(eerie music) (specters moan) - [Narrator] Imagine, groggy and sleepy, you stumble across the square of a small West Alabama town.

The bright light of day makes you curse the corn whiskey you consumed the night before.

You lift your eyes to the county courthouse that looms over you, but something in the top window catches your attention.

No, it's impossible!

Plain as day, the face of a dead man stares down at you.

- But it can't be.

He's dead.

- [Narrator] Whose face is really imprinted on that window?

- Lightning bolt hit right here.

- That was the weirdest thing I've ever seen in my life.

- [Narrator] And what actually happened that night at the courthouse?

- The areas that we're talking about are Klan strongholds.

- It was full-body apparition.

- "The Face in the Courthouse Window," one of the finest ghost stories in the state.

- [Narrator] Her name was Kathryn Tucker Windham.

- You do not have to believe in ghosts to enjoy a good ghost tale.

- [Narrator] A folklorist and storyteller.

For nearly 50 years, she traveled the South, collecting tales of mystery and the supernatural.

- But a good ghost story will stretch your imagination and make you wonder, "Could that really be true?"

- [Narrator] But she was not alone.

An unearthly presence followed her.

She named the spirit Jeffrey.

This is what they discovered.

- [Narrator] Behind me is the courtroom in the Pickens County Courthouse in Carrollton, Alabama, where if he had lived, Henry Wells would have been tried for arson for burning the courthouse that once stood on this site.

He became one of the most famous figures in Alabama folklore.

(disquieting music) - [Storyteller] "The Face in the Courthouse Window."

Since 1878, there has been the picture of a man's face so indelibly stamped on a window of the Pickens County Courthouse that it looks as if a photographer has snapped his lens and made the likeness on the glass pane.

(fire crackling) The original courthouse had been burned by Yankee troops under the command of General John T. Croxton on April 5th, 1865.

It was a senseless burning, serving no military purpose, and it infuriated and embittered the residents of the county.

(subdued music) In those days following the Civil War, the task of rebuilding the courthouse seemed impossible.

There was no money; materials were scarce and expensive.

Skilled labor was difficult to find.

Yet, somehow the courthouse was rebuilt.

Even the occupying federal troops who were camped in Carrollton during the post-war years must have been impressed by the achievement.

Then, less than 12 years after their first courthouse was burned by the Yankees, the residents of Carrollton watched helplessly as their second courthouse, the one they had struggled so hard to rebuild, was consumed by fire.

It was almost more than they could bear.

Fire broke out in several places at the same time, and for this reason, the blaze was held unquestionably to be the work of an incendiary.

(brooding music) As time went on and nobody was able to point the finger of justice at any suspect, the citizens of Carrollton became uneasy and began to criticize the officers of the law for not finding the criminal.

The sheriff realized that he must find a suspect if he possibly could.

Henry Wells, a Negro who lived near the town, had a bad name.

His temper was high, and he had been involved in several fights.

It was rumored that he always carried a razor.

Nobody really saw him set fire to the courthouse, but he had been in town early on the morning when the fire occurred, and rumors connecting him with the burning began to be circulated, especially when no other suspect could be located.

In spite of the fact that there was only vague, circumstantial evidence against him, Wells was arrested on four counts: arson, burglary, carrying a concealed weapon, and assault with intent to murder.

(static hisses) Wells swore that he was not guilty and was being wrongly accused.

But in a group of men gathered about the square on the sultry afternoon of his arrest, feeling against him ran high, and with the aid of some corn whiskey, it ran higher until it reached a dangerous pitch.

- [Narrator] Today, the town square in Carrollton is quieter, though the stories told of that fateful night still echo here.

The current courthouse was rebuilt using its predecessor's bricks in a little over a year.

It was saved from being destroyed again in modern times, largely thanks to the efforts of celebrated local luminary, Dora Johnson.

- She is the reason the courthouse is still here.

Her and some other ladies back in the '70s really went to bat for the courthouse, and she continued that throughout her life.

- [Narrator] Overflow cases from the modern courthouse next door are still occasionally tried here, and the public defender's office recently moved into the first floor, but it's the face and the story around it that draws people from far away, curious to see if it lives up to the legend.

Local historians and boosters alike have embraced Henry Wells' story, even encouraging a play that retold the night's events that was staged inside the courthouse.

- My name is Barry Bradford.

I am the writer of the play "Face in the Courthouse Window."

The town very much supported the play and came to it, and people from out of town.

It was a tourist event for a lot of folks.

I got to meet Kathryn Tucker Windham.

She came to see the play one year just before she passed away, and I was honored that she came to see this play.

- [Narrator] But for several of the cast and crew, the courthouse's haunted past extended beyond the stage.

- I actually have had a couple of weird things happen here with me.

(laughs) I didn't tell you that, did I?

- My name is Jeff Wilson, and I directed "The Face in the Courthouse Window."

We just would hear sounds, see things, people in the cast would be like, "Man, did you see that?"

"No, I didn't see that.

What are you talking about?"

We thought there were other people in the cast, but they were not of this earth.

