LIVINGSTON, Ala. — Pulling into the driveway of Lucy and Ken Gallman’s century-old home atop Baldwin Hill here, it’s easy to see how the place got its reputation as a haunted house.

In mid-October, the home was decorated for Halloween. The long driveway was flanked by two poles with little tissue paper ghosts pinned to the top, and the front porch was decorated with an abundance of faux spider webs and glowing jack-o-lanters. Adolf, the Gallmans’ mustachioed cat, leaned into some of the spider webs, lazily swishing his tail, looking like a realistic part of the Halloween decorations.

Year round, a gargoyle guards the front walkway, which winds between two enormous oak trees that provide an appropriately ancient frame for the slightly sagging white home. The grounds are littered with gardens — a rusty old shed sits in the back yard, and adjacent to it, a pet cemetery with large gravestones marked “Minnie,” “Pig,” and “Butch” perches on the side of the hill. The house looks very much like the kind of place you might imagine a witch living.

The home was built in 1901 by a man named Julian Ennis, and stories of ghosts there began to persist soon afterward. They may have started with an undated poem by Mrs. W.H. Coleman, titled “Deres A Ghost On Baldwin Hill.”

The poem, written in dialect, tells the story of a ghost that speaks to people, pushes children’s swings, knocks on doors, and shakes windows.

The stories

Lucy Gallman, whose family moved into the home in 1954 when she was about 5 years old, said she’s been hearing stories about ghosts there since she was a small child. Lucy is a good-natured and welcoming person, and said she welcomes spirits in her home just as easily as she welcomed this reporter.

“The very first ghost story I heard when I fist moved here,” she said, was “Robert Ennis is dead.”

According to the story, the previous tenants heard a spectral voice in the night, talking about Julian Ennis’ nephew, Robert. Night after night, the tenants would lie in their beds and hear the sound of a bouncing ball, and then a strange voice would proclaim “Robert Ennis is dead.”

Wanting to know who was hanging around outside their bedroom window at night, they spread cornmeal over the porch.That night, as always, they heard the bouncing ball and the voice, but the next morning, there were no marks in the cornmeal.

By day, the house is kind of cozy. Laid out in a turn-of-the-century style, the home has warm yellow walls in the parlor and dining room. The parlor centers around an old fireplace and is filled with ornate antique furnishings, including an old fainting sofa. Photos of loved ones, glowing candles, and old books adorn the walls and furniture. One of the Gallmans’ cats — Precious — greets guests with furry affection.

But by night, it is said that the home is completely different. As UWA – Livingston Professor Dr. Alan Brown puts it, the house at night is quite simply “creepy.”

So creepy, in fact, that the Gallmans’ own children refuse to sleep there.

In all her years living in the house on Baldwin Hill, Lucy has never seen a ghost, but, she said, plenty of other people have.

She recalls vividly the day that a female college student, renting one of the other houses on the hill, ran up to her door hyperventilating, white as a sheet.

The tenant refused to go home because she said that, while washing dishes, she saw an apparition float by and disappear into another room. She followed it, and said it vanished without a trace. The girl was so terrified that she ran out of the house with the water still running.

See that?

Lucy’s husband, Ken, has seen apparitions of Lucy’s mother in her favorite old nightgown. Ken tells his ghost stories without alarm or fear, and excuses himself afterward to finish watching NCIS.

“This is actually the truth. We were moving and I looked up for a second, and my mother-in-law was standing in this door,” he said, indicating a nearby doorway. “It was not a glimpse, but it was a full thing of her standing there. She wore a nightgown that was about 43,000 years old, but it was comfy.”

In another instance, Ken said he saw his mother-in-law’s face in the window.

Lucy’s granddaughter has apparently seen an apparition of Lucy’s father. The little girl told her grandparents about a man she saw in the house who fit the description of her great-grandfather.

“She said he had white hair and he had on a pale colored suit. She never knew my father. She was born in 1998,” Lucy said.

Though Lucy has never seen any apparitions, she has heard things that are hard to explain. One otherwise ordinary day, as Lucy and Ken were getting ready to turn off their computer and go to bed, they both distinctly heard someone ask, “Can you hear me?”

No one else was there. Used to strange goings on, the Gallmans simply replied “We hear you.”

Photo evidence shows that a wedding held at the Gallman home may have had some uninvited but un-intrusive spectral guests. The wedding, between the Gallmans’ niece, Deborah, and her now-husband, Craig, was held on what would have been Lucy’s parents 60th anniversary. It was an emotional day, Lucy said, because her father died shortly before the wedding.

Ghosts or photo snafus?

Many snapshots were taken of the happy couple that day, and they were taken in different parts of the house and grounds. In a large number of the photos, Gallman said, the bride and groom had orbs above their heads. No one else in any of the photos had orbs.

These days, Craig refuses to spend the night in the house for fear of being confronted by a ghost. “It’s all we can do to get him to come and eat Christmas and Thanksgiving,” Lucy said.

Other reports of ghosts on Baldwin Hill can be found on the internet, where one site makes the claim, “The ghost of a dreadfully burned female is regularly perceived up on the highest spot of Baldwin Hill rearranging orbs around.” The Gallmans, though, made no mention of such an apparition.

Baldwin Hill is far from being the only haunted place in Livingston. There are numerous reported hauntings there – most famously the story that outlaw Sheriff Steve Renfroe, who was lynched under a Chinaberry tree on July 13, 1836, returns every year on the anniversary of his death to swoop over the Sucarnoochee river.

In fact, there are so many ghost stories in Livingston that Dr. Brown, who authored several books on haunted places, including Stories of the Haunted South and his new book Ghost Hunters of New England, gives ghost tours of Livingston every year, and had 200 people pack his last one.

So it’s no surprise that Lucy, having grown up in Livingston, isn’t afraid of ghosts, and rather than looking toward spending Halloween in her haunted house with apprehension, she’s looking forward to spending the evening with granddaughter, going into town to try and scare people. Whatever spirit or spirits haunt her house, she’s learned not just to live with them, but to enjoy them.