{"id":1336,"slug":"hitching-post-mentone-alabama","story":[{"heading":null,"paragraphs":["The Hitching Post stands on Alabama Highway 117 in Mentone, the mountaintop resort town on Lookout Mountain's brow — a two-story frame commercial building erected in 1898 as a general store, and for most of its life one of the centerpieces of the town's small commercial strip. Carol M. Highsmith photographed it for the Library of Congress in 2010, looking every inch the mountain-town anchor it has been for over a century.","Its upstairs had a second life: the second floor long served as a popular dance hall, the kind of room where a summer colony actually danced. In recent decades the building has housed a shifting collection of businesses — a realty company and Crow's Nest Antiques among them."]},{"heading":"The lady upstairs","paragraphs":["The filed report, preserved in the Southern Spirit Guide following Deborah Collard's Haunted Southern Nights volume on Mentone-area hauntings, is a single apparition: a female wraith seen on the second floor. The guide offers the reasonable guess — that a figure on the old dance-hall floor may date to the dance-hall era — while leaving the identity entirely open.","There is no attached tragedy in the record, no named woman, no dated death; the file is one persistent sighting in a building with the right biography for it. That is precisely the profile the archive indexes: a documented place, a documented dance hall, and a reported figure who has never been explained — filed as legend, which is the most honest status a lone apparition can hold."]}],"name":"Hitching Post","aliases":[],"type":"COMMERCIAL_BUILDING","type_label":"Commercial Building","cats":["HAUNTED_PLACE"],"groups":["hauntings","institutions"],"desc":"Commercial building in Mentone; research record.","full_desc":"Hitching Post is a commercial building in Mentone, Alabama. Commercial building in Mentone; research record. It sits in the archive under haunted places. The dossier holds 1 reported claim and 1 legend — all telling, no verified spine yet, and the file says so plainly. Access details are unverified — research before visiting. For HauntHunt it is exactly the kind of file the archive exists for: a real place, a real record, and a story still being told.","address":"6081 AL-117","city":"Mentone","county":"DeKalb County","state":"Alabama","postal":null,"region":"South","lat":34.563209,"lon":-85.589704,"coord_kind":"CITY","status":"UNKNOWN","access":"UNKNOWN","access_notes":null,"ownership":null,"website":null,"phone":null,"year_built":null,"year_opened":null,"year_closed":null,"year_demolished":null,"designation":null,"current_use":null,"research_notes":"Discovery pass. Precise location, historical chronology and current visitor conditions require independent enrichment. Confidence concerns provenance only.","stage":"SOURCE_RESEARCH","quality":{"level":"LOW","score":40.6,"dims":{"location_confidence":0.75,"identity_confidence":0.65,"historical_confidence":0,"source_quality":0.3999999999999999,"paranormal_claim_provenance":0.8,"coordinate_confidence":0,"current_access_confidence":0,"freshness":0.65}},"claims":[{"id":598,"type":"HAUNTING","description":"Southern Spirit Guide recounts an upstairs female apparition. The site in Mentone, Alabama gives the account a documented setting: real place, real history, unresolved reports. The account has a collector's pedigree — written down as legend, which is the most honest status it can hold. The account appears in 'Alabama Hauntings — County by County, Part III'. The haunting is unproven and unfired: it keeps showing up for work anyway.","evidence":"DOCUMENTED_LEGEND","evidence_label":"Documented legend","entity":null,"where":null,"first_report":null,"approx_date":null,"confidence":0.5,"conflict_notes":null,"source":{"name":"Alabama Hauntings — County by County, Part III","url":"https://www.southernspiritguide.org/alabama-hauntings-county-by-county-part-iii/","publisher":"Southern Spirit Guide","type":"BLOG","authority":4},"conflicting_source":null,"variants":[]}],"history":[],"legends":[{"name":null,"summary":"Southern Spirit Guide recounts an upstairs female apparition. Hitching Post's file is thin on proof and long on persistence — the standard profile of American place-lore. The story is documented as legend — recorded and retold, never verified as fact. It's the version the place will be remembered by, whether or not it's the true one.","earliest":null,"evidence":"DOCUMENTED_LEGEND","source":{"name":"Alabama Hauntings — County by County, Part III","url":"https://www.southernspiritguide.org/alabama-hauntings-county-by-county-part-iii/","publisher":"Southern Spirit Guide","type":"BLOG","authority":4}}],"entities":[],"events":[],"investigations":[],"encounters":[],"media":[],"persons":[],"visitor":{"tour_availability":"Verify before visiting","notes":"Access details are unverified; research before visiting.","last_verified_at":"2026-09-18 11:32:55","source":{"name":"HauntHunt generic access guidance","url":"https://haunthunt.com/about#access-guidance","publisher":"HauntHunt editorial","type":"DIRECTORY","authority":2}},"sources":[{"name":"Alabama Hauntings — County by County, Part III","url":"https://www.southernspiritguide.org/alabama-hauntings-county-by-county-part-iii/","publisher":"Southern Spirit Guide","type":"BLOG","authority":4}],"conflicts":[],"wiki":null,"counts":{"claims":1,"history":0,"legends":1,"entities":0,"sources":1}}