The Face in the Courthouse Window

The legend, popularized by Kathryn Tucker Windham's 1969 book 13 Alabama Ghosts and Jeffrey, says that after Henry Wells was arrested, a crowd came to the courthouse to lynch him, that he stood at the garret window protesting his innocence, and that a flash of lightning seared his likeness into the glass. The 1974 Alabama Historical Association marker on the north lawn says Wells was "held in the garret of this building" and, under the words "Legend holds," that lightning struck "as Wells peered out of the North window at a mob gathering below." A second marker, placed in 2020 by the William G. Pomeroy Foundation and the Alabama Folklife Association, calls him "the freedman" and says lightning "etched his 'face in the window.'"

The fire and the arrest

Union troops under General John T. Croxton burned Carrollton's first courthouse on April 5, 1865. Its replacement, newly built at a cost of $18,000 to $20,000, burned on November 16, 1876.

Bill Burkhalter, later named as Wells's accomplice, was captured near Tuscaloosa on January 6, 1878. According to the local paper, he said Wells had gone into the probate office, lit a candle, searched the room, and come back saying he had set the building on fire and found "only some tobacco." Wells was caught on January 29 on a plantation near Fairfield. The paper reported that he tried to escape and was shot twice, and that he was carried to the jail.

On January 30, the day after the shooting, a statement in Wells's name was "sworn to and subscribed" before Probate Judge T.G. Williams. In the statement, Burkhalter proposed breaking open the safe in the probate office, and Wells "left the candle near some papers." The paper ran it as the "Dying Confession of Henry Wells." Wells died of the gunshot wounds on February 3, 1878. P.J. Gossett, who reread the 1870s papers for the Journal Record of Hamilton, Alabama, in 2023, has written that the confession could have been coerced.

The county paid $7 for Wells's coffin and burial. Where he is buried is not known.

The windows

On February 20, 1878, 17 days after Wells died, the paper reported that "the windows that are being fitted in their respective places in the courtroom" made the new courthouse look nearly finished. Gossett's reading is that the building had no glass while Wells was alive and that it is doubtful he was ever in the garret. The state marker says he was held there. In October 2025, Craig Patterson, president of the Pickens County Courthouse Foundation, showed a WVTM13 reporter a small cell in the courthouse basement as the room where Wells was taken.

The Carrollton jail

On the night of September 26, 1877, four months before Wells was captured, an armed mob of 30 or 40 men took Nathaniel T. Pierce from the Carrollton jail, dragged him through the streets by a rope around his neck, and hanged him from a tree about a mile out on the Pickensville road. Gossett argues that the legend took the mob from Pierce's death and gave it to Wells.

On September 14, 1893, a white mob stormed the Carrollton jail and shot Paul Archer, Will Archer, Emma Fair, Ed Guyton, and Paul Hill to death. The five had been arrested on an accusation of burning a white man's mill and gin house, and the case was still under investigation. The Equal Justice Initiative counts them among 15 known victims of racial terror lynching in Pickens County between 1886 and 1917; its 2020 county table lists 14 for the years 1877 to 1950.

The pane

A 1928 newspaper said "many are the stories that have been told about its mysterious appearance." A hailstorm on December 30, 1927, broke another pane in the same window, and the article reported that the face was left unharmed. It also reported that after the carpenter J.E. Oglesby replaced the broken glass on January 6, 1928, a face appeared on the new pane as well. Some accounts gave the original face to Burkhalter instead of Wells. Burkhalter's own end is reported three ways: hanged, handed over to Noxubee County, Mississippi, or escaped.

The glass has been washed with acid, and later accounts add soap, gasoline, and lye. "It looks like somebody had their face smashed up against the window," Patterson said in 2025.

The face is in the lower right pane of the garret window on the north side of the building, and a diamond-shaped highway sign with a black arrow is bolted to the brick beside the window, pointing at it. The pane is seen from outside, from the lawn or the street, at any hour. Both markers stand on the north side, facing the intersection of Tuscaloosa Street and Phoenix Avenue.

The building is a working courthouse for the circuit and district courts.

Carrollton is about 35 miles west of Tuscaloosa.