WORDS Brent Rosen
Like most places with a long and colorful history, Montgomery is full of ghosts. Unlike most other places, Montgomery’s ghosts can’t make lights flicker, don’t stand at the foot of your bed silently watching, and won’t chase rebellious teenagers from graveyards. Montgomery’s ghosts aren’t that stereotypical, although some do wear sheets and some do drag chains.
Take Dexter Avenue, Montgomery’s most haunted street. Powerful ghosts live there, tangling and swirling together like a Ying Yang, each with a small amount of the other, an amount even the most ardent had to begrudgingly respect. These ghosts remind us that perspective is the difference between a demigod, a demagogue and a demon. Their rhetorical fervor now reduced to a murmur, but a murmur that travels on the wind blowing from South Union Street to Dexter Plaza. Something about that murmur must be frightening, since what was once Montgomery’s most vibrant street is now mainly deserted.
The haunting isn’t contained on Dexter. Scary ghosts have frightened away business on Cottage Hill and in Capitol Heights, turning Mobile and Mt. Meigs Streets into the forlorn, dusty, musty places where ghosts thrive. Were it not for the ghosts, commerce would have come back to Commerce long before 2007. Outside of downtown, the ghosts haunting Cloverdale and McGehee Estates have gotten so bad some folks established Pike Road, hoping - one can only assume - that a place without history is also a place without ghosts.
If this seems like a particularly frightening ghost story, I have good news: ghosts are not real. Let me repeat: ghosts are not real. Not even a little. Montgomery’s ghosts are no more real than the Red Lady of Huntingdon, the maniac with the hook hand who prays on young lovers, or the comely hitchhiker who forgot her sweater. Remember - if you refuse to believe in ghosts, you take away their power.
I started thinking about Montgomery’s ghost stories after my visit to the Historic South Hull neighborhood and my conversation with Dr. Susie Paul. After our interview for the Cottage Tour last month, she sent me an email, an email that felt like a ghost story. Dr. Paul realized outsiders feared her neighborhood, as she explained that Historic South Hull had been “ravished by white flight for a good while,” yet she stressed “ALL of her neighbors had been welcoming and wonderful” to her. She went on: “I swear, in Montgomery, people do that ‘oh, I’m not a racist; I just want to be careful about my property value’ deal as an excuse for not moving into an area like ours. I absolutely hate to hear this. We really are black, white, and brown, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Atheist. And especially, we are affluent and poor over here.” Dr. Paul continued, “when you walk out the door here, you’re just not living in a place where you can take for granted that everybody agrees with you on most things. You have to stretch, and this makes for greater humanity in each of us.”
Dr. Paul ignored the ghost stories about South Hull. She refused to believe the neighborhood was haunted, refused to see the “other” as a frightening presence. And Dr. Paul is right. Historic South Hull is beautiful, diverse, vibrant, not scary. Interestingly, Dr. Paul’s belief goes beyond anecdote: crime statistics offer hard facts, and those facts say Historic South Hull is no more dangerous than any other midtown Montgomery community - including Old Cloverdale. Those who use words like “dangerous” or “dark” to describe places like South Hull are telling ghost stories, but once you remember there is no such thing as ghosts, you see that neighborhoods like South Hull are alive, not un-dead.
So at the risk of being redundant, let me repeat: ghosts are not real. So now I am left to wonder something else: if there is no such thing as ghosts, what are all the people who fear Montgomery so afraid of?