The 177-year-old Lakewood House in Livingston, Ala. has been inhabited by the same family for seven generations, and for as long as they've been keeping track, it's been inhabited by the same ghost as well. 

The house, built in 1832, looked like the poster image of a haunted antebellum home on the night of Oct. 3. With a full moon hanging over the double-chimneyed roof, an eerie light was cast upon the white brick pillars, large screened porch, and steep staircase of the two-story home. A wrought iron fence that once enclosed the family plot of graves, crooked old trees scattered throughout the spacious yard, and an old water well sitting alongside the house made it look like the perfect haunt for troubled spirits. 

Olivia "Sweetie Pie" Collins, has lived in the house all her life, and her first memories of the family ghost date back to her childhood. 

"There has always been a spirit here," she said. "It's always been outside the house. You would be at the big (Lakewood) house downstairs in the back part of the house and you would see a white figure go by the window... People would visit and and say 'somebody just went by that window,' and we would say, 'No,  that's just our ghost.'"

Even as a little girl, Sweetie Pie said she felt the ghost was a  good spirit, almost like a family guardian. "I was never afraid of him," she said. "He was a part of us... He's just the caretaker, our spirit that's floating by that doesn't let anything bad happen here." 

The apparition is seen most frequently, Sweetie Pie said, from the kitchen window, which it is known to pass by when people gather there to eat. 

"That would indicate that either he's hungry or he just wants company," said Dr. Alan Brown, a professor at the University of West Alabama and the author of numerous books on haunted places.

There are no theories, Sweetie Pie said, as to whom might be haunting the house. Though the family still owns 18 acres of the original plantation, the house itself is almost completely original, with just a kitchen and bathroom added on, and though even some of the original furnishings remain in the home, she said no diaries or other artifacts that might provide some clue as to the spirit's identity have been found. 

Sweetie Pie said she's not sure exactly how many people have seen the spirit, but that they all seem to have seen it in the same form — a wisp of something white floating by. Sweetie Pie described it as looking like a disembodied white shirt. Though the apparition doesn't appear as either male or female, she said her family has always referred to it as "he."

Sweetie Pie's father and aunt also grew up with the ghost, and also were never afraid of it. But her daughter, Sidney, has different feelings about the white figure floating by. "Sidney is scared to death of it," Sweetie Pie said. "She will not go in the big house by herself." 

It's been about seven years since the last time the white spirit was spotted, but it's not the only apparition that has been reported at Lakewood House. Sweetie Pie admits that, though the white spirit has never frightened her, she has had some frightening experiences with other spirits in the house. 

In particular, Sweetie Pie had a disturbing experience one Friday afternoon when she was in college. She was cleaning up a guest room for her uncle, and while folding a blanket at the foot of the bed, she caught a glimpse of a plaid flannel shirt from the corner of her eye. Thinking it was her uncle, she turned to greet him. 

"There was nobody there," she said. "but I had distinctly seen a red plaid shirt, a man's chest." 

She checked to see if her uncle's or her father's cars were outside, and they weren't. Though the apparition was in many ways similar to the one seen from the kitchen window — both were of a none too distinguishable shirt-like figure — something about the plaid-shorted apparition made her feel extremely uneasy. Frightened, she ran outside and waited on the patio until someone came home.  

"From then on," she said, "I wouldn't go on the third floor and come down at night." 

Sweetie Pie hasn't seen the apparition since, and said she is no longer afraid of it, but will never forget the sinking feeling it gave her on that Friday afternoon. 

Another woman who wished to remain anonymous also had a strange experience with an apparition inside the house. While sleeping downstairs in the house, she awoke to what seemed to be someone sitting on the edge of the bed, and a lady and a child standing up nearby. 

Sweetie Pie said the guest wasn't afraid of the three ghostly figures, nor was she merely dreaming that they were there.

Some of Sidney's friends have also had strange experiences in the house. 

"It's scary," said Tyler Moore. "And it's real... I try not to go over there, for real. I don't like it." 

Tyler had a strange experience when he stopped by the house one day after football practice to get a quick shower. "I was just showering and nobody was here," he said. "The lights flicked off and I didn't think anything of it. I figured it was somebody just playing a joke on me." 

But after he turned on the lights only to have them flick back off again several more times, he got scared. He got out of the shower and, finding that there was no one there to pull a prank on him, went outside and waited for someone to come home before going back in. 

Strange things have also happened at the nearby guest house. The original guest house was converted from a chicken coop, but that house was destroyed in Hurricane Ivan and had to be rebuilt completely. 

It was from the guest house that Sweetie Pie told of her experiences with spirits. 

"I have had a spirit on the front porch in that rocking chair right outside the window," she said, pointing toward a window by the front door.

Sweetie Pie believes the spirit rocking the chair was that of her mother, who used to live in the guest house. When Sweetie Pie used to drive her daughter home from a hunting camp late at night, her mother would wait up for her. 

March 1 of this year was Sweetie Pie's first time to take her daughter to the hunting camp since the death of her mother. After dropping Sidney off, Sweetie Pie came to the guest house, though she lives in Lakewood House.

After her mother's death, Sweetie Pie enjoyed visiting the renovated home.

"I just felt like I was closer to her in this house," she said. "Like I had part of my Mamma back." 

When Sweetie Pie returned to the house, she entered through the back door. When she entered the front room, she saw that the front porch light was on and that, though there was no wind, just one of the three front porch rocking chairs was moving back and forth. 

When Sweetie Pie went onto the porch to shut off the light, the rocking stopped. 

"I always said it was my Mamma waiting for me to come home," she said. "I felt kind of at peace because I knew my Mom had made it to the cottage." 

Sweetie Pie has not seen the chair rock by itself since, but Brown and a group of people saw it move while visiting the home on a tour of haunted Livingston. 

Indeed, it is not out of the ordinary for strangers to witness strange things on the grounds of Lakewood House. Meridian Star photographer Paula Merritt experienced an unusual phenomenon with her camera while photographing the home for this story.

Everytime she took a picture of the home, the camera would take a second picture by itself. If she turned to take a picture of something else, the camera would only take one photo. When others present tried the camera, the same thing happened — when taking a photo of the house, the camera took a second picture on its own. When taking a photo of anything else, it didn't. 

At one point, Brown took a photo pointing the camera away from the house. When he turned to hand the camera back to Merritt, he made a sweeping motion that briefly pointed the lens toward the house — in that brief moment, the camera took a picture of the house. 

Merritt took dozens of pictures of the house, all with the same result. Many of the photos had strange images — orbs, weird white blurbs, one even had something that appeared to be the moon, although the moon in reality was outside the frame of the photograph. None of the strange images, however, could be decisively identified as either supernatural or merely coincidental.

The only thing that's for sure is that Merritt has never had a camera act so strangely. "I've been (a professional photographer) for 25 years and I've never had anything like this happen before," she said. "I've had this camera for three years and its never malfunctioned." 

Though there is no way to really prove if a house is haunted or not, many of the people who have visited Lakewood will tell you, some things don't need proof — you just know.