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| George Buster Singleton |
This week’s edition of The Progressive Era marks the first edition of the newspaper in October, and
with Halloween just around the corner, it’s hard not to think about some of Wilcox County’s best local ghost stories.
One of my favorite tales is the story about the supposedly
haunted gravesite of Elizabeth Dixon Smith, and I’ve spent more than a little
time over the years researching this unusual tale. Even today, despite my best
efforts, concrete facts about Smith and her untimely demise remain mysteriously
elusive.
For those of you unfamiliar with Smith’s story, here’s what
I’ve pieced together over the years. The story begins during the Civil War as
the young Miss Smith waited at home as her fiancé was off fighting the Yankees.
Like many young women during this time, she eventually received word that her
husband-to-be had been killed in battle somewhere in Tennessee.
Smith, distraught over the news of her lover’s death, took
her own life by hanging herself in her upstairs bedroom. Unfortunately, the
news about the death of Smith’s fiancé was wrong, and he returned home only to
learn that Smith had taken her life and had been laid to rest in a nearby
cemetery. He had a tall marker erected over her grave and vowed to always
maintain the grounds around it.
As fate would have it, this unnamed Wilcox County soldier
didn’t live long enough to fulfill his vow to Smith. He returned to duty and,
like many young Southern men of his generation, he sacrificed his life for the
“Lost Cause.”
Many over the years learned of Smith’s tale through the
writings of George Buster Singleton, a ghost-hunter and paranormal investigator
who for decades wrote a weekly column for The Monroe Journal newspaper in
Monroeville. Singleton, who died in 2007, wrote about Smith on more than one
occasion, but he never specifically said where she was buried other than to say
that it was in a small cemetery in Wilcox County. However, he did offer a few
clues as to where her grave could be found.
In a February 1995 newspaper column, Singleton wrote about
visiting Smith’s grave to find “that the tall grass and dead weeds had been
pulled up from around her tombstone and cast away from the grave. The grass
along the grave had carefully been broken off at ground level, and the wilting
blades had just begun to turn brown in the winter sun.” Singleton chalked this
up to “the ghost of the unknown Confederate soldier” who “had returned as it
had in the past to pull the weeds and tall grass around the final resting place
of the girl he loved and had planned to marry.”
Singleton wrote that the “small cemetery” where Smith was
buried was located north of Beatrice on a “certain high hill” just over the
Wilcox County line. He noted that to reach the cemetery, he had to turn off the
pavement and then make his way up a narrow trail on his motorcycle to reach the
graveyard. At one point, he had to get off his motorcycle and walk up a steep,
narrow trail on foot to reach the cemetery on top of the hill, where the “view
was almost overwhelming.” Smith’s gravestone was said to be the “tallest marker
in the small burial ground.”
Over the years, I’ve tried unsuccessfully to pinpoint the
exact location of Smith’s grave. I’ve followed Singleton’s clues, but have been
unable to find my way to the place that the ghostly Rebel soldier supposedly keeps
clean despite the passing years. While I have located the graves of a couple of
Elizabeth Smiths buried within the borders of Wilcox County, neither of them is
the Elizabeth Smith described in Singleton’s tale. They died long after the end
of the Civil War.
In the end, I’m hoping that one of The Progressive Era’s
good readers will see this column and will contact me with more information
about the gravesite of Elizabeth Dixon Smith. Where is her grave located? How
do you get there? Who was her Confederate husband-to-be? When exactly did she
take her own life? These questions and others are among the many that I hope to
answer with the help of the newspaper’s readers.
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