Spectral Stars—The Meridian Star Building

The Meridian Star
814 22^nd Avenue
Meridian, Mississippi

In my most recent check of news, I didn’t come across any articles of interest. Recently, however, I’ve discovered just how many wonderful newspapers put their archives online for free. Thank you! Until recently, I’ve been paying to use an online clipping service, but now with some free archives, I’ll be sure to check there first. Anyway, with little recent news, I moseyed on over to some Mississippi newspapers to see what I could find. Lo and behold, The Meridian Star has a free archive! And, even better, there’s an amusing article about the newspaper’s own offices being investigated.

Dr. Alan Brown, one of my paranormal writing heroes, is a resident of Meridian and has written about The Meridian Star building. According to him, not only is the newspaper building haunted, but the Pigford Building next door and Peavy Melody Music across the street from the newspaper are also haunted. These are all covered in his 2002 book, Haunted Places in the American South.

But back to the newspaper, local lore tells of one death in the building when a worker was caught under a hydraulic lift in the newspaper’s shop. Another death occurred when a man fell from a second story window (in the Pigford Building?) into an alley that once ran beside the building. Though, it’s not known if any of these deaths are related to the activity that takes place within the building.

In one particularly intriguing story, an employee working late in the building walked to the break room. As she passed through an older section of the building, she was overcome with a feeling of dread. She looked around and saw a toddler walking a few feet away. She immediately looked around for the parents, but when she looked back towards the child, it had vanished. She spent a few minutes looking for the child but found no one. She returned to her office where another colleague was working and told him of what she had just seen.

The same colleague, a sport editor, had also had an odd experience. Walking through the pressroom very early one morning, he felt a chill and witnessed two filmy figures hovering near the ceiling above him. After a few moments, the figures ascended into the ceiling. A reporter had a similar experience a few weeks later.

The article I discovered, from 2006, tells of investigators from a group called Observations who investigated the office one Sunday afternoon. The group spent four hours investigating and did capture an orb on video near the press. One of the investigators mentioned that the orb moved very slowly and deliberately, unlike the movement from dust or an insect.

This article is one of a handful I’ve discovered from this Mississippi newspaper. Please tune in again for more on the mysteries of Meridian.

Sources

• Brown, Alan. Haunted Places in the American South. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2002.
• Brown, Ida. “Ghost hunters probe The Star for paranormal activity.” The Meridian Star. 23 April 2006.