Wetumpka Mortuary Ghost Stories: Screams From a Demolished Funeral Home

The Wetumpka Mortuary no longer stands, yet locals insist the building never really left. Once part of the downtown Wetumpka, Alabama, this long-demolished funeral parlor sits at the center of one of Elmore County’s most talked-about ghost stories — a tale of flickering lights, mysterious screams, and a haunting that, according to those who worked next door, didn’t end when the wrecking crew arrived. It arguably got worse.

Key Takeaways

What Is the Wetumpka Mortuary Haunting?

The Wetumpka Mortuary haunting refers to a cluster of reported paranormal activity tied to a former funeral home that once stood in downtown Wetumpka, Alabama, in the vicinity of Court Street and East Bridge Street.

According to entries filed with paranormal-listing sites, passersby and visitors described lights inside the vacant building mysteriously switching on and off with no one inside, along with screams that seemed to come from within its walls. Similar unexplained sounds were reported at neighboring buildings along the same block.

The mortuary itself was eventually torn down. But rather than closing the book on the story, its demolition is described by a former downtown employee as the point when the paranormal activity intensified next door — inside what had been the mortuary’s immediate neighbor, the historic Bank of Wetumpka building, which today houses the Wetumpka Area Chamber of Commerce.

That connection — a torn-down mortuary and an adjoining historic bank building that a 32-year paranormal investigator would later formally rule “haunted” — is what elevates the Wetumpka Mortuary story from a single spooky address into one of the more layered haunted histories in central Alabama.

The Building and Its Location in Historic Downtown Wetumpka

Wetumpka sits along the Coosa River in Elmore County and is the county seat. The city’s name comes from the Muscogee Creek phrase we-wau tum-cau, meaning “rumbling waters,” a reference to the sound the river once made as it rushed over the rapids known as the Devil’s Staircase before the construction of the Walter Bouldin and Jordan dams tamed the flow in the 20th century.

The mortuary stood within, or immediately adjacent to, the East Wetumpka Commercial Historic District, a six-acre district added to the National Register of Historic Places on February 20, 1992. The district contains 25 contributing historic structures dating from roughly 1820 to 1931, clustered along Company Street, East Bridge Street, and Commerce Street at a distinctive five-way intersection downtown.

One of the anchor buildings of that intersection is the c. 1910 Bank of Wetumpka building at 110 East Bridge Street — a two-story white masonry structure with a bold, vertically oriented facade, and one of only two architect-designed buildings in the entire historic district. This is the building now occupied by the Chamber of Commerce, and it is the building described as having stood directly beside the mortuary.

A real-haunts directory lists the mortuary’s address as 164 Court Street, describing the location as effectively the same corner as the Chamber of Commerce building — consistent with the account of the two structures having stood side by side before the mortuary came down.

Reported Paranormal Activity

Independent of the Chamber building’s haunting, the mortuary structure itself generated its own reports while it was still standing empty.

According to a listing on a paranormal-locations directory, the building’s lights were known to flicker on and off with no apparent source, and people walking past after dark reported hearing screams coming from inside. The same account notes that comparable, unexplained incidents were reported in some of the neighboring buildings on the block — suggesting that whatever residents attributed to the mortuary was not perceived as an isolated phenomenon confined to a single address.

A separate visitor account, submitted after the structure had already been demolished, offered a more skeptical postscript: with the building gone, there was “no haunts or spooky anything going on” at the site itself, though the writer still recommended visiting the nearby cemetery after dark, with a reminder to be respectful of the grounds.

The Mortuary’s Demolition and the Haunting That Moved Next Door

The most detailed and dated firsthand account of the Wetumpka Mortuary comes from Jamie Young, who served as the Wetumpka Area Chamber of Commerce’s associate director and had worked out of the historic Bank of Wetumpka headquarters for four years.

Speaking to The Wetumpka Herald ahead of the city’s first-ever Wetumpka Haunted History Tours in October 2016, Young explained that the chamber building is considered one of the most paranormally active locations in downtown Wetumpka, and that a number of the strange occurrences there trace back to the demolition of the mortuary that had once stood next door.

Young described hearing footsteps on the building’s stairs — sometimes heavy, “like boots,” and sometimes light — along with constant shuffling sounds in the hallway even when she was alone in the building after dark, to the point that she stopped staying in the office by herself once the sun went down. She also described a frequent, unexplained incident involving a Halloween scarecrow decoration that moved from window to window on the third floor without anyone moving it.

During a renovation of the building’s offices, construction crews reported finding the scarecrow and a large table on that same floor repeatedly relocated to different spots in the room — an experience Young said left the workmen visibly spooked.

The CAPI Investigation: A Rare “Haunted” Ruling

The Chamber building’s reputation was later tested formally by Central Alabama Paranormal Investigations (CAPI), a Christian non-profit paranormal research group that used hand-held monitoring equipment, an electromagnetic field meter, and electronic voice recording devices during an on-site investigation in August 2016.

CAPI’s founder, Johnny Rushing — who by that point had spent 32 years testing sites for paranormal activity — told the Herald that the former Bank of Wetumpka building was the first structure he had ever formally ruled as haunted, a designation he described as extremely rare in his decades of investigative work.

