901 Spirit Seekers

02/17/2026

🗝️ HIDDEN MEMPHIS PART 28: THE WALLS THAT STAYED

You can still see it from Hernando Street.

The limestone walls.
The tower rising over South Memphis.
The parts that refused to fall.

Long before it became known around the world, Clayborn Temple began as something else entirely.

In 1892, the building was constructed as Second Presbyterian Church. Memphis was still rebuilding from the devastating Yellow Fever epidemics of the 1870s. The city had lost its charter, its population, and thousands of lives. By the 1890s, leaders were trying to restore confidence and stability.

This church rose during that era of recovery.

Built in the Romanesque Revival style, it featured thick limestone walls, rounded arches, and a prominent bell tower. It was designed to feel permanent in a city that had recently faced collapse.

At the time, it served a white Presbyterian congregation in what was then a developing residential corridor south of downtown. As the decades passed, Memphis grew and shifted. Neighborhood patterns changed. Congregations relocated.

In 1949, the building was purchased by an African Methodist Episcopal congregation and became Clayborn Temple A.M.E. Church.

That transition reflected the changing face of the neighborhood. The walls did not move. The city around them did.

The African Methodist Episcopal Church was founded in 1816 as the first independent Protestant denomination established by African Americans in the United States. It was created in response to discrimination within Methodist congregations and built on the principle of dignity and self determination.

By the mid twentieth century, Clayborn Temple was more than a place of worship. It was a community anchor in South Memphis. Meetings were held there. Educational programs operated there. Civic conversations happened inside those walls.

So when sanitation workers gathered there in 1968, they were stepping into a building that already carried decades of resilience.

Clayborn Temple became a headquarters for organizing during the sanitation workers’ strike. The now iconic “I AM A MAN” posters were stored and distributed from there. Marchers assembled there before walking into history.

The building did not create the movement.
But it sheltered it.

In April 2025, a devastating fire struck the historic structure during ongoing restoration efforts. Significant portions were damaged.

And yet portions still stand.

Stone laid in 1892 during Memphis’ recovery from Yellow Fever remains visible today. Walls that witnessed segregation, civil rights organizing, neighborhood decline, and renewal are still there.

Clayborn Temple’s story is not simply about division. It is about evolution.

A building constructed in one chapter of Memphis history became central in another. The same structure has served different congregations, different communities, and different generations.

It has stood through epidemic, social upheaval, and fire.

And now, once again, there are efforts to rebuild.

Because Clayborn Temple has never just been about what happened inside it.

It has always reflected the city around it.

Memphis has rebuilt before.
After disease.
After flood.
After struggle.

The walls that remain on Hernando Street are not just remnants.

They are reminders.

This city has changed.
This city has grown.
This city has faced hard truths.

And still it stands.

That’s Hidden Memphis, Part 28.

02/17/2026

🗝️ HIDDEN MEMPHIS PART 27: Memphis’s “Merry Widow”

Elmwood Cemetery holds generals, yellow fever victims, and civic leaders.

It also holds one of Memphis’s most controversial women.

Her name alone tells the story of her marriages:

Mrs. Alma Herrin Cook Cox Calvert McClavy Theede Gill.

Born Alma Herrin in Memphis in 1895, she grew up in poverty. As a teenager, she worked in the Vance Avenue district, an area known in the early 1900s for prostitution and vice. Newspapers at the time began referring to her as “Vance Avenue Alma,” a nickname that followed her for decades and shaped how the public saw her.

At nineteen, she shot and killed her husband Roy Calvert in 1919. She claimed he had abused her and that she acted in self-defense. A jury acquitted her on grounds of justifiable homicide.

More marriages followed. So did more trials.

By the time police arrived at the home of her husband Ed Gill in the early morning hours of January 3, 1949, her reputation was already well established. According to contemporary reporting, at least one deputy sheriff reportedly remarked at the scene, “Heh, heh, heh… Alma’s gone and shot herself another husband.”

The comment reflected how law enforcement and the press had already framed her story.

In earlier cases, juries had acquitted her or declined to convict. But in 1949, she was found guilty in the shooting death of Ed Gill and sentenced to prison.

Newspapers increasingly labeled her “Memphis’s Merry Widow.” Some later called her a “Black Widow,” implying calculated, profit-driven murder.

Court records show a more complicated picture. In multiple cases she claimed self-defense in violent marriages, and at least one jury agreed. The truth of each marriage remains debated, but the headlines often proved louder than the verdicts.

Alma Herrin Gill died in 1958 and is buried at Elmwood Cemetery.

Was she a calculating killer?
A woman repeatedly trapped in violent relationships during an era when domestic abuse protections were nearly nonexistent?
Or a figure shaped as much by sensational journalism as by courtroom outcomes?

