👻 HAUNTED PLACE · EXP. Nº9478
ACTIVE
Pigford Building
The painted sign two storeys high on its flank still says PIGFORD BUILDING, but almost nothing else about this corner block in downtown Meridian, Mississippi, has stayed put for long.
Where is Pigford Building?
- Location
- Mississippi, United States
- Type
- Other
- Coordinates
- 32.366, -88.7
- Last updated
LOCATION
Why is Pigford Building said to be haunted?
The Knights of Pythias built it in 1914-1915 as Pythian Castle Hall; since then it has held a grocery, offices, a graphic-design studio, a tanning salon, a dress shop called Alexander's, a spa, a chilli restaurant, an event space called The Venue and, since 2019, Jean's, a Meridian lunch restaurant first announced there as a stopgap. The ghost belongs to the middle of that list. Tenants of the 1990s and 2000s described a woman in a long white dress on the mezzanine, footsteps on empty upper floors and merchandise found on the floor in the mornings; a shop assistant named J.T. Mohammed told the folklorist Alan Brown that the figure was more like company than a fright. In October 2008 The Meridian Star walked the place with Brown, recorders and thermometers in hand. The cameras and recorders caught nothing, and the paper still declared the building haunted, on the strength of a thermometer reading, a clock that gained two minutes, a computer that shut down and an alarm light.
What is the history of Pigford Building?
The Pigford Building was built for a lodge: Mount Barton Lodge No. 13 of the Knights of Pythias raised it on the corner of 22nd Avenue and Ninth Street in downtown Meridian and called it Pythian Castle Hall. The Mississippi Historic Sites Survey form that later carried the building onto the National Register dates it to 1914-1915 and names the deed record as its source. That deed, of 30 June 1915, is the only surviving statement of what the men who paid for the building actually wanted from it: the fraternal organisation, it says, desired to "furnish a Pythian home for weekly meetings. . .and for club rooms and other conveniences for comfort, pleasure and benefit".
That is the standard fraternal formula of the period — rent-paying commerce at street level, brotherhood upstairs — and it explains the shape of the building. The survey describes three storeys of red brick, seven bays by nine, with flat-arched ground-floor openings separated by square brick columns with stepped capitals, a projecting metal cornice between the first and second floors, tripartite windows with transoms above, stone lintels on the second floor and an entablature finished with a pressed-tin frieze of swags. The style is recorded as Classical Revival elements. The line for architect or builder was left blank, and remains blank.
Jody Cook prepared that form in February 1979. By then the lodge was long gone: the survey lists the owner as M. A. Pigford, the present use as "office building" and the former use as "grocery below, offices above" and the physical condition, in one word, as fair. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on 18 December 1979 under reference number 79003401, as part of the Meridian multiple-resource submission. The name on the painted sign that still covers the north flank — PIGFORD BUILDING, in letters two storeys high — comes from that ownership; the lodge that built it had called it Pythian Castle Hall.
A designer the local paper names only as Becky ran a graphic-design business and a tanning salon there in the early 1990s; some years after she closed, according to the same paper, the whole building was gutted and renovated, and a dress shop called Alexander's opened in 1999. By October 2008 the ground floor held three tenants at once: the Chili House restaurant, the Body Bar spa and a dress shop called Dream It, run by Theresa Long, who had been there nearly two years. Above them the upper floors stood empty, their windows boarded over in mismatched plywood — plainly visible in the photograph taken of the building that same summer.
On 30 September 2015 The Meridian Star reported that Elic Purvis was converting the building into a multi-purpose event space called The Venue, keeping the exposed brick and what he described as the industrial feel, and expecting to open in late November or early December. The next tenant came from Front Street, where in the summer of 2018 David Purvis, who owned the Front Street building that housed Jean's Restaurant, shut the restaurant down, citing the conditions in its kitchen, and on remodelling found structural problems in the attic. He kept the name and the cooks, and in December 2018 WTOK reported that the new Jean's would open at The Venue in January, temporarily, with its permanent home to be back on Front Street. On Tuesday 28 May 2019 WTOK reported that Jean's had reopened at 22nd Avenue and Ninth Street, across from the downtown post office, and quoted Purvis saying that the Front Street building had become unstable. Downtown Meridian's list of event spaces, read on 8 October 2026, still gives Jean's at 820 22nd Avenue, with room for 125 guests.