One of Rushing’s investigators reported seeing the shadow entity of a man in a top hat and tails standing at the top of a staircase in a recently renovated section of the building. According to Young, that detail wasn’t new: the same shadow entity, dressed the same way, had reportedly been witnessed years earlier by a previous chamber director, well before that section of the building was ever renovated — an odd continuity between two unrelated witnesses separated by years.

CAPI’s investigation didn’t stop at the chamber building. The organization also planned to examine the first bank ever built in Wetumpka, constructed in 1905, which by 2016 housed a coffee shop and variety store.

The business partners running that space, Larry Oates and Savannah Dart, described their own unexplained incident: Oates climbing a firmly planted ladder that suddenly toppled backward for no apparent reason, followed by a picture frame that was found on the floor again the next morning after the building had been locked overnight — despite having been picked up and reshelved the night before, alongside several other undisturbed knick-knacks that had also been moved.

Other Ghost Stories Tied to the Same Downtown Block

The Wetumpka Mortuary story doesn’t exist in isolation. It sits within a small cluster of downtown ghost lore that local paranormal investigators and the Chamber of Commerce have folded into the same walking-tour circuit:

• The Lancaster Hotel, built in the early 1900s, is said to have doubled as a brothel and to have been the site of two deaths that some attribute to its paranormal reputation. According to legend, a bride tripped on her veil while descending the hotel staircase for her wedding, broke her neck in the fall, and died at the bottom of the stairs — with believers claiming her presence has lingered ever since.
• A dentist’s fatal love-triangle shootout reportedly took place on the street between the historic bank building and the Lancaster Hotel, when the dentist’s cousin, who had taken an interest in the dentist’s wife, killed him in a gunfight that left bullet holes in both buildings. Because both men came from a prominent local family, no one was ever held publicly responsible, and the story has it that the killer disposed of the weapon in the nearby river and was never caught. These “Lancaster tales” were never recorded in Wetumpka’s official written histories. However, at least one longtime resident has claimed to have witnessed the shootout as a child.

These stories matter to the Wetumpka Mortuary narrative because they establish that the mortuary was never considered a standalone anomaly by locals — it was one node in a network of reportedly haunted buildings clustered around the same five-way downtown intersection, most of them more than a century old.

The Wetumpka Haunted History Tours

The mortuary’s legend, and the activity attributed to the Chamber building next door, became formal enough by 2016 to anchor a public event. The Wetumpka Area Chamber of Commerce partnered with CAPI to launch the first-ever Wetumpka Haunted History Tours, held October 26 through 29, 2016, from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. nightly through downtown Wetumpka.

Standard tours offered narrated history and ghost lore from tour guides and building owners; an extended package added a live investigation alongside CAPI members using the same EMF meters and EVP recording equipment used in their earlier chamber-building investigation.

Because of the subject matter and the three-hour length, the extended tours were restricted to guests over the age of 12. Stops on the extended route included the second and third floors and basement of the Chamber of Commerce building — the reported hotspots — along with the Elmore County Museum and other downtown landmarks.

Wetumpka Mortuary vs Other Haunted Funeral Homes

The Wetumpka Mortuary is far from the only former funeral home in the country with a paranormal reputation:

Is the Wetumpka Mortuary Really Haunted?

No verified paranormal phenomenon has ever been documented at the mortuary site or the neighboring chamber building under controlled, repeatable scientific conditions — a limitation that paranormal investigation as a field generally shares.

What exists instead is a consistent, decades-spanning pattern of firsthand testimony from people with no obvious reason to fabricate their accounts: a chamber employee who worked in the building for years, construction crews mid-renovation, business owners in an unrelated nearby building, and a paranormal investigator willing to publicly stake his reputation on a rare “haunted” ruling.

Skeptics point out, reasonably, that old wooden buildings settle and creak, that hallway drafts can sound like footsteps, and that a scarecrow decoration is an easy thing to knock loose. Believers point to the specificity and repetition of the accounts — the same shadow entity seen by two unconnected witnesses years apart, the same third-floor window pattern, the timing tied directly to the mortuary’s demolition.

What isn’t in dispute is the history: a real mortuary once stood in downtown Wetumpka, it was torn down, and the block around its former footprint — inside a National Register-listed historic district dating to the 1820s — has generated a genuinely unusual volume of reported paranormal activity for a small Alabama river town ever since.

Visiting the Site Today

The original mortuary building is gone, and the lot where it stood is, by most accounts, unremarkable to look at. Visitors curious about the story are encouraged to focus their attention on the surrounding historic district instead — particularly the former Bank of Wetumpka building on East Bridge Street, now home to the Wetumpka Area Chamber of Commerce, where the bulk of the documented activity has actually been reported.

As with any historic property, it is not open for casual paranormal exploration outside of organized events, and visitors should always respect posted hours, private property, and any restrictions in place at the cemetery and surrounding grounds.

Sources

• Upton, Lonna. Haunted Wetumpka. The Wetumpka Herald, 18 Oct. 2016. Accessed 4 Aug. 2026.
• East Wetumpka Commercial Historic District. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation. Accessed 4 Aug. 2026.
• History. Wetumpka. The City of Wetumpka. Accessed 4 Aug. 2026.
• Central Alabama Paranormal Investigations (CAPI).