Mobile writer Elizabeth Parker has spent years collecting the port city’s ghost stories, and in a recent interview she explained how that obsession became a book.
From Self-Publishing to the Haunted America Series
Parker’s Haunted Mobile combines her two earlier self-published titles, Mobile Ghosts: Alabama’s Haunted Port City and Mobile Ghosts II: The Waterline. Frustrated that Mobile’s haunted history was underrepresented beyond a few mentions in Kathryn Tucker Windham’s books, she wrote them herself. The History Press approached her in 2009 to add the work to its national Haunted America line.
“Ghosts stick around because they do not perceive their stories as finished,” Parker said. “I feel like it is my job, as well as my passion, to tell these stories.”
Spooky Encounters and a Fake Tale
Parker described being physically shoved out a door by an unseen presence in the second parlor at Oakleigh, and being followed home by something with “a funky, rank stench.” She also noted that one well-known Mobile ghost story is entirely contrived, created in part to deter vandalism, and therefore excluded from her books.
Looking ahead, Parker is working on a book of all-new stories and hopes to document the ghosts of “Katrina country,” including Bayou La Batre, before those accounts fade. Haunted Mobile is available at Bienville Books, Page and Palette, the Museum of Mobile and Mobile Carnival Museum gift shops, local bookstores, Sam’s Club and the library.