(static buzzing) (heels clicking) - Good evening.

On this week's program, we're going to take you into the world of the supernatural.

- [Narrator] Imagine after a late night of studying in the school library, you step into your dorm's hallway only to see a strange figure at the far end.

A girl about your age dressed head to toe in the deepest shade of red.

She walks steadily towards you.

Squinting through the dim light, you can just make out her face.

Ghostly white and locked in an expression of grim despair.

Through the haze of terror, you remember the story.

It's her.

The Red Lady is here.

- There's always someone who tells of seeing something in red, something.

- Coming down the hallway with long black hair wearing a long red dress.

- [Narrator] Who was she?

- She perhaps felt like an outsider.

- All that the Red Lady wanted was to be connected.

- [Narrator] And why does her story still haunt the gothic halls of this Southern college?

- [Interviewer] You don't believe that there is such thing as a Red Lady?

- What do you think we saw?

- Huntingdons Red Lady, a wonderful college ghost.

- [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.

(ominous music) - Nearly all colleges have ghosts.

Legends that have grown up around some supernatural occurrence that generations of students tell to each other.

But the finest of those ghost stories, those college ghost stories, is told here at Huntingdon College in Montgomery.

- [Virgina] "The Red Lady of Huntingdon College."

Huntingdon College in Montgomery has been haunted for years by a ghostly visitant known as the Red Lady.

This ghost was a former student named Martha, who had lived a sorrowful life which came to a tragic end in her room on the fourth floor of Pratt Hall.

Martha was from New York.

And she came to Huntingdon because her father's will specified that his daughter must attend her grandmother's, his mother's, alma mater.

Martha did not especially want to come to Alabama.

But her father's fortune was large and she knew his deep love for his home state of Alabama.

She was dressed in red when she arrived.

And she brought with her red draperies for her windows and a red spread for her bed, as well as other accessories of the same color.

From the beginning, she refused to explain her apparent obsession with the color red.

Being a stranger and shy as well as unhappy in her unfamiliar surroundings, she could not make friends among the students.

They sensed that she was different from themselves.

And having heard she was wealthy, they mistook her shyness for disdain.

Martha sat alone and apart from them in the dining hall.

She seldom spoke to her roommate.

And when girls dropped in to visit, she seemed so cold and unfriendly they stopped coming.

Her roommate found the situation unbearable and asked the housemother if she could move out.

The housemother granted this request and put someone else in the room with Martha, who became increasingly aloof and irritable.

The second girl also left her after only a week.

This procedure happened again and again as one roommate after another found it impossible to live with the surly girl.

At last, the president of the dormitory, who was known for her ability to get along with everybody, moved in with Martha and did all she could to make friends with her.

But all efforts were futile.

Martha had become embittered as well as withdrawn, and she seemed to resent the presence of this kind-hearted girl.

After all her efforts at friendship had failed and after she found herself growing depressed and despondent, the dormitory president packed her belongings and prepared to leave.

Just as she was about to go, Martha, who had not known of her imminent departure, returned to the room.

With a look of defiance, she said, "So you couldn't stand me either like all the rest of your stuck-up friends.

I was beginning to think you really wanted me to be your friend.

But you hate me, just like the rest.

Well, I'm glad to be rid of you.

Take your things and go.

But I'll tell you one thing, my dear.

For the rest of your life, you'll regret leaving this room."

- [Narrator] Before we finish Martha's story, let's turn our attention to another nervous freshman leaving home for the first time.

In 1935, in the very depths of the Great Depression, Kathryn Tucker Windham arrived at Huntingdon's gates, scholarship in hand.

- I'm Anthony Leigh.

I'm the president of Huntingdon College.

Kathryn Tucker Windham absolutely loved her time at Huntingdon College.

She came here in 1935, graduated in 1939.

- [Kathryn] We just had a good time at Huntingdon then.

And we have kept up.

This class of '39 is the best class that ever graduated from Huntingdon, I'm quite sure that all of them are the smartest and the most fun and the cleverest.

- [Narrator] One of Kathryn's teachers did more perhaps than any other to influence the path her life would take.

Margaret Gillis Figh taught English at Huntingdon for 48 years.

During that time, she became known as a prolific collector of southern folklore, including stories sourced from her own students.

Kathryn and Margaret stayed in touch after graduation.

And in the mid 1960s, it was Margaret who suggested they collaborate on a collection of ghost stories, a project that would become "13 Alabama Ghosts and Jeffrey."

When the time came to select which stories to include, they only needed to think back to Kathryn's freshman year.

- I came here as a freshman long time ago, uneasy and little bit homesick.

Wanting some security and some reassurance.

And what I got was the story of the Red Lady.

- [Narrator] Tucked away in a corner of Houghton Memorial Library, Huntingdon's archive holds many artifacts related to the college's history.

