👻 HAUNTED PLACE · EXP. Nº9478
ACTIVE
Pigford Building
Pigford Building is a location reputed to be haunted in Mississippi, US. Its reputation comes from reported apparitions, unexplained phenomena and eyewitness accounts gathered over time.
Where is Pigford Building?
- Location
- Mississippi, US
- Type
- Other
- Coordinates
- 32.366, -88.7
- Testimonies
- 0
- Last updated
LOCATION
Why is Pigford Building said to be haunted?
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. 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 January 2019, Jean's, a Meridian lunch institution that arrived as a stopgap and never left. 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, whose newsroom is the building next door, walked the place with Brown, recorders and thermometers in hand, and published what they found — which, by their own account, was almost nothing.
What is the history of Pigford Building?
The Pigford Building was not built for shopkeepers. It 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". Physical condition, one word: 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, not from the men who built it.
What followed was churn. A designer the local paper names only as Becky ran a graphic-design business and a tanning salon there in the early 1990s. 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 roughly 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.
The rescue came in 2015. Elic Purvis announced in September of that year that he 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. Four years later the building acquired a tenant with more history than itself. Jean's, a Meridian restaurant of some forty years, had closed its Front Street home in the summer of 2018 after its owner, David Purvis, found structural problems in the attic during a remodel. In January 2019 Jean's reopened inside The Venue as a stopgap while Front Street was repaired. It never went back. On 28 May 2019 WTOK reported the restaurant settled at 22nd Avenue and Ninth Street, across from the downtown post office, and that is still where it is.
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. This is the earliest telling of the story that can be fixed to a printed page.
- 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; the only anomaly is an infrared thermometer reading of 76 degrees around shop owner Theresa Long against 82 in the rest of the room. 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.
- January 2019 Jean's, a Meridian restaurant of some forty years, reopens inside The Venue after abandoning its Front Street home in the summer of 2018, when owner David Purvis found structural problems in the attic. The move is announced as temporary.
- 28 May 2019 WTOK reports Jean's settled at 22nd Avenue and Ninth Street with the same staff as before. The temporary move has become permanent, and the restaurant still occupies the building.
Is there a rational explanation for Pigford Building?
There is exactly one published investigation of the Pigford Building, and the most striking thing about it is how little it found.
On 25 October 2008 The Meridian Star ran a Halloween feature by staff writer Jennifer Jacob, who went into the building with Alan Brown, a professor at the University of West Alabama in Livingston and the author of the 2002 chapter that first put the place in print. Their kit was cameras, tape recorders, an electromagnetic field detector and an infrared thermometer. Jacob's own summary of the results: "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 single positive reading was a thermometer. While Theresa Long said she felt something wrong, Brown pointed the infrared thermometer at her and got 76 degrees against 82 in the rest of the room. It is worth being precise about what that instrument does: an infrared thermometer reads the radiation coming off whatever surface falls inside its cone, and the cone widens with distance. It does not measure air temperature at all, and the number it returns depends on the emissivity of the material — cloth, hair, skin, painted plaster and shop glass all read differently at the same true temperature. Aimed at a person's clothing from a few feet away, in a room where the walls are the reference, a six-degree difference is what the device is built to produce.
The context of the article matters too. The Meridian Star's newsroom is the building next door, and the piece opens on the shops — the Chili House, the Body Bar, Dream It — and closes by telling readers that whatever haunts the place is benign, "so don't be afraid to shop there". The phrase sometimes quoted about this being downtown's most haunted building is the newspaper's, written for a downtown that was fighting for footfall. It is not a finding.
And the relato can be dated. The 1979 survey form recorded this building in detail — the pressed-tin frieze, the deed of 1915, the owner's name, even the physical condition — and says nothing whatsoever about a ghost. The earliest printed telling that can be fixed to a page is Alan Brown's chapter of 2002, some eighty-seven years after the Knights of Pythias moved in. Every account before that is retrospective: Becky describing the early 1990s to a reporter in 2008, J.T. Mohammed describing 1999 or 2000 to Brown at least a year later.
The setting supplies the rest. This is a masonry block on a street corner with a mezzanine open to the shop floor and, for decades, two vacant boarded storeys overhead. Footsteps from above, voices carrying down, doors that move when the front door opens on a windy corner — in a building of that construction those are reports about acoustics and air pressure before they are reports about anything else.
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 — address and opening hours» — 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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