(chuckles) - [Narrator] If ghosts do in fact roam these halls, not one could claim to have lived through a more bleak and violent time than the man whose face appears in that infamous window.

We don't know much about Henry Wells except for what we can learn from the few appearances he made in the "West Alabamian" newspaper.

Here's what we do know.

One, we know that he'd been born enslaved and freed with the end of the Civil War, and we know that like many of his fellow freedmen, in the years that followed, he'd have to struggle to survive.

- My name is Michael Fitzgerald.

I'm a retired professor at St.

Olaf College.

There's a lot of random violence immediately after the war.

Angry Confederate troops marching home, they see Black refugees on the road, they take it out on them.

Then you have the Black Codes, then you have the attempt to rebuild labor on lines that resemble slavery.

There's a wave of labor unrest throughout the Cotton Belt.

Large numbers of white and enslaved refugees are pouring into the region.

- The economy had been destroyed essentially by the war, and so everyone was trying to pull their lives back together.

- [Narrator] And against this backdrop, Henry would have been expected to do whatever he could to be the provider for a budding family.

- There's some census information that you can find.

He did have a wife named Caroline.

He was a man acting out of his particular time and his needs to feed his wife and himself.

- [Narrator] What else do we know?

Two, we know that the second Pickens County Courthouse burned in November of 1876.

In the next month, Henry and a man named Bill Buckhalter fled into the countryside after being accused of robbing a nearby store.

Guilty or innocent, for a Black man of this time and place, just the accusation of theft could be a death sentence.

- Areas that we're talking about in western Alabama are Klan strongholds.

The plantation areas just south of Pickens County, Greene County and Sumter County along the border.

They're some of the bloodiest areas.

A lot of the whites that are participating are coming in from Pickens County.

(eerie music) - [Narrator] Three.

We know that in January of 1878, Henry's supposed accomplice, Bill Buckhalter, was captured near Tuscaloosa.

Buckhalter reportedly told his captors that Henry had burned down the courthouse a little more than a year earlier.

A few days later, Henry was captured in Pickens County after his pursuers shot him twice and was presumably turned over to the sheriff.

If the legend were true and the sheriff did hide Henry in the courthouse, it's likely that he'd have first taken him to the building's lone jail cell in the basement.

- The only access we have to where we believe Henry was kept during those days is through our women's bathroom now, but at that time, you know, this was the sheriff's office up here, so we do have to go through the women's bathroom to get into the basement, the holding area, which we have set up basically like we would think that they had held Henry at that time.

Mm.

(door creaks) (door latch clicks) And be careful.

Very steep.

(stairs thud softly) Here is a setup that was done to try to replicate what Henry might have been put into, just a plain cot with blankets, a necessary pot, and a chair, and that would have been basically all he would have had.

- [Narrator] Four.

We also know that Henry and Bill Buckhalter signed a confession that was entered into this book stating that they were responsible for burning the courthouse, but we have no way of knowing if it was coerced or even if they knew what they were signing.

Now, with a clearer picture of his last days, let's return to Henry's story and learn how he became a legend.

(ominous music) - [Storyteller] The air on that afternoon was oppressively humid.

In a black ragged cloud west of town, the rumbling of thunder lent an additional menace to the already ominous situation.

(townsfolk clamor) Men began milling about, demanding immediate action against Wells.

Soon, someone produced a rope, and hasty plans for hanging him at once were made.

In an effort to save him from the excited crowd, the sheriff hid Wells in the garret of the new courthouse, but his whereabouts were soon discovered.

- Well, we're in the jury consultation rooms, but also in this room is our attic access.

And as you can see, it's not very big.

Henry was just about invalid, so it would have been tough for two people to try to get a man like that into that small space, which is not very far from the window.

You're only looking a few feet.

- [Storyteller] Bent on vengeance, the angry horde closed in on the courthouse, ready to break down its doors if necessary to reach their prey.

Wells knew why they were there, but he went to the garret window, his face gray with fear, and confronted them, defiantly shouting at the top of his lungs, "I am innocent!

If you kill me, I'm gonna haunt you for the rest of your lives!"

Just as the bloodthirsty crowd was about to get into the building, a bolt of lightning illuminated Wells' tortured face behind the window pane, and Henry Wells' picture, caught by the lightning, they say, has remained imprinted on the garret window of the Carrollton Courthouse from that day to this.

(subdued music) The next morning, a calm day after the tumultuous night, a member of the lynching party was passing the courthouse.

He glanced up at the window where he had seen Wells looking out the night before, and he turned pale with fright.

He rubbed his eyes, and silently cursing the corn whiskey he had drunk the night before, he looked again.

And again he saw the face of Henry Wells peering down at him.

He knew that Wells was dead, and he began to scream that the devil had come to haunt him.

- [Town Resident] Oh, God!

- [Storyteller] His screams brought other people to the scene, and they, too, saw the face of Henry Wells, distorted by fear, but an unmistakable likeness, looking down at them.

The face was still there the next day, and the next, and the next.

Hundreds of people came to gaze in awe and disbelief at the eerie likeness.

The sheriff was particularly upset by the accusing face.

