ago right at the base of the Bells' monument. A group of ghost hunters came in to investigate the historic and haunted town. Derry was out in the graveyard with them when the hunters became very excited. They called her over to the Bell’s monument and said they had a very clear EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomena), which is a recording that plays an unexplained voice.
“It said as clear as a bell ‘Don key,’” Derry said. “I wasn’t surprised it said Don because he is our maintenance supervisor here and he hears voices all the time, but the other word key was interesting.”
Derry went on her day and then went home, but she still wondered what Don key could mean. That following morning she found out.
Don came in that day and told Derry he couldn’t find his keys. She relayed to him about the “Don key” episode so they decided to look at the Bell’s monument. However, the keys were not there. Later that day they were found — in the slave cemetery by the Bells' slave who was accused of taking keys for the family.
With that story in mind the hunters were sent off with two members of Central Alabama Paranormal Investigators.
The group spread out trying to find any abnormal activity before heading to the Barker's Slave Quarters.
There they learned about the Kirkpatrick family who renovated and then inhabited the home for mere weeks. The hunters were able to explore the first floor and the back of the home.
One man who lived in the area for a short time as a kid, Clifton Kirkpatrick, experienced a ghostly encounter almost daily then. However he didn’t know it.
When Clifton was a young kid he would go out near the cemetery and river. He was told to mind his step by a man named Gat. Everyday he would go out and play like young boys would do — getting into things he wasn’t supposed to do or going a little too far — all the time his trusty older friend Gat would tell him to be careful.
Clifton was relaying his memories of his old friend one day many years after the fact when he was told that his caretaker Gat had died several years before he was even born.
Stories like this swirl around Old Cahawba and once a year people can come through the gates. Some come to experience the ghosts like Hannah Estes, Prattville.
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