Huntingdon College

Huntingdon College's Red Lady is a ghost that moved campuses. The first sighting was at the old Tuskegee Women's College in the nineteenth century — a woman in scarlet with a scarlet parasol, glowing red, walking the dormitory's 'Sky Alley' all night and never seen again. When the college moved to Montgomery in 1909, the legend should have stayed behind. It didn't.

The second Red Lady is the one Kathryn Tucker Windham fixed in 13 Alabama Ghosts and Jeffrey — Martha (or Margaret), the New York girl sent south by her father's will, who arrived with red drapes, a red bedspread, and an obsession nobody explained. Shunned and homesick, she died in her room in Pratt Hall — by suicide in the legend's telling — and stayed: the Red Lady of the third floor, a vindictive turn from the first lady's wandering.

Windham's account — the only written source — made her Alabama's most famous campus ghost, and Pratt Hall's residents still report the red glow under the doors and the figure in the halls. Two women, two campuses, one color — the archive's most portable haunting, a ghost that followed the school.

Huntingdon College is the archive's Red Lady file — the Montgomery campus haunted by the scarlet ghost that followed the school from Tuskegee, Windham's Martha still walking Pratt Hall's third floor.