Imagine a warm, peaceful Southern day. The sun shines on a large, old house as a man ascends the steps, checking to make sure he has his materials. Tape recorder, a pad of paper, a series of highly unusual questions, and a camera in case there are any mists or orbs to be found. Even though the day is pleasant, something feels not quite right—everything seems expectant, heightened. Perhaps the inhabitants of the house have a story to tell. Perhaps the house will tell the story itself.

Dr. Alan Brown ’72 is an English professor at the University of West Alabama teaching freshman composition and running the school's writing center and compensatory writing program. But Brown has a hobby that verges on the eerie, paranormal side. Brown makes it his business to research and record the ghostlore of the American South.

His love of paranormal has its roots in respect and love of the Southern people, whom Brown first encountered when he moved to Alabama in 1986. As he began to get acquainted with Southerners and their traditions, Brown noticed that they loved to tell stories.

"Southerners have a proclivity for storytelling because they love to talk," Brown says. "I can recall stopping for directions at a gas station outside a small town in Mississippi on my first trip down here and being treated to a 10-minute history of the town by the attendant." This natural inclination for storytelling is coupled with strong superstitious tendencies—Brown maintains that Southerners are "openly superstitious" and speaks of a doctor in Demopolis, Ala., whose greatest competitor, even into the 1990s, was a "hoodoo doctor." The storytelling and superstitions of the South piqued Brown's interest and eventually led him to a record the oral tradition of the region’s ghost stories.

To learn more about writer and Professor Alan Brown '72, please see pages 22 and 23 in the Summer 2006 issue of your Millikin Quarterly!

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