(bell ringing) - This yearbook is known as "The Bells and Pomegranates."

It's from 1931.

And it has probably a student dressed up as the Red Lady by Pratt Hall.

And this is one of the earliest mentions of the Red Lady's story.

She has been a part of Huntingdon's story for a long time.

- [Narrator] Longer than you might think.

Before Martha, before the name Huntingdon, the Red Lady was already tied to the school's history.

In the mid 1850s, the white Methodist citizens of Tuskegee, Alabama faced a worrying truth.

Baptists had built a women's college in their town.

Unwilling to subject their daughters to a Baptist education, the Methodists took the only logical step.

After much fundraising, planning, building, and striving, they opened Tuskegee Female College in 1856.

From its earliest days, the school sought to set an abnormally high bar for women's education.

- I'm Lisa Lindquist Dorr, and I'm a professor of history at the University of Alabama.

The education that was available to women in the 19th century in the South was primarily to give them sort of the refinement to be a lady, though also with some focus on the classical topics of education because it was sort of a marker of class status.

- Huntingdon was not founded just to create a finishing school for women.

It was designed to be a place of rigor.

It was designed to be a place that prepared young women to go forth to be thoughtful leaders and difference makers.

- [Narrator] The ensuing years would test that commitment, but not break it.

The Civil War and the Depression of the 1870s came close.

Each of the college's successive presidents repeated the arduous task of traveling across the country fundraising, begging parents to keep their daughters in school, and stretching budgets to their limits.

The effort paid off.

By the time the college entered the 20th century, the school had outgrown the tiny campus at Tuskegee.

- College recognized that there was a town of promise about 30 miles to the west.

And so the decision was made to relocate from Tuskegee to Montgomery.

And in doing so, it changed its name to Woman's College of Alabama.

And then in the middle of the Great Depression, 1934, it became Huntingdon College.

- [Narrator] But wait.

Before we leave Tuskegee behind, the old campus still has a secret for us.

Martha was not the first Red Lady.

- [Virgina] Actually, there have been two apparitions who walked or walk the dormitory halls by night who wore or wear red.

The first lady dressed in red appeared at the college when it was still upstate in Tuskegee.

She was seen one night in Sky Alley, the top floor of the dormitory in the Tuskegee institution.

It was just after all lights were turned off at 10 o'clock in the evening when she came into view, walking up and down the corridors in a lonely vigil, looking neither left nor right and uttering no sound.

The lady clad in a red evening dress and carrying a red parasol was visible through a crimson aura of light, which surrounded her and cast a lurid glow over her unearthly features.

The frightened students who saw her hastily gathered in one room and moved a heavy washstand against the door.

But they continued to hear her footsteps.

These weirdly rhythmic sounds alarmed them so greatly, they became panic-stricken.

One of the girls fainted.

And nobody dared speak above a whisper until at dawn the tap, tap noise of her clicking heels died away.

And she was finally glimpsed disappearing in the gloom of an avenue of cedars leading to an entrance gate.

The students at the old college never saw the Red Lady again.

But for a long time, their sleep was made restless by memories of the ghostly promenade.

The mind of one girl became so unhinged that she would not retire at all without having a lighting taper burning at her bedside.

And the nerves of others neared the breaking point.

- [Narrator] Another totally different Red Lady.

And yet the way they're described, neither she nor Martha look anything like the photo from the 1931 yearbook.

The mysterious link between them might have been explained in the papers of the old campus, if not for a great disaster.

- In August of 1909, all of the belongings of the institution were moved from Tuskegee to Hamner Hall in downtown Montgomery.

And the night that all of the textbooks and records and the furniture and laboratory equipment moved into Hamner Hall, the building caught fire.

And the college lost everything.

- [Narrator] What kind of place was this new campus where freshman Martha would arrive and the legend of the second Red Lady flourish?

- This is John Jefferson Flowers Hall.

For a couple of years, this was the only building on our campus.

- [Narrator] Flowers Hall remained unfinished even as the students appeared with their luggage in tow.

For months, classes were held in rooms without doors or windows.

With stairways and roofs under construction, girls had to climb scaffolding to their dorm rooms and carry umbrellas indoors.

The finished construction revealed a gothic design, intentionally modeled after the oldest European universities.

A suitably spooky backdrop for young women inclined to tell ghost stories.

The school's first decade in Montgomery was eventful.

The patriotic frenzy of America's entry into the First World War, the lockdown that accompanied a global pandemic, the Spanish flu, and across the country, a new youth culture redefined expectations for young women.

- Now, at a place like a woman's college like Huntingdon College, they had opportunities to engage in extracurricular activities, to be movers of particular organizations and clubs and sororities without having to share any of those leadership responsibilities or leadership opportunities with men.

For many young women who are attending these schools, they are going to create those civic organizations that create the modern south.

