Drish House

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.

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.

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.