Is portion of I-65 from Evergreen to Greenville haunted?

In the Oct. 7 edition The Evergreen Courant newspaper, in the spirit of Halloween, I relayed to readers a ghost story that someone told me about a portion of Interstate 65 that runs through Conecuh County, Alabama.

About a year ago, a man who’s normally not given to telling such tales told me that he believes there’s a stretch of interstate in Conecuh County that’s cursed. He explained that over the years an unusually high number of accidents have happened in this area, and some motorists have claimed to have seen an unusual creature dart in front of their vehicles in this area. He believed that the distraction caused by this creature running across the road may have been the cause of so many of these accidents.

Soon after the Oct. 7 paper came out, a reader contacted me with more information about this story. The reader presented me with a copy of “Haunted Places: The National Directory: Ghostly Abodes, Sacred Sites, UFO Landings and Other Supernatural Locations,” a 1996 book by Dennis William Hauck.

(Hauck is a journalist and an internationally recognized authority on the paranormal. He’s also one of the founding editors of the Mutual UFO Network’s “MUFON UFO Journal.” He currently publishes a weekly newsletter called “The Haunted Places Report.)

In Hauck’s “Haunted Places,” you don’t have to flip far through the book to find information about the Evergreen-Interstate highway tale. On Page 3, there’s an entry for “Evergreen: Interstate 65.” Here’s what the book has to say.

“A section of this modern highway is haunted. Engineers built the highway over sacred Creek Indian burial grounds. The hills around Evergreen remain the Creeks’ spiritual home, and many believe that their ghosts haunt the white man’s highway that runs through the middle of it. The Creeks loved the land so much that they said goodbye to every tree and hill when they were forced to leave the area in the 1830s. Of fifteen thousand Creeks marched to a reservation in Oklahoma, over 3,500 died along the way. Between 1984 and 1990, there were 519 accidents, 208 injuries and 23 deaths on this 40-mile stretch of highway. The road is even, straight, and well-maintained, but the accident rate is well above average.”

The book goes on to say that “The Haunted Highway is a 40-mile stretch of I-65 that runs between the towns of Evergreen in Conecuh County and Greenville in Butler County, in south central Alabama.”

Now, I’m among the most skeptical people you’ll ever meet, but the fact that this story has made it into print does lend some degree of credibility to this story. Whether or not the story’s true remains to be determined.

In the end, I should say that since the Oct. 7 paper, a number of readers have contacted me about a variety of other spooky locations throughout the county, and I’m currently putting together a “Top 10 list of Creepy Places” that will be published at a later date.

If you know a good local ghost story or have information about a spooky location, call me and tell me about it. You can reach me by calling 578-1492, by e-mail at courantsports@earthlink.net or by mail at The Evergreen Courant, ATTN: Lee Peacock, P.O. Box 440, Evergreen, AL 36401.