Kathryn Tucker Windham was a simple storyteller who became an Alabama icon
Ghost Lady By John Brightman Brock As the world came to love her books, Kathryn Tucker Windham easily became an open one for many Alabama school children who would sit at her feet, listen, watch and believe. Alabama and the world lost Kathryn Tucker Windham June 12, when she died in Selma at the age of 93, following a year-long illness. For decades, this storyteller extraordinaire would turn pages and weave words in slow Southern melodies, adding mysterious glances and a comforting smile. Children through three generations were captivated by accounts of history intertwined with places where even ghosts could come alive. Windham’s widely known book, “13 Alabama Ghosts and Jeffrey,”
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was published in 1969. It would be the first of seven books about ghosts. In all, she would write 26 books. Following her death in June, a few friends gathered at a memorial service, where the author was laid to rest in a pine box of her choosing. As she was slowly lowered into the ground, a homespun “I’ll Fly Away” was played on combs and wax paper, an instrument Windham loved. Left behind were friends and fans of her books, themselves merely aging children who had first believed her personal account about life with a spirit she lovingly called “Jeffrey.” It had been hard to find a seat at the Church Street United Methodist Church that day. At interment, overcast skies hung around New
Live Oak Cemetery for this one-ofa-kind woman, says pallbearer and close friend Dr. S. Michael Mahan of Brierfield.
Storytelling and cane poles Mahan first met Windham in 1967. The dentist remembered when she was working for the Selma Times-Journal newspaper. “She came to me with a tooth problem, and I asked her: ‘Would you consider telling stories in my dental office?’” Mahan recalls. Scores of fourth-graders from Montevallo Elementary School were soon listening to her stories at Mahan’s office. “I wanted to keep my practice young,” he says. Since that initial pool of mostly 9-year-olds, sto-