Thursday, September 28, 2017

Camden's Gaines Ridge gets 'ghostly' mention in latest 'Alabama' magazine

A few days ago, I took my daughter to an orthodontist appointment in Mobile. While we sat in the lobby, I happened to glance down at the table between our chairs and spotted the September-October edition of “Alabama” magazine.

I picked it up and began to flip through its pages, but I didn’t have to go far before my eyes fell on a very well-done article about the Gaines Ridge Dinner Club written by Taylor Dougherty as part of the magazine’s regular “Alabama Insider” feature.

Dougherty’s article let readers know that “this Southern Gothic restaurant serves up delicious food and historical appeal in an atmosphere that is truly haunting.” The article goes on to describe the history of Gaines Ridge, its menu (including its famous black-bottom pie) and fine dining atmosphere.

The portion of the article that I found most interesting came when Dougherty began to discuss the ghostly reputation that Gaines Ridge has garnered over the years.

“As with any old Southern locale, Gaines Ridge has its share of reputed ghost activity, with guests claiming to have seen apparitions floating past windows, heard disembodied screams and detected smells that seem to come from nowhere,” Dougherty wrote. “One of the restaurant’s founders, Betty Gaines Kennedy, has a personal story of her own that she might be willing to share. The popularity of these legends has landed Gaines Ridge Dinner Club on the official Alabama Ghost Trail, and it has often been called Alabama’s most haunted restaurant.”

The “Alabama Ghost Trail” that Dougherty is referring to is the list of supposedly haunted places published years ago by the Southwest Alabama Regional Office of Tourism and Films as part of its popular Alabama’s Front Porches website, www.alabamasfrontporches.org. 

In addition to Gaines Ridge, other Wilcox County locations on that “ghost trail” include Snow Hill Institute, the “Castro Tree” in Camden, the “Unfilled Hole” in Camden, the Gees Bend Ferry, the “Millie Hole” on Pine Barren Creek, the intersection of County Road 59 and County Road 24 near Pine Apple, the Burford House and the Purefoy House at Furman.

With that said, next week’s paper will mark the first paper in the month of October, and that means that Halloween is right around the corner. Last year, the first ever list of the “Spookiest Places in Wilcox County” appeared in the Oct. 26 edition of The Progressive Era. Nine eerie locations made that list, including all of the places mentioned above as well as the New Providence Cemetery at Coy and the “House of the Dancing Skulls” at Rosebud. 

Other nominees for last year’s list included the Coy Railroad Crossing, Moore Academy in Pine Apple, Prairie Bluff Cemetery, Dale Masonic Lodge in Camden, Camden Cemetery and the Wilcox Female Institute in Camden.

In the coming weeks, I’ll be compiling The Progressive Era’s second annual list of “Spookiest Places in Wilcox County,” which I hope to get in the paper on Oct. 25, which is the Wednesday before Halloween this year. 

In the end, if you know of a really spooky Wilcox County location that isn’t mentioned above, but deserves to be on a list of “Spookiest Places in Wilcox County,” please let me know. Send me the name of the place, including where it’s located, and some information about why you think it deserves on the list. More than a few readers submitted information last year for the first list of “spooky places,” and I’m hoping to get a whole new crop of “spooky places” from readers this year. Please let me hear from you.

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