He was often seen carrying buckets of water up the steep stairs to try to wash away the symbol of a town's guilt, but he only succeeded in making the picture more clearly defined.

No amount of scrubbing, not even with gasoline, would remove the image from the window pane.

It is still there, plainly visible on the lower right-hand pane of the garret window.

On at least one occasion, some people say two, every window pane in the Carrollton Courthouse was broken during a severe hailstorm, except the pane with the image of Henry Wells on it.

And on stormy nights, some people swear they can hear Wells' wails coming from the twisted mouth of the face in the window.

- [Narrator] It's a beautiful and terrifying story.

No wonder that it could very well be Alabama's most famous ghost tale.

There's just one problem.

(haunting music) (camera shutter clicks) According to the "West Alabamian" newspaper, Henry died in the Pickens County Jail in late January, soon after he was captured.

No mention is made of a mob or a lightning bolt or even the courthouse.

Then in February, almost a full month later, the windows of the still-under-construction courtroom were installed for the first time.

It's not impossible, but it seems likely that when Henry died, there would have been no attic window to press his face against.

And there are other versions of the legend that make things even more confusing.

Some local members of the Wells family hold that Henry actually escaped that night and lived out the rest of his life under a new name.

One newspaper account from 1928 says that the famous face actually belongs to Henry's alleged accomplice, Bill Buckhalter, and appeared in the window supernaturally after he was executed.

But even if things didn't happen exactly as they did in the story, there are reasons why the legend of Henry Wells spread in those early days and has persisted for so long.

- If you burn down the heart of a town, then you're creating a tremendous trauma to that community.

It was such a traumatic event in the history of these folks that they remember that.

It was important to them.

- [Narrator] If ghost stories and folklore can memorialize trauma, they can just as well preserve guilt.

The historical record makes no mention of a mob coming for Henry Wells, but lynching parties did come for several other Black people in Pickens County in the years that followed.

It could be that Henry's legend, as it came to be told, persisted for so long in memory of those victims.

- In this story, it sort of suggests the misgivings of the level of violence.

I suspect that most people, as things calm down, kind of wonder about some of the things that were done.

- [Narrator] But for those supernaturally inclined, who's to say that a face didn't manifest on the window glass, whether it was the night of Henry Wells' death or sometime later?

After all, by all accounts, something lurks in the old Pickens County Courthouse.

- One night, probably two in the morning, I had locked the doors.

Everything's locked downstairs.

I hear one of the doors open, footsteps.

They go all the way over to the public defender's office down there, but at the time that room was totally... They were renovating it.

So I was thinking, "Who could this be?"

So I need to go check it out.

So I go running down the stairs, go in that room, and it was this time of year, it was hot.

All of a sudden, it was probably 40 degrees.

I could see my breath and every hair on my body was... I wouldn't say fear, it was more like awe, and the cold was just like a slap in the face, you know, just felt like you walked in a walk-in cooler, and I just had a feeling that someone was there.

And I said, "I'm sorry," and walked out, (laughs) and I left immediately.

- Right before I finished the play, I was talking with Leon Manning, who was one of the people who really made this happen.

And I said, "Then there'll be a tremendous explosion.

There'll be thunder and lightning, and that'll be the climactic ending of the play."

When the last of those words came out of my mouth, a transformer exploded across the road, and it was a blue, bright blue skies, no storm.

That was the weirdest thing I've ever seen in my life.

- Heard something up here, thought a cast member was up here.

I didnt know who it could be.

I came up the stairs and I looked, and if you'll see behind me, that's a witness chair.

And sitting in that chair was a woman in what I thought was 1920s costume.

I'm thinking, "Who is this?

Why are they here?"

It was full-body apparition with her back turned toward me.

Once again, the cold feeling, and I looked away and looked back, and nothing, gone.

- I went up to, you can actually get up to the garret room.

There's a trap door in that room there, and I went up there.

There was a ladder, and I got up to that room and took my camera and couldn't get my camera to work there.

It would not work in that room.

I took pictures all over this courthouse, but when I went up there, it would not function.

It just kept turning off, which is a little weird.

(laughs) - The face of Henry Wells looking down at that mob of men who had come to kill him, and you visit this little town in Pickens County, you look up at that garret window, and you will see Henry Wells, the face in the courthouse window.

(subtle eerie music) - [Narrator] Thanks for watching.

This was by far the most requested of Mrs.

Windham's stories on our social media feeds, and it's not hard to see why.

Ghost stories are often at their best when they invoke the memories of real-life horrors, especially those close to home.

Please, if you haven't already, like and subscribe to this channel.

Jeffrey has many more stories he can't wait to tell you.

(subtle eerie music continues) - Yeah, several years ago, we found that we had a beehive, a bee colony in this, that would be the northwest side corner, the top corner of the courthouse.

And we had a couple of guys, which one of our board members is a beekeeper, so he got up there with a scissor lift and that kind of thing, and they was able to get the bees out and collect the combs and that kind of thing, and actually even retrieve honey from that.

And actually, that's some of Henry's honey, as we call it, so... - [Director of Photography] Cut.

(crew chatters) Henry's honey?

- Henry's honey.