Old Cahawba

The town began as a transaction. When Alabama entered the Union in 1819, the federal government donated the river-confluence site, and Governor William Wyatt Bibb had it surveyed, laid out, and auctioned — the lot sales financed the state's first treasury, which means, as site archaeologist Linda Derry puts it, that Alabama owes Cahawba its seed money. The legislature moved in by 1820 and out again by 1826, bound for Tuscaloosa. The famous floods that supposedly drove the capital away are, per Derry's accounting, largely a fiction — 1825 was a drought year, and the drowning stories were inflated by rival newspapers in towns competing for the seat.

What killed Cahawba the second time is better documented. Reborn as a Black Belt cotton port — a railroad by 1859, three thousand people, per capita wealth ranking fourth in the nation in 1860 — the town had its rails torn up by the Confederacy for another line, then hosted Castle Morgan, a lice-infested stockade where roughly three thousand Union prisoners were held in the town center; as many as 147 died there. A flood inundated the town in 1865, the county seat moved to Selma in 1866, and within a decade even the houses were being dismantled and hauled off. By 1900 it was a ghost town in fact, not just in branding.

Underneath it all sits a Mississippian mound some have argued may be Maubila — the town de Soto's expedition destroyed in 1540. The identification is disputed; the layering is not.

The apparition file stayed open after the town closed. At the New Cemetery, visitors report the laughter of children, heard but never seen. Castle Morgan, the prison site with its reconstructed 'dead line,' is called very active by the paranormal groups the park admits — investigators claim voices and figures where the Union dead were once registered. And the Pegues Ghost has successors in the reports of floating lights along the old streets, keeping the will-o'-the-wisp tradition current.

The park itself runs the testimony: annual Haunted History Tours move guests by wagon to the cemeteries and ruins, candlelit, with what the staff describe as authentic accounts at each stop — no jump scares, no costumes — followed by a mini-investigation with paranormal equipment. A ghost town selling haunted history is at least honest about the product.

What remains is managed by the Alabama Historical Commission: the Crocheron Columns, the 1860 slave quarters, church foundations, three cemeteries, the marked line of Castle Morgan, and roses and Spanish moss reclaiming the street grid. The record gives a capital financed, a cotton economy liquidated, and a town taken apart board by board; the legend gives a light over the labyrinth that nobody caught. The archive files both — and notes that Cahawba's ghosts, unusually, were on the payroll before the payroll ended.