Like many Hidden Memphis stories, the answer is layered.

And her grave remains a quiet reminder that reputation and record are not always the same thing.

02/16/2026

REST IN PEACE | Robert Duvall, the legendary Oscar-winning actor whose career spanned seven decades, has died: https://www.localmemphis.com/article/news/nation-world/robert-duvall-dead/507-602cd9af-40dd-4906-a671-b83bac86dd01?utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook_ABC24_Memphis

(Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP, File)

02/14/2026

Nineteen-year-old Emma Sullivan stepped on rusty nail, June 10, 1909, one week before wedding to Thomas Murphy, nail punctured deep into foot, Emma washed wound with water, wrapped in cloth, didn't see doctor, wedding in one week, too busy with preparations, foot hurt but Emma ignored it, focused on wedding.
June 15, five days after stepping on nail, Emma's jaw felt stiff, difficult to open mouth, Emma thought she was clenching from wedding stress, didn't worry, by evening jaw locked completely, couldn't open mouth at all, tetanus setting in, bacteria from rusty nail producing toxins, destroying Emma's nervous system. Emma's mother called doctor, doctor examined Emma, recognized lockjaw immediately, tetanus, almost always fatal once symptoms appeared, Emma would die, probably before wedding.
Thomas visited Emma, June 16, Emma's condition worsening, body becoming rigid, back arching, experiencing painful muscle spasms, Emma crying, couldn't speak, jaw locked shut, could only make sounds through clenched teeth, Thomas held her hand, Emma squeezed, trying to communicate, both knowing she was dying, wedding day was tomorrow, June 17, Emma wouldn't survive it.
Thomas made decision, married Emma that night, June 16, at her bedside, Emma in rigid position, body arched, jaw locked, couldn't speak vows, priest allowed it, Emma blinked once for yes when asked if she took Thomas as husband, Thomas said his vows through tears, placed ring on Emma's rigid finger, kissed her locked jaw, married wife who was dying in front of him.
Emma died June 17, 1909, 4:30 AM, wedding day morning, married twelve hours, died from tetanus, body locked in rigid arch, jaw clamped shut, Thomas beside her holding her stiff hand, Emma's last hours were violent spasms, suffocating during seizures, conscious through it all, tetanus doesn't affect consciousness, just muscles, Emma aware she was dying, aware it was her wedding day, aware Thomas was now her widower.
Wedding guests arrived at church June 17, told bride died that morning, wedding became funeral, guests in wedding clothes attending burial instead of ceremony, Emma buried in wedding dress she'd never worn to church, dress stained with blood from muscle spasms that tore her tissue, Thomas stood at grave in wedding suit, widower before being husband more than twelve hours.
Emma's mother never forgave herself, should have insisted Emma see doctor about nail wound, tetanus could have been prevented with proper wound care, Emma died from rust and bacteria, step on rusty nail killed her in seven days, married on her deathbed, buried on her wedding day. Thomas never remarried, wore wedding ring until death 1954, age sixty-four, married twelve hours in 1909, remained faithful to memory forty-five years.
Thomas told his nephew before dying: "I married Emma June 16, 1909. She was dying from lockjaw. Tetanus. Couldn't speak. Body was rigid. Jaw locked shut. She blinked yes when priest asked if she'd take me as husband. She died twelve hours later. Our wedding day. I buried her in her wedding dress. We had twelve hours of marriage. She spent them dying. I spent them watching her die. Wore this ring forty-five years. Never took it off. Emma was nineteen. Stepped on rusty nail. Seven days later dead. We never had wedding night. Never had honeymoon. Never had life together. Just twelve hours of her dying while being my wife."
Emma's grave marked "Emma Sullivan Murphy, 1890-1909, Beloved Daughter, Bride, and Wife, Married and Died June 1909," tombstone Thomas commissioned, only memorial to their twelve-hour marriage, Thomas buried next to Emma 1954, finally reunited after forty-five years, together forever as they'd planned on wedding day.

02/13/2026

🗝️ HIDDEN MEMPHIS PART 26: No Man’s Land at Elmwood

We have mentioned many times how yellow fever repeatedly struck Memphis in the 1870s, most devastatingly in 1878.

That epidemic nearly collapsed the city.

During the outbreaks of 1873, 1878, and 1879, thousands died. The worst year was 1878, when more than 5,000 people in Memphis lost their lives and tens of thousands fled the city. Burial systems were overwhelmed.

Elmwood Cemetery, founded in 1852, was required to handle dozens of burials a day during the height of the crisis. According to historical accounts and the cemetery’s own records, more than 50 burials per day were conducted at times.