- [Narrator] For a new generation eager to put their stamp on history, these years were fertile ground for new traditions, some of which would reach back to the college's haunted past.

One such tradition, begun during World War I, was an annual event called Senior Inspection.

Once a year in the dead of night, the seniors would dress up as ghosts and run through the dorms rustling every student out of bed to parade around the campus.

Writing about Senior Inspection in the mid 1950s, one Huntingdon faculty member called it, "An antecedent of a present well-known senior custom."

Interestingly, we see an echo of Senior Inspection in the modern day Red Lady Run, a newer tradition maintained by Huntingdon sororities.

One night every October, sorority sisters dress in all black and dash around the campus, led by one young woman chosen to portray the Red Lady herself.

- It's tradition that the Red Lady during the Red Lady Run knocks on the door of the president.

What a cool moment to open the door and there was the Red Lady.

And in typical 2024 mode, the first question I asked her was, "Can we take a selfie?"

- [Narrator] The connection between Senior Inspection and the Red Lady Run looks even stronger when we consider what we know about the Red Lady traditions of the intervening century.

- My name is Mary Kate Dean, and I started Huntingdon College in 1971-72.

And I was graduated in 1974-75.

I did not know anything about the Red Lady when I came here in my freshman year.

I heard the story from a group of freshman girls.

And they said, "What?

You mean you've never heard the story of the Red Lady?"

I said, "No."

Well, one night, it must have been in the fall of '71, I was in the bathroom studying for my first Western civilization test.

The suitemates and my roommate wanted to go to sleep.

I needed to study a lot more, so I just kind of made myself a nest on the floor of the bathroom, kept the light on, and began to study.

Somewhere around midnight, to my dismay, the lights went out.

(switch clanking) Then, I began to hear all this commotion out in the hallway.

Doors being banged, girls screaming.

So that woke everybody up in both rooms.

And we all rushed to the door.

And I opened the door.

And coming down the hallway and very sedately and slowly was a girl with long black hair wearing a long red dress.

- Freshman year, I saw her.

I saw, you know, I heard the girls screaming.

And, you know, you looked out and girls were, you know, just seeing what was going on out in the hall.

And you, you know, saw her just flash down the hall.

- And she had a candle underneath her chin, and it illuminated her very white face.

But I recognized her.

I had seen her on campus and that's when I caught on.

This is just a prank.

This is obviously something they do when they get a new crop of freshmen girls in.

Some girls were not very happy about the tradition.

Frankly, I thought she did an excellent job as the Red Lady.

It was very dramatic.

- [Reporter] You don't think that what you've seen and heard are pranks by, say, upperclassmen?

- I do feel it's pranks by upperclassmen.

'Cause being an upperclassman, Ive pulled these pranks.

- [Narrator] Waking students in the middle of the night, one or more young women dressed as ghosts, a rite of passage for seniors and underclassmen.

Considering all they have in common, could Huntingdon's various Red Lady traditions all have evolved from Senior Inspection?

Look again at the 1931 yearbook picture.

The caption reads, "Freshman fears are culminated in the appearance of that mythical Red Woman who has caused such uneasiness to each student during her college career."

Already in 1931, someone is dressing up as the Red Lady to scare freshmen.

And it's implied to have been going on for a while.

But wait.

Is this picture really supposed to be Martha?

Look at the timeline.

The Montgomery campus opens in 1910.

Pratt Hall, where Martha lived, is built in 1912.

Martha's roommate is the dorm president, a position that didn't exist until 1914.

This picture is taken in 1931.

There's a 17-year gap during which Martha's story could have taken place.

If this story was true, hardly enough time would have passed after Martha died that seniors would have impersonated her to prank freshmen.

It seems more likely that perhaps influenced by the story of the Tuskegee Red Lady, the Red Lady of the Montgomery campus existed as a prank first.

And that her backstory, the sad tale of Martha, was invented sometime later.

One person might have known for sure, and it wasn't Kathryn Tucker Windham.

- [Interviewer] You don't believe that there is such a thing as a Red Lady that is a ghost of a former student?

- I'm afraid I'm a skeptic.

I suppose it's not particularly good business for me to say this since I wrote an article, I wrote a story about her in our "13 Ghosts."

But by George, I cannot tell a lie.

(Margaret laughing) - [Narrator] Remember Margaret Gillis Figh, Kathryn's English professor and collaborator on the first Jeffrey book?

She came to Huntingdon in 1924 and could have recorded the source of Martha's legend as part of her folklore studies.

Her collective papers have sat undisturbed for years on a shelf here at the University of Alabama's W.S.

Hoole Special Collections Library.

At our request, archivists here will soon begin the process of cataloging the contents of those papers.

If the truth of Martha's origin can be found anywhere, it's here.

- I think that she's a legend worth fostering.

She will walk again.

I'm kind of confident of that.

