BETH RUSSLER
Post-Herald Staff Writer

HUNTSVILLE.--Some ghosts refuse to stay buried.

One such recalcitrant wraith is a red-haired beauty who is said to glide from time to time among the graves of 4 of her 6 husbands, buried on the grounds of  a once properous plantation a mile east of. Hazel Green, near Huntsville.

Built on an Indian mound in 1847 in the heart of a 500 acre plantation, the history of the house, which stood until it was destroyed by fire a year and a half ago