Sturdivant Hall

Its ghost is said to be John McGee Parkman, who bought the house in 1864 and at twenty-eight was president of the First National Bank of Selma. When the bank lost government deposits in cotton speculation, General Wager Swayne seized it and arrested him. The story usually told — that he was shot as he ran home to Sturdivant Hall — cannot have happened: the jail was at Cahaba, almost thirteen kilometres away. What the Selma Times printed the next day is stranger. On 23 May 1867 he bolted from the jail hall, ran seventy-five yards to the Alabama River with the jailer firing, swam, reached the paddle wheel of the steamer Gertrude while passengers watched, and went under. The paper called it suicide; the wires called it drowning; when the body surfaced a week later, the wound was a gunshot. The earliest printed ghost story is from 1969.

The house came first and the ghost arrived a century later. Both are better documented than the version that circulates online, and neither says what that version says. The lot, the builder, and the people the record leaves out On 19 April 1852 Colonel Edward T. Watts, a cotton planter, bought a corner lot bounded by Mabry and Union streets and McLeod Avenue at a public sale for $1,830. What he wanted, according to the museum's own history page, was a house "in town" for entertaining guests. Work ran from 1853 to 1856 under Thomas Helm Lee of Selma, a cousin of Robert E. Lee, and cost around $69,000. What Lee produced was a brick house rendered in stucco and scored to imitate ashlar stone. Six fluted Corinthian columns thirty feet high stand across a sixty-foot front, their capitals cast in iron rather than carved, behind a lace-work iron balcony that runs the whole length of the porch. Four windows to each floor have hinged panels below the sills so the sashes can be used as doors. The roof is hipped, with three chimneys and a small cupola windowed on every side. Inside, a T-shaped hall divides both floors; the drawing room measures twenty by thirty feet and its cornice carries large plaster rosettes spaced widely at the bottom and tiny ones crowded at the top; a straight-run stair serves the bedrooms and a spiral stair winds around a central post up to the cupola. The 1972 nomination that put the house on the National Register compared it to the Natchez mansions, and to Stanton Hall in particular. Artisans brought from Italy did the plaster and the marble. Here is what the record does not say. The nomination form names Watts, names Lee, gives the price and the comparison, and stops. The Encyclopedia of Alabama adds the Italian plasterers. Neither names — nor even mentions — the enslaved people who built a Greek Revival mansion for a cotton planter in Dallas County in the middle of the 1850s. The same reference work says it of a comparable house. The Encyclopedia of Alabama's article on Lyon Hall in Demopolis, finished in 1853, states that it "was built with slave labor for its first resident, George Gaines Lyon". For Sturdivant Hall the nomination, the Encyclopedia's article and the museum's own history page of 2010 are all silent on who did the work, and this file supplies no names that those sources do not. The banker Watts moved to Texas and on 12 February 1864 sold the house for $65,000 to John McGee Parkman, born in Selma on 12 January 1838. Parkman had climbed from dry goods to clerk, bookkeeper, teller and cashier, and in 1866 — at twenty-eight — he was made president of the First National Bank of Selma, a newly organised institution with $100,000 of capital and large deposits of United States government money. The bank went into cotton speculation, which the museum's own account calls "a common error of the times", and lost. What happened next is unusually well recorded, because the Selma Times printed a full account on 24 May 1867 that Northern papers reprinted within the week. On 15 April 1867 some $160,000 was said to have been stolen from the bank; the next day Parkman advertised a reward in the city papers for its recovery. On 17 April General Wager Swayne, the senior Federal officer in the state, took possession of the bank and its deposits on behalf of the government and placed the president under military arrest. The following morning Parkman escaped from his own residence, where he was being held under guard, and took the Cahaba road on horseback. Swayne offered $1,500 for him. He was captured in Wilcox County on the 19th, brought back to Selma, and lodged the next day in the county jail at Cahaba, 12.7 km (7.9 miles) south-west of the house he had bought three years earlier in a straight line, and 19 miles below Selma by river on the table of Alabama River landings in Saffold Berney's Handbook of Alabama (1878). Twenty-three May 1867 At about sunset on 23 May the prisoners were assembled in the hall of the jail when the jailer opened the door. Parkman rushed out and made for the Alabama River, "about seventy five yards distant". The jailer fired at him as he ran and he was seen to fall; he got up, reached the water and struck out swimming. The steamer Gertrude lay some twenty yards below the point where he entered the river, and a party of ladies and gentlemen on board watched the whole thing. He went under once or twice as he was carried down towards the boat. Efforts were made to save him. He reached the paddle wheel, which was not turning, held on for a moment "stifled and exhausted", then sank beneath the boat and was not seen again. He left a widow, Sarah J. Norris, and two small daughters, Emily Norris Parkman and Maria Hunter Parkman. The Selma paper, which knew him, asked that "his errors in the closing scenes of his bank" be attributed "to his youth and ambition, and not to any mature fraudulent intentions". The telegraph flattened all of that into one line that ran from Mobile on 24 May and was printed from Alexandria to Baton Rouge: Parkman "escaped yesterday, plunged into the river and drowned himself". The Selma Times had already run it under a blunter heading: "The Selma Bank Robbery — Suicide of the President, John M. Parkman". Then the body came back. On 30 May 1867 the Selma Messenger reported that it had been recovered the previous day about fifteen miles below Cahaba and brought up to the city, and that a gentleman who saw it said the appearances "all indicated that he came to his death from a gun shot wound", the ball entering near the spine on the left side, in the lumbar region, and passing out just above the navel. Three weeks later a separate wire told a different story: the remains were found about a mile above White Bluff, Alabama, and the vultures had disfigured them. White Bluff was a landing on the Alabama River below Cahaba; Berney's table puts it 10 miles below Cahaba by water, so the wire's spot lies about nine river miles below the town and the Messenger's about fifteen. The two reports put the body on the same reach of river, some six miles apart, and differ on its state: a wound described by a witness in one, a corpse disfigured by vultures in the other. Afterwards Parkman's widow and daughters stayed on until January 1870, when the estate went at auction for $12,500 to Emile Gillman, a Selma merchant. The Gillman family kept it until the autumn of 1957, when the City of Selma bought it for $75,000: $50,000 came from the estate of Robert Daniel Sturdivant, whose will provided for a museum, and the city council and the Dallas County Board of Revenue put in $12,500 each. The house therefore carries the name of a man who never lived in it. It was documented by the Historic American Buildings Survey in 1934–35 and listed on the National Register on 18 January 1973, on a form signed by W. Warner Floyd of the Alabama Historical Commission. The ghost is younger than the museum. The earliest printed telling among this file's sources is "The Return of the Ruined Banker", a chapter in 13 Alabama Ghosts and Jeffrey by Kathryn Tucker Windham and Margaret Gillis Figh, published in Huntsville in 1969 — a hundred and two years after the death, and twelve years after the house opened to visitors. It opens on a guided tour, with somebody insisting that "Parkman's ghost is right here in Sturdivant Hall!"