(static buzzing) - [Narrator] Knowing what we do now, let's finish Martha's story.

Please be warned.

Some viewers may find what follows to be disturbing.

- [Virgina] The sad girl, abandoned by the person she had believed to be her only friend, formed the habit of wandering into rooms where other girls were congregating.

But her presence cast a chill upon the groups.

And they would soon find flimsy excuses for leaving her alone.

Then with a feeling of alienation from all humankind, she would return to her solitary sleeping quarters, where she would wrap herself in her red bedspread as though she were retreating from the whole world.

Later, her behavior became even more strange.

She would wait until lights were out, and then she would visit one dormitory room after another, never saying a word, but staring into space as if she were in a trance.

As time passed, she took to walking up and down the halls during the darkest hours of the night.

Often, she would alarm girls by opening and closing their doors, then hurrying away to resume her pitiful promenade.

One evening after Martha had not appeared for classes or meals all day, her former roommate, the dormitory president, had a guilty feeling and decided to go see her, thinking that this time she might be able to help Martha in some way.

As she neared Martha's room at an isolated end of the corridor on the top floor of the building, she noticed the first of the now famous flashes of red shooting out into the corridor.

She opened the door and screamed.

(president screaming) Girls from all over fourth floor Pratt rushed from their rooms to see what was wrong.

They found the dormitory president lying in a faint within the doorway of Martha's room.

Not more than three feet beyond her lay Martha, dressed in her red robe and draped in her red bedspread with blood around her on the floor.

Martha had carried out her threat by slashing her wrists and bleeding to death.

(static buzzing) This happened a long time ago, but students at Huntingdon say that on the date of Martha's suicide each year, rays of crimson light flash down from over her transom.

And the Red Lady in her bizarre clothing returns to haunt the halls of Pratt Hall at Huntingdon College.

- [Narrator] You can no longer find Pratt Hall on Huntingdon's campus, yet the school still maintains Martha's legend.

- When the college made the decision that Pratt Hall can no longer remain intact, most of our friends and members of the community, they were asking the question of what's gonna happen to the Red Lady.

A group of our red jacketed student ambassadors and our student government association, they knocked on the front door of Pratt Hall.

And Martha came to the door.

And she was dressed in red, and she had her suitcase and her hat box with her.

And our student ambassadors had a parade of students that escorted her to this building.

She's now housed on the second floor of Jackson Home.

- [Narrator] If it's true that Martha's story was invented to scare freshmen, its longevity must owe something to its sadness and how recognizable it is to generations of college students.

- She perhaps felt like an outsider.

There is a sense of insiders and outsiders on college campuses.

And she reflected that sense.

- The spirit of the Red Lady who wanted to be known, who wanted to belong, who wanted to have connection.

- [Reporter] You feel sorry for her?

- Oh, I feel very sorry for her.

I've related to her before.

You know, sitting in the room and, you know, just lonely, nice looking outside.

And you just, you know, I don't know why, just, you know, I think about her.

She must have been a very lonely girl.

- [Narrator] Martha, the infamous Red Lady of Huntingdon College, the friendless girl lost to her loneliness, is surely one of Alabama's greatest fables.

Or is she?

The story, the traditions, could there be a presence on Huntingdon's campus that inspired them all?

- [Student] There's just been too many unusual happenings within the dorm and on the floor that can't be explained.

- My sophomore year, I had a new roommate.

Her name was Charlotte Yon.

And we were fast asleep in our beds one night when suddenly something woke me up.

I don't know what it was that woke me up.

But I sat up straight in bed and I started looking around the room because going through my mind was, "It must have been Charlotte.

She woke me up when she got out of bed."

So I looked towards the door and I thought I saw Charlotte.

It was a vague form of perhaps Charlotte, so I called out to her.

Looking straight at the door, I said, "Charlotte."

And then I was startled when I heard Charlotte's reply coming not from the door, but from the bed right across the room.

Because Charlotte said, "Huh?"

I didn't look back at the door.

I didn't look back at Charlotte.

I simply remember thinking, "I don't like this.

I don't like this.

I don't like this."

And I turned to face the radiator.

And I pulled the covers up over my head.

And that's the way I went back to sleep.

The next morning, we were at breakfast.

And Charlotte and I were discussing it when a guy across the table said, "Well, I know what you saw."

I said, "What do you think we saw?"

He said, "The Red Lady."

- The Huntingdon Red Lady, a wonderful college ghost.

(ominous music) - [Narrator] Thanks for watching!

To my mind, the Red Lady of Huntingdon College has to be one of the most disturbing of the original 13 Alabama ghosts, but also one of the most affecting.

Depending on what we hear about Margaret Figh's papers, we might make a follow-up to this episode.

Go ahead and subscribe just to be safe.

After all, Jeffrey would be very disappointed if you missed it.

(light ominous music)