Timeline: the documented record of Pigford Building
- 1914-1915 Mount Barton Lodge No. 13 of the Knights of Pythias builds Pythian Castle Hall on the corner of 22nd Avenue and Ninth Street. The state survey dates the building 1914-1915 from the deed record and leaves the architect and builder unnamed.
- 30 June 1915 The deed record states that the lodge wished to "furnish a Pythian home for weekly meetings. . .and for club rooms and other conveniences for comfort, pleasure and benefit" — the only surviving statement of intent by the men who paid for the building.
- February 1979 Jody Cook records the building for the Mississippi Historic Sites Survey: owner M. A. Pigford, present use "office building", former use "grocery below, offices above", physical condition fair. The form documents the pressed-tin frieze and the 1915 deed and says nothing about a ghost.
- 18 December 1979 The Pigford Building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places under reference number 79003401, within the Meridian multiple-resource submission.
- Early 1990s A designer the newspaper names only as Becky runs a graphic-design business and a tanning salon in the building and later tells The Meridian Star that "there was always a presence". Her three-year-old cousin, taken up to the mezzanine, says: "I don't like the lady in the long dress. She doesn't like me."
- 1999 The dress shop Alexander's opens on the ground floor. A few months later an employee, J.T. Mohammed, sees a woman with long hair in a handkerchief-like dress gliding across the mezzanine. She later tells Alan Brown: "She's more like company, like a presence."
- 2002 Alan Brown devotes pages 146 to 149 of Haunted Places in the American South to the Pigford Building and the accounts from Alexander's.
- July 2008 The photograph now used on this page is taken: the ground floor is the Dream It dress shop, the upper two storeys are boarded up in mismatched plywood, and the painted PIGFORD BUILDING sign covers the north flank.
- 25 October 2008 The Meridian Star publishes Jennifer Jacob's account of a night in the building with Alan Brown. Cameras and EVP sessions produce nothing unusual, but the team declares the building haunted on the strength of an infrared thermometer reading of 76 degrees around shop owner Theresa Long against 82 in the rest of the room, a clock that gained two minutes, a computer that shut down and an alarm light that flashed red. The article ends by telling readers not to be afraid to shop there.
- 30 September 2015 The Meridian Star reports that Elic Purvis is converting the building into a multi-purpose event space called The Venue, keeping the exposed brick, with an opening planned for late November or early December.
- December 2018 WTOK reports that a new Jean's will open at The Venue in January, temporarily. David Purvis, who owns the Front Street building that housed Jean's Restaurant, had shut the restaurant that summer, citing the conditions in its kitchen, and on remodelling found structural problems in the attic.
- 28 May 2019 WTOK reports that Jean's reopened that Tuesday at 22nd Avenue and Ninth Street, across from the downtown post office, with the employees of the previous location; Purvis says the Front Street building had become unstable.
Is there a rational explanation for Pigford Building?
The Meridian Star ran a Halloween feature on the building on 25 October 2008, by staff writer Jennifer Jacob. She went in one evening with Theresa Long, who ran the Dream It dress shop on the ground floor, with Kevin Chatham, reference librarian at the Meridian-Lauderdale County Public Library, and with Alan Brown, a professor at the University of West Alabama in Livingston whom the paper introduced as the author of Stories of the Haunted South. Their kit was cameras, tape recorders, an electromagnetic field detector and an infrared thermometer. Jacob's summary of the cameras and recorders: "We took hordes of pictures and conducted a few Electronic Voice Phenomena sessions without encountering anything out of the ordinary on our cameras or voice recorders."
The team's verdict was nonetheless "Haunted", and the article lists what it rested on. When Theresa Long said she felt something not quite right, Brown's infrared thermometer read 76 degrees around her against 82 in the rest of the room; the paper says this happened several times during the evening and only to her, though seven people were present. A clock gained two minutes during the voice sessions, Long's computer shut down on its own, and an alarm panel she said had never worked flashed red all evening. What convinced the reporter most was that tenants who did not know each other had described the same kind of activity.
An infrared thermometer reads the radiation coming off whatever surface falls inside its field of view, a cone that widens with distance. It does not measure the temperature of the air, and the figure it returns depends on the emissivity of the material it is pointed at: cloth, hair, skin, painted plaster and shop glass give different readings at the same true temperature. Pointed at a person and then at the room, it compares two different surfaces. The article does not say what Brown aimed at to get the 82, or from how far away.