Sturdivant Hall is at 713 Mabry Street, Selma, Alabama 36701, in the Old Town Historic District. The telephone number given by guidebooks and by the regional tourism site Alabama's Front Porches is (334) 872-5626. On 11 May 2026 the Selma Times-Journal gave the hours for the house, its grounds and the gift shop as Tuesday to Friday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. The Encyclopedia of Alabama, last revised in January 2024, still has Tuesday to Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.; it describes public tours through the house, the detached kitchen that now holds the gift shop, and the garden, with admission fees and fundraisers paying for the upkeep. The tornado of 12 January 2023 broke windows and uprooted or damaged many of the old live oaks on the lawn, and museum coordinator Mary Margret Mims told the Selma Times-Journal two days later that the museum was closed until further notice while the house was repaired and the grounds cleared. On 26 October of that year the museum held its Barbecue on the Green fundraiser on the grounds, with Mims, named in the report as museum director, greeting the guests. In March 2024 the house was the venue for the reception that opened the Historic Selma Tour of Homes, and in May 2026 board members were replanting its heritage rose garden, where 50 of the original 180 bushes had died after the tornado and the pandemic years. The museum's former web address, sturdivanthall.com, no longer belongs to it: on 24 September 2026 the domain redirected to an Indonesian-language slot and lottery page. Upstairs, according to the Encyclopedia of Alabama, a T-shaped hall leads to four bedrooms and cantilevered stairs rise to the attic, where a spiral stair winds round a central pole up to the cupola. Next door stands the White-Force Cottage, which the museum's own website described in 2013 as built in 1859 for Clement Billingslea White and his wife Martha, born Martha Todd, a half-sister of Mary Todd Lincoln. The place where Parkman was jailed and died is Old Cahawba Archaeological Park, the site of the vanished river town, about 13 km (8 miles) to the south-west. The house is let for weddings and private events, and the Encyclopedia calls it a prominent stop on the Historic Selma Pilgrimage.