A bright flash of light like a fireball shot down the front stairwell of the Whitfield-Duke-Searcy House five years ago. Three women working with the city of Opelika witnessed the light and remember the event vividly, but it is just one of the many stories people working in the house tell when asked about the ghost of the house.
Vivian Anthony, administrative assistant for the Opelika Chamber of Commerce; Cindy Pugh, sales manager for Auburn Opelika Tourism Bureau; and Tipi Miller, director of Keep Opelika Beautiful; have all been working in the house for at least eight years.
"Everyone is excited about it, and everyone has a story," Pugh said about the ghost in the house.
Built in 1895, by the John Whitfield family, the house has been repurposed several times. The Duke family, then the Searcy family, owned the house. In 1979, First Alabama Bank bought it for their Opelika office. Then, in 1988, the city of Opelika bought the house to serve as the city's chamber of commerce.
Today the house has been refurbished, but it stays true to the original design.
The downstairs bedrooms, once for guests, have transformed into offices and meeting rooms. The dining room still has a table, but it is a long oval with enough seats for city meetings instead of family dinners.
Two leaded glass windows with yellow and red are original to the house, and cast multi-colored lights on the front stairwell and greeting room like windows from an old church.
Upstairs, the original family sleeping quarters has been repainted like the rest of the house and converted into office buildings. It is in these offices the legend of the child ghost is the strongest.
The middle room on the left side of the building, where the Keep Opelika Beautiful office is today, was once the children's room.
In the early 1900s, Pugh said, a young girl died of a sickness believed to be hay fever.
Those working at the office speculated about the death, but over the years, there have been cousins and distant family members from the Whitfield, Duke and Searcy families who have come into the building just to tell the tales told to them about their relatives. Several of them mention the death of a child, said Pugh and Anthony.
Approximately five years ago, Pugh noticed indentations of footprints would regularly appear on the back staircase. After being cleaned off, Pugh said, the footprints about the size of a five-year-old would come back in the same manner.
They always stopped at the fifth step, and they always were two by two, as if a child was jumping up the stairs.
Miller believes the footprints could have been from the daughter of the cleaner who no longer works there, but the consistency with which they used to appear makes Pugh question that theory.
Another visible sign before the house was remodeled appeared in the bathroom directly below the allegedly haunted room. Water damage formed in the silhouette of a girl, like one that would be cut out in grade school, said Pugh. When the house was remodeled, it disappeared, but it is now starting to come back.
Other paranormal stories include a painter who claims he felt he was pushed while painting the outside of the room the child allegedly died in, chairs rolling across the top floor despite there being only one person working downstairs and piles of phone books scattering themselves and falling.
One night, while Anthony was at the house by herself, working late, a man knocked on the door of the chamber building. She let him in and they took a couple steps back from the door, right below the stairwell that the fireball of light allegedly went through.
They were standing about four feet from each other when an 8x11 piece of paper floated down from upstairs and landed exactly in the middle of them. The man ran out of the door, and Anthony shut the door, sat back down and kept working. Her family said maybe it was some sort of a sign protecting her.
"I've never felt scared from everything that goes on," Anthony said. "Besides the painter, nothing that has happened seems aggressive."
However, every Friday afternoon, Anthony gets the "feeling of something really wanting you out of here."
The webpage about the chamber encourages people to ask about the ghost. One mention to either Pugh or Anthony at the front office will draw a crowd of women who work at the office eager to talk about their personal experiences.
Dramatic fireballs of light are rare, but a visit at the right time may give an outsider the chance to witness hard to explain mischief themselves.
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