Vacuums That Run Unplugged: The Haunted Pigford Building

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated October 13, 2026 · How we verify

Three stories of red brick on a downtown Meridian street do not look like much of a ghost story, which is part of why the haunted Pigford Building in Mississippi keeps turning up in regional accounts. The stories here did not come from a battlefield or an asylum. They came from the people who sold dresses and ran a graphic design studio out of a former fraternal lodge hall, and they have been remarkably consistent across three separate businesses.

Quick orientation: the building is a three-story red brick structure in downtown Meridian, also known as Pythian Castle Hall. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on December 18, 1979. The ground floor is retail. The upper two floors have been closed to the public since 2000.

Built in 1914 for the Knights of Pythias

The Knights of Pythias Mount Barton Lodge No. 13 put the building up in 1914 and called it the Pythian Castle Hall. It was purpose-built for the lodge’s weekly meetings, which is the sort of detail that explains the layout: offices stacked on the second floor, and a full ballroom taking up the third.

The Pythians did not hold it long. In the 1920s the property was bought by Pigford Realty, which gave the building the name it carries today and began renting space to small businesses. From 1933 to 1976 the first floor housed a post office and a drug store owned by R.M. Hamil. Restaurants, beauty salons and dress shops have all cycled through the building since construction.

The Graphic Design Studio and the Woman Who Worked Late

The modern reports begin in the 1990s, when a graphic design business and a tanning salon occupied the building. The owner of the design business worked late enough and often enough that she set up a small sleeping area on site, and it is from those late nights that the first accounts come.

She reported hearing footsteps on the second floor. Voices came through the building’s intercom system. The most specific claim involves a full-bodied apparition of a woman in a long white dress, first seen by the owner’s three-year-old cousin and, according to the account, later by the owner herself. She concluded that whatever was in the building did not like men: objects reportedly moved across rooms and doors slammed when male employees were present.

None of this is documented beyond the testimony itself. It is worth saying plainly that a three-year-old’s report, relayed secondhand, is the thinnest possible evidentiary thread, and that an old intercom system in a gutted and renovated building is capable of producing noise on its own. After the design business closed, the entire building was gutted and renovated.

October 15, 1999: The Balcony at Alexander’s

A dress shop called Alexander’s, owned by Debbie Moorehead, opened in 1999. Employees and customers there reported hearing what was described as a woman’s ghostly laughter. The practical complaint was more mundane and more frequent: jewelry and clothing turning up on the floor in the morning after having been hung or pinned the night before.

The sharpest single incident on record comes from October 15, 1999, when an Alexander’s employee named J.T. Mohammed reported seeing the apparition of the lady in white on the balcony. Other staff accounts from the shop include an employee alone in the store receiving a phone call from an inside line, and another employee hearing voices coming from an empty dressing room. In 2000, the two upper floors were closed to the public.

Alan Brown’s Two Visits

Alan Brown, author of Haunted Places in the American South, investigated the building in the early 2000s. Several experiences were recorded during that visit: a door to the roof found nailed shut, clothes that moved while untouched, and earrings that appeared beside the bed of Brown’s assistant the following morning. Brown returned in 2008 for a further study, after which he labeled the building haunted.

That label belongs to Brown, not to any neutral authority. It is the assessment of an author who writes about Southern ghostlore, based on his own time in the building. Readers should weigh it accordingly.

Dream It and the Electronics Problem

The current first-floor tenant is a dress shop called Dream It, owned by Theresa Long. Long and her daughter have both reported vacuum cleaners switching on while unplugged, and say that many electronic devices simply work incorrectly inside the building. Electrical oddity in a 1914 structure has an obvious prosaic explanation, but the unplugged vacuum is the one detail that resists it, and it is the claim most often repeated.

Seeing the Pigford Building in Downtown Meridian

There is no ghost tour here and no admission. The Pigford Building is a working retail address in downtown Meridian, and the only part of it a visitor can walk into is the ground-floor shop during business hours. The second floor, where the footsteps were reported, and the third-floor ballroom have been closed to the public since 2000.

Treat it as an architecture stop with a story attached. The exterior is the reliable part of the trip: a National Register-listed Pythian Castle Hall that has outlived its lodge, its post office and most of its tenants. If you go inside, you are a customer in someone’s dress shop. Behave like one.

Address: Downtown Meridian, Mississippi

Sources

• Haunted Places in the American South
• NPGallery Asset Detail (National Park Service)
• GeoHack – Pigford Building
• Wikipedia: Pigford Building