DRISH HOUSE
Historic House — 2300 Seventeenth Street, Tuscaloosa, Tuscaloosa County County, Alabama
Status: Status unknown · Access: Access unknown · est. 1837
Dossier: https://haunthunt.com/place/drish-house-tuscaloosa-alabama/

Historic house in Tuscaloosa; research record.

Physician-planter John Drish built the hybrid Greek Revival–Italianate mansion in 1837. After he fell—or jumped—from the tower stairway in 1867, legend says his widow Sarah hoarded candles against her own funeral, which were burned so many times that a phantom light in the tower once drew fire crews.

On a night in 1867, Dr. John R. Drish — physician, planter, contractor, gambler, and by most accounts an alcoholic drying out badly — came over the banister of the winding staircase in his own mansion and died of the fall. He had seen it coming, in a way: his instructions for burial were elaborate and specific, down to the tall candles that were to burn around his coffin while he lay in state upstairs. The candles were lit as ordered.
His widow Sarah lived in the house seventeen more years, increasingly consumed, the story goes, with a single provision — that the same candles be saved and burned again at her funeral. She hid them too well. When she died, no one could find them, and Sarah Drish lay in state in the house on 17th Street without them. The legend has been resolving the discrepancy ever since.
The house John Drish built around 1837 — on a 450-acre plantation at what was then the edge of a state capital — is one of Alabama's strangest architectural documents: Greek Revival bones remodeled before the war into an Italianate villa with a three-story tower, its plasterwork executed by the enslaved artisans of Drish's own contracting operation.

THE DOCUMENTED RECORD
Drish arrived in Tuscaloosa in 1822, practiced medicine, built houses, married the wealthy widow Sarah Owen McKinney in 1835, and sat in the state legislature. The war and the drinking took most of it. The house took the rest of the century to spend its own capital: sold off around it for Tuscaloosa's first expansion, it became the Jemison School in 1906 — one of the city's first public schools — then a church for seventy years under Southside Baptist, then, in the file's most photographed decline, an auto-parts warehouse. Walker Evans photographed it in 1936 under a Tuscaloosa Wrecking Company sign.
The preservation society took title in 2007, and the house went onto the National Register in 2015 as Jemison School-Drish House — the only listing in the archive, one suspects, whose legal name is half schoolhouse.

WHAT WITNESSES FILE
The haunting entered the canon in 1969, when Kathryn Tucker Windham made it the second chapter of '13 Alabama Ghosts and Jeffrey' — 'Death Lights in the Tower.' The phenomenon is mechanical and, by ghost-story standards, well documented: people have reported the tower ablaze with light and called the fire department. Repeatedly. Crews arrived; there was never any fire.
The lore assigns the light to Sarah's candles — the widow finally burning what she hid — and the current operators file their own reports: the smell of roses on the stairs where no flowers are kept, a face caught at the edge of a group photograph after the last tour left. The file notes, approvingly, that this is a haunting with a motive, a mechanism, and a paper trail of false-alarm runs.

WHAT REMAINS
The Drish House stands restored at 2300 17th Street, booked for weddings and tours, its tower intact — the same tower that killed its builder, held its widows' candles, and has summoned the Tuscaloosa Fire Department on evidence it could never find. A house, the file concludes, that spent a century being everything the town needed, and the last fifty years being itself.

FILED CLAIMS — 2 on record, reported not verified
· [Documented legend] haunting: The Encyclopedia of Alabama records the Drish House's haunted reputation and its place in Kathryn Tucker Windham's '13 Alabama Ghosts and Jeffrey' — the volume that canonized Alabama's best ghost stories. Dr. Drish's mansion earned its chapter honestly: a builder who drank himself to ruin and a widow who never quite left.
  source: Historic Drish House (https://encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/historic-drish-house/)
· [Documented legend] unexplained lights: Legend holds that a phantom light in the Drish House tower — attributed to the candles lit at Sarah Drish's funeral — has drawn Tuscaloosa firefighters to at least one false alarm. The story is Windham-recorded lore at its best: a grieving widow's vigil still burning long enough to trip the fire department.
  source: Drish House (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drish_House)

HISTORY — 3 documented facts
· John R. Drish commissioned the house in the 1830s using skilled enslaved labor. Later uses included a school and church; private owners purchased it in 2014. Drish House's documented history is the record the rest of the file stands on. The record holds it as fact — documented, not retold. The detail is preserved in 'Historic Drish House'. The entry's timeline holds it; the lore holds the rest.
· [1837] Built in 1837 for Dr. John Drish; the distinctive tower was added around 1850. Drish House's documented history is the record the rest of the file stands on. The record holds it as fact — documented, not retold. Sources including 'Drish House' carry the record. The entry's timeline holds it; the lore holds the rest.
· Dr. John Drish died in 1867 after a fall down the tower stairs; the house later served as a school, church and auto-parts warehouse before preservation efforts. The house's past is on record — this entry belongs to the verified layer of the site's file. The fact is historically verified — the part of the file that doesn't need hedging. The detail is preserved in 'Drish House'. Documented ground is what separates this file from pure legend — this is part of it.

SOURCES — 2 cited
· Historic Drish House — Encyclopedia of Alabama
  https://encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/historic-drish-house/
· Drish House — Wikipedia
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drish_House

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