The feature opens and closes on the building's tenants. It begins with the "droves of people" who come downtown "to eat at the Chili House, to be pampered at the Body Bar, or to shop at Dream It", calls the building "what may be downtown's most haunted building", and ends: "we think that whatever haunts it is benign, so don't be afraid to shop there." The Meridian Star gives its own mailing address as 814 22nd Avenue, on the same block as the building that the 1979 survey numbers 818.
The story can also be dated. The 1979 survey form recorded the building in detail — the pressed-tin frieze, the deed of 1915, the owner's name, the physical condition — and says nothing about a ghost. Alan Brown gave it a chapter in Haunted Places in the American South (University Press of Mississippi, 2002), some eighty-seven years after the Knights of Pythias moved in. Every account in the 2008 article looks back: Becky describing the early 1990s to a reporter in 2008, and J.T. Mohammed telling Brown about a figure she saw a few months after Alexander's opened in 1999. Between those two tenancies, the paper adds, the whole building was gutted and renovated.
Most of what the tenants reported is sound and small movement: footsteps from the floor above when nobody else was in the building, a whimpering cry, a voice on the intercom, a vacuum cleaner that started after being unplugged, staplers and doors moving. The woman on the mezzanine is a sighting in three accounts — Becky's, her three-year-old cousin's and J.T. Mohammed's — and in 2008, as the photograph of that summer shows, the two storeys above the shops stood boarded up.
Can you visit Pigford Building?
The Pigford Building is open to the public, but not as a haunted attraction: it is a restaurant.
The ground floor is occupied by Jean's, a Southern lunch place that moved in from Front Street in January 2019 and never left. The restaurant gives its address as 820 22nd Avenue, Meridian, MS 39301; the National Register files the building as 818 22nd Avenue. It is the same corner block, at 22nd Avenue and Ninth Street, across from the downtown post office. As of August 2026 its own website lists opening hours of 10:30 to 14:30 on Monday to Friday and on Sunday, closed Saturday — lunch only — with the telephone number 601 692 7042.
The event space that Elic Purvis created here in 2015 survives inside the restaurant: Downtown Meridian's directory lists 820 22nd Avenue for gatherings of up to 125 guests, with enquiries by email to the restaurant. There is no ghost tour, no admission charge and no organised access to the upper floors, which are private. Do not arrive expecting the shops from the ghost story — Alexander's, the Chili House, the Body Bar and Dream It are all long gone, and the last of them closed more than a decade ago.
The free part of the visit is the outside. The painted PIGFORD BUILDING sign on the north flank is legible from the street and is the best surviving trace of the building's twentieth century; the Meridian Star's old offices stand immediately to the south, and Hallie Ward Interiors opened next door at 816 22nd Avenue in September 2024. Downtown Meridian is compact and walkable from here: the MSU Riley Center, The MAX and Weidmann's are all within a few blocks.
Sources consulted
- Jody Cook, «Pigford Building — Mississippi Historic Sites Survey / National Register of Historic Places inventory-nomination form (ref. 79003401)» — Mississippi Department of Archives and History / National Park Service, 1979 report
- Jennifer Jacob, «Haunted places of East Mississippi and West Alabama: the Pigford building» — The Meridian Star, 2008 newspaper archive
- Alan Brown, «Haunted Places in the American South (chapter on the Pigford Building, pp. 146-149)» — University Press of Mississippi, 2002 book
- Bill Graham, «Pigford Building to become "The Venue"» — The Meridian Star, 2015 newspaper archive
- WTOK-TV, «Jean's reopens in temporary location» — WTOK-TV, Meridian, 2018 newspaper archive
- WTOK-TV, «Jean's Restaurant reopens in new location» — WTOK-TV, Meridian, 2019 newspaper archive
- Jean's, «Jean's — eatjeans.com (on 8 October 2026 the address returned a Squarespace 'Website Expired' page, HTTP 404)» — eatjeans.com, 2026 web
- Downtown Meridian, «Event & Meeting Spaces — 820 22nd Ave, capacity 125» — downtownmeridian.org, 2026 web
- Dudemanfellabra, «File:Pigford Building.jpg — photograph of the building, July 2008» — Wikimedia Commons, 2008 archive
Reviewed by V. Serrano on 2026-08-13 · How we verify our content
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