Everyday in Meridian, droves of people come downtown to the Pigford building – to eat at the Chili House, to be pampered at the Body Bar, or to shop at Dream It.

Most of them have no idea that they’re also visiting what may be downtown’s most haunted building.  

Apparitions of a lady in a long white dress, footsteps from above when no one else is in the building, strange whimpering cries, even a vacuum cleaner that turns itself on after being unplugged – according to its many tenants, the Pigford building has all the signs of a classic haunting.

The Meridian Star, along with Meridian-Lauderdale County Public Library Reference Librarian Kevin Chatham, and Dr. Alan Brown, a professor at the University of West Alabama – Livingston and the author of Stories of the Haunted South, formed a paranormal investigation team of sorts to search for signs of the supernatural at the Pigford building.



A haunting history:

From the outside, the Pigford building looks like any other old building in downtown Meridian. It’s several stories high, made of brick, and adorned on its south side with a weathered old painting bearing the building’s name.

The building has been around since at least the early 1900’s, and has housed a lodge, a post office/drugstore, a realty office, dress shops, restaurants, and beauty salons, just to name a few.

In the early 1990s, a woman who we’ll call “Becky” (she wished to remain unnamed) opened up a graphic design business and a tanning salon in the parts of the building that now house Dream It dress shop and The Body Bar spa. Becky had strange experiences in both businesses, but especially in the graphic design office, where the dress shop now sits.

Becky came to Meridian after escaping an abusive relationship, and found solace working in graphic design. She worked late into the night so often that she made herself a sleeping area on the mezzanine, where the majority of reported paranormal activity has taken place.

Almost as soon as she opened her business, Becky, along with her family and co-workers, began to notice some very unusual activity.

Employees would hear a ghostly, whimpering cry so often that it became an expected part of the work day. Becky would leave the building at night and return to find her workspace rearranged. Alone in the building at night, she would see and hear footsteps from the second floor. And, she said, “There was always a presence. You could feel her when she walked in the room… I would be sitting there drawing at night, and you’d feel like this warm thing.”

            One night, Becky was working late with her young daughter in tow. The two businesses were connected through an intercom system, and Becky’s daughter heard a woman speaking to her. Thinking that her mom was calling her over the intercom, she called back, saying, “What is it, mom?”

            Becky, who had not used the intercom or spoken at all, asked her daughter what she was talking about, and her daughter said, “Someone was talking to me.” This continued throughout the night.

            Becky and the other people who spent time in the building always felt that something strange was going on there, but there was one instance that confirmed for them that what they were sensing wasn’t just in their heads.

            Becky’s 3 year old cousin had been spending time in the building. One day he came down from the mezzanine and said he would not go back.

            “I don’t like the lady in the long dress,” he said. “She doesn’t like me.”

Eventually, Becky saw the lady in white herself, gliding along the mezzanine in a floor-length dress. But rather than being afraid, she began to think of the lady as a kind of protector – it many have been protective of her, but she said the spirit had a different attitude toward men. Sometimes, while working with male employees, Becky saw regular objects, like staplers, move across the room of their own volition and doors slam though no one was anywhere near them.

            Becky said that, even after seeing doors slam and staplers fly around, she wasn’t afraid of the lady. Instead, she felt sorry for her. “She was really sad,” she said. “I could be down there by myself and I did not feel endangered… She was hurt and you could tell she was hurt.”

            Several years after Becky closed up shop, the entire Pigford building was gutted and renovated, and in 1999 a dress shop called Alexander’s was opened where the graphic design business had once been. According to Dr. Brown, an employee there saw the lady in white, too.

            The employee, J.T. Mohammed, saw the woman a few months after the store’s opening. She described her to Dr. Brown as a woman with long hair in a handkerchief-like dress, glowing somewhat as she moved across the mezzanine.

            Like Becky, J.T. said she was not afraid of the specter. “She’s more like company, like a presence,” she told Dr. Brown.

            Employees, apparently with no knowledge of Becky’s experiences, described similar ones of their town to Dr. Brown – footsteps from upstairs, clothing and jewelry that had been in place the night before found scattered on the floor in the morning. One employee received a call from an inside line when no one else was in the store, and one customer reported hearing someone talking from a neighboring dressing room that was apparently empty.        



The investigation:

            Today, there is a new dress shop in the same location. The shop, Dream It, is owned by Theresa Long, who says that she, too, has had some spooky experiences there. Theresa opened the shop to The Meridian Star one evening, so that we, with Chatham and Dr. Brown, could search for spectral activity.

            “The story always went that it was haunted,” said Theresa, who has been in the shop for nearly two years.

Both Theresa and her daughter, Monica, began to believe the stories were true when, at separate times, they both saw a vacuum cleaner defy the laws of physics. In both instances, the women unplugged the vacuum cleaner and left the room, and in both instances, the vacuum turned on by itself after being unplugged.

Theresa has also felt a presence, and has seen the floorboards give way to footsteps she heard from upstairs when no one else was in the building. At the time Theresa experienced the footsteps, Dream It was the only business in the Pigford building.

Dream It has not had problems with dresses being strewn on the floor, but Theresa has had curious things happen to her electronics. In one clock, the batteries constantly run low – a classic sign of a haunting – and a computer will lock up at unusual times. She has had problems with little things like getting breakers and keys to work correctly or getting the radio to turn on much more often than when inside any other building.

Theresa’s son has reported weird noises and things moving around on their own on the mezzanine, along with a feeling of being watched. He said that sometimes, he is too scared to go up there by himself. 

            Our group of ghost hunters went to Dream It armed with cameras, tape recorders, an electromagnetic field detector, and an infrared thermometer, all in hopes of capturing some sort of physical evidence of the Pigford spook.

            We took hordes of pictures and conducted a few Electronic Voice Phenomena sessions without encountering anything out of the ordinary on our cameras or voice recorders. But the infrared thermometer did produce some unusual readings.

            During an EVP session, as we commented aloud about the haunting, Theresa remarked that she felt something not quite right. Using the IR thermometer, Dr. Brown found that, while the temperature in the rest of the room was 82 degrees, the temperature around Theresa was 76. The same thing happened several times over the course of the evening, and only happened to Theresa although there were seven people present.

            Other somewhat curious events of the night – the clock, which Theresa said had been acting strange since she brought it into the shop, gained two minutes during our EVP sessions. Theresa’s computer shut down on its own, though it had never done so before. And an alarm system, which Theresa said had not been working since the store opened and which she had never seen emit any sort of light, flashed red for the entire evening. 



The diagnosis:

            Haunted.

            We may not have picked up any EVP’s or curious photographs, but the strange things that have happened to the Pigford building’s tenants, the funny behavior of the electronics at Dream It, and the confirmed drop in temperature around Theresa have these ghost hunters convinced – the Pigford building is Haunted with a capitol H.

The most convincing argument to this reporter – different tenants reported the same sort of activity although many of them did not know each other and apparently had not heard each other’s stories.

            Though there does appear to be some paranormal activity in the Pigford building, we think that whatever haunts it is benign, so don’t be afraid to shop there. As Theresa said of the spook or spooks “I think they must like us.”