To manage the surge, a large section of Elmwood was set aside for mass interments. That section became known as “No Man’s Land.”

Victims from every social class were buried there. In the urgency of the epidemic, traditional family plots were often set aside. Many were interred in trenches, and individual identification was not always preserved.

Today, a simple marker erected in 1985 commemorates those buried in No Man’s Land. The inscription acknowledges the thousands who perished in the yellow fever epidemics of 1873, 1878, and 1879.

Historical estimates indicate that approximately 2,500 yellow fever victims are buried at Elmwood. Of those, about 1,400 are believed to rest in the No Man’s Land section.

Elmwood is not the only place Memphis remembers.

Martyrs Park, located along the Mississippi River, honors the Catholic nuns, priests, physicians, and lay volunteers who remained in Memphis during the 1878 epidemic to care for the sick. Many of them died as a result of their service.

No Man’s Land represents the scale of loss.

Martyrs Park represents sacrifice.

Together, they tell the story of a city that endured one of the deadliest epidemics in American history and was forever changed by it.

02/12/2026

02/11/2026

🗝️ HIDDEN MEMPHIS
What Are Those Bricked Up Doors in the Mounds

If you have ever walked through Chickasaw Heritage Park and noticed the small brick doorways built into the sides of the giant grassy hills, you are not imagining things.

Those are not storm shelters.
They are not old maintenance tunnels.
And they are definitely not random.

Those hills are ancient Native American ceremonial mounds. They were built long before Memphis ever existed, by the ancestors of the Chickasaw people. For centuries, the mounds were sacred gathering places, spiritual centers, and ceremonial sites overlooking the Mississippi River.

But in the 1800s, everything changed.

When Hernando de Soto passed through the area in 1541, the mounds became landmarks for European explorers. Later, during the Civil War, Confederate forces turned the sacred earthworks into Fort Pickering.

They dug into the mounds and hollowed parts of them out to use as bunkers, cannon placements, and gunpowder storage.

Those bricked up doorways you see today are the sealed entrances to those tunnels.

They were once open, dark passageways that ran inside the mounds.

After the war, the structures were closed off and eventually sealed for safety. Over time, grass grew back over the hills, and the mounds slowly returned to looking like simple green slopes.

But the doors remain.

They are quiet reminders that these sacred Native American sites were once turned into military fortifications and literally carved open from the inside.

So when you walk past those small brick doors built into the hills, you are standing at the intersection of thousands of years of Indigenous history and one of the most pivotal military chapters in Memphis history.

And almost no one realizes it.

Hidden Memphis
Part 24

02/11/2026

🗝️ HIDDEN MEMPHIS

PART 19

HOW MEMPHIS HELPED SHAPE THE FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT

NOTE: This post is shared for historical understanding, not to divide. The goal is to learn from the past so we can better understand one another in the present.

When people talk about civil rights tensions in Memphis, they often think of 1968 and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr..

But Memphis shaped civil rights law long before that moment.

Just one year after the Civil War, violence here helped change the U.S. Constitution.

THE MEMPHIS MASSACRE OF 1866

In May 1866, Memphis was struggling to adjust to emancipation.

Formerly enslaved Black residents were building new lives, opening schools and churches, and asserting basic rights. Many were Union Army veterans.

Tensions grew between white Memphians, Irish immigrant police officers, and Black soldiers.

On May 1, 1866, a confrontation between white police officers and Black Union veterans sparked three days of racial violence.

This was not a riot.

It was a massacre.

WHAT HAPPENED

For three days, white mobs, aided by police officers and firefighters, attacked Black neighborhoods.

Documented outcomes include:
• At least 46 Black men, women, and children killed
• More than 70 injured
• Over 90 Black homes destroyed
• 12 Black schools burned
• 4 Black churches burned
• Widespread sexual violence against Black women

No white deaths were reported.

Almost no one was held accountable.

WHY CONGRESS PAID ATTENTION

News of the Memphis Massacre spread nationwide.

Along with similar violence in New Orleans later that year, Memphis became a key example cited in congressional debates over the Fourteenth Amendment.

Lawmakers argued that states could not be trusted to protect the rights of formerly enslaved citizens without federal constitutional guarantees.

The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, established birthright citizenship and equal protection under the law.

Memphis helped prove why it was necessary.

WHY THIS HISTORY IS SHARED

Understanding this chapter is not about assigning modern blame.

It is about recognizing how hard-won constitutional protections came to exist, and how moments of pain helped push the nation toward stronger protections for everyone.

History is most powerful when it helps us learn, reflect, and move forward together.

🗝️ Hidden Memphis is about understanding the past so we can better understand each other.
Part 19

02/09/2026

🗝️ HIDDEN MEMPHIS
The Real Story Behind “Voodoo Village”

At the end of a dead end road in South Memphis sits one of the most whispered about places in the city.

