ONE MILE EAST OF Hazel Green, Ala., stands the crumbling remains of what was once one of North Alabama's finest ante-bellum homes. A succession of families have lived in the house in the last 75 years. None of them remained very long. No one calls the house home.

There are ghosts in the house--the ghosts of three men who died violently and mysteriously there. There are ghosts in the low thickets in the ___.

Sometimes, or so the people of Hazel Green say, on stormy nights the ___ings of tortured souls can be heard coming from the lonely old plantation.

Yet stranger than the ramshaeckled house with its sagging doors, its paneless windows, and its ghoulish company within is the graveyard behind an immense. holly tree a few- yards to the south. In the graveyard are four tombstones in a random -pile. Beneath the stones four men are buried. The four were. successively the husbands of a beautiful and charming woman-' a woman with the complexion of an angel but who, if we are to believe the musty old records of the Madison County Courthouse at Huntsville, Ala., must have had the heart of a demon. For  Mrs. High Brown Routt , as the court records refer to her, over a period of nine year between 1839 and 1848, was accused of coldly and maliciously murdering her husbands and burying them one by one beneath the holly tree. In addition, if we are to believe the testimony of one Abner Tate, Mrs. Routt, as a sort of grim, callous memorial, had a special rack built in the main hallway of the big house where hung the hats-her four, husbands had worn

MRS. ROUTT WAS NEVER convicted of the murder charges her neighbors brought against her. No one was ever able to prove that she hadso much as lifted a hand, against her husbands. Her neighbors claimed that the Negro slaves who worked her huge plantation and knew her as a cruel and iron-willed mistress, could have given damning testimony if  they had been allowed to speak.. But in 1848 the word of a slave was not accepted. As a result the beautiful Mrs. Routt, so far as anyone knows, died a happy and untroubled death.

Elizabeth E. Routt was born Elizabeth Dale. The grandaughter of a wealthy Revolutionary soldier, Elizabeth learned to love fine clothes, fine horses, fine furnishings. Her appeal to men so the record reads, was irresistible.

She came to Madison County as the young wife of am early settler, Alexander Jeffries, but not before she had had two two husbands--a Gibbons and a Flannigan. Both died mysteriously their marriages. But at course, no one suspected her of their deaths.

Mrs. Routt SEEMS to have lilived happily with Alexander Jeffries for many years. Two children were born to them.

As Jeffries wife, Elizabeth lived in a two-room log cabin located atop an Indian burial mound. Jeffries died in 1837, the year his daughter was born. He was 65. No record exists that he died other than of natural causes except the implication of Abner Tate's claim that Jeffries' wife had murdered six husbands.

Mrs. Jeffries didn't pine away. Two years after her third husband's death, she met and -married Robert High, a member of the Alabama Legislature. A chronicle of the times describes him as "a dashing widower seeking his fourth wife-being partly bald and taking great pains to conceal it" Three years after the marriage Robert High died suddenly.

ABOUT THIS TIME Elizabeth's  neighbors began to suspect foul play. There was a great deal of talk, but no proof.

Mrs. Elizabeth Gibbons-Flanagan-Jeffries-High married a fifth husband in 1846. He was Absalom Brown of New Market, Ala.

During that period the  plantation house that still stands was constructed.
Built facing the east, the house had
 eight  large rooms--four up and four
 down--two stairways, a huge main
 door.

The first coat of white paint-'was 'still drying 'on the house- when Absalom Brown died in agony, his body swelling to tremendous proportions. For this reason, Mrs. Brown stated in her testimony-later on, he had to be buried immediately. A crew of quaking darkies dug his grave by lantern light and, with the lady of the house officiating, interred him beside the other bodies in the rapidly expanding graveyard.

Yet in spite of female-bluebeard rumors and behind the back accusations, another willing victim stepped forward-. Elizabeth's sixth husband was Willis Routt, In a few months he was dead.

THAT WAS THE LAST STRAW. Elizabeth's nearest neighbor, Abner Tate,brought charges of murder against her. No one could prove the charge and the matter was dropped. But not by the resourceful Mrs. Routt. In 1854, Tate was severely wounded by a blast from a shotgun wielded by one of his slaves. The slave was killed before he could speak; but the story got around that the tigress of Hazel Green had hired him for the job.

 Tate recovered but Mrs. Routt was still not finished with him.. A drover from Kentucky who had sold his herd in South Alabama and was on his way home. was last seen, or so Mrs. Routt charged, in the vicinity of Tate's plantation. She immediately brought charges against Tate that the drover had disappeared, in fact had been murdered and cremated, while stopping at Tate's house.

Tate was brought to trial and aquitted. But before he was acquitted he really spoke out. From the witness chair he pointed at Mrs. Routt and shouted: "Around the marriage couch of that woman six grinning skeletons are hung."

AFTER HIS ACQUITTAL Tate went to the trouble of publishing a pamphlet with the elaborate title "Defence of Abner Tate Against Charges of Murder Preferred by D. A. Bingham The Following False and Defamatory Matter With Intent to Defame the Plaintiff, viz, Around Whose Marriage Couch Six Grinning Skeletons Were Already Hung."

This pamphlet, written in flowery melodramatic phrases, accused Mrs. Routt of maliciously murdering six husbands and attempting to kill Tate himself.

WHETHER OR NOT THE charges against Mrs. Routt were true, no one can ever say. In the 1850's public opinion against her must have been very strong, for In 1855 she sold her house and plantation and moved off to Mississippi. If in that state, she
continued the quaint custom of rapid riddance to husbands, there is no record of it. And the only records that. exists in Madison County today are the painstakingly written court records, the weather beaten house and its tiny graveyard which can still be
found one mile east of Hazel Green today.