Most Memphians know it as Voodoo Village.
Its real name is St. Paul’s Spiritual Temple.

The property sits on Mary Angela Road and is surrounded by iron fencing, tall spikes, symbolic structures, handmade shrines, and brightly painted wooden sculptures that feel unlike anything else in Memphis.

The man behind it all was Chief Wash Harris.

Harris founded St. Paul’s Spiritual Temple in the 1950s. He described himself as part African American, part Chickasaw, and part Cherokee. He practiced faith healing and created an entire religious compound filled with artwork, religious symbols, gardens, towers, and hand built monuments meant to represent heaven, earth, and spiritual cleansing.

To outsiders, the property looked mysterious and unsettling.
To Harris and his congregation, it was sacred.

By the early 1960s, people across Memphis were calling it Voodoo Village. Stories spread quickly. Some claimed strange rituals took place behind the gates. Others said ghosts walked the property at night. It became a rite of passage for teenagers to drive down Mary Angela Road just to see if anything would happen.

Rumors even claimed that if you drove too far down the road, residents would push an old abandoned school bus into the street to block your exit.

Newspapers later confirmed that while many of the darker stories were exaggerated, the street itself had real tension. Neighbors reported frequent harassment by large crowds of people who came just to gawk. Police were often called to the area for blocked roads, thrown bottles, and vandalism.

Chief Harris was arrested several times in the 1960s and 1970s for practicing healing without a license. He became more private over time. He rarely explained his artwork, once saying that no one else could truly understand what it meant.

He died in 1995 at the age of 89.

Today, St. Paul’s Spiritual Temple still stands quietly behind its gates. The rumors remain. The stories still circulate. And Mary Angela Road continues to be one of the most talked about and least understood streets in Memphis.

Some places keep their secrets.

Hidden Memphis
Part 22

02/08/2026

One of Memphis’s most distinctive museums began as a private dream.

Built as a residence for Clarence Saunders, founder of Piggly Wiggly the world’s first self-service grocery store the home was dubbed the Pink Palace for the rose-colored Tennessee marble used in its construction.

Saunders invested more than $1 million into the estate, but after losing his fortune, he never lived there. The home and its surrounding 10 acres were eventually turned over to the city, opening as a museum in 1930.

From unrealized mansion to Memphis landmark this is how history found a second life.

ROYAL BY NATURE

#901

02/06/2026

RIDING THE RANGE AND ACTING STRANGE

On June 6, 1927, 21-year-old Memphian Evelyn Estes decided she wanted an adventure.

So she created one.

She put on khaki riding pants, strapped a gun around her waist, climbed onto her horse Billy, and galloped across the Harahan Bridge headed west.

She wore a man’s wristwatch and a felt hat.
In her knapsack were three bandannas, a pencil, a toothbrush, a change of pants, socks and underclothes. She carried a canteen, a canvas bucket, a knife, a compact, and lipstick.

And she had 25 dollars in her pocket, about 450 dollars today.

Her goal was simple.

Ride from Memphis to California the old-fashioned way, just like the pioneers.

Most people who heard about her plan thought she would last a few days, maybe a week at most. Some said she would be back before sunset the same day.

She proved them all wrong.

Over the next two years, Estes rode her horse across the country. She stayed on ranches in Oklahoma and Kansas, camped with Native American tribes in the Southwest, and worked wherever she could.

Along the way she met Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth in Wyoming and even visited President Calvin Coolidge at his summer home in the Black Hills of South Dakota.

With her short haircut and felt hat, she was often mistaken for a boy. Once people realized their mistake, many invited her in and offered help.

She earned her keep by pitching in with farm work, doing laundry, milking cows, and at one point even helping to deliver a baby.

She finally arrived in Los Angeles in February of 1928 after traveling more than 3,800 miles.

And even then, her adventure was not quite over.

The Commercial Appeal later reported that after dark she took a wrong turn off Mulholland Drive and ended up lost in the woods below the Hollywood sign. A park ranger rescued her and pointed her in the right direction.

By then she was already a national sensation, referred to in newsreels as Calamity Jane’s little sister.

Over the following year she rode back to Wyoming and eventually made her way home to Memphis, returning 23 months after she first left.

When asked why she did it, Evelyn Estes answered in her own words:

“There is an old English saying that every life is entitled to one great folly.
I had a great need to be free.
It was as hard to obtain as it was to explain.”

She later married in 1940, though the marriage did not last long. Evelyn Estes died in 1999 at the age of 93.

But her bold, fearless ride out of Memphis remains one of the most remarkable adventures most people have never heard of.

Hidden Memphis
Part 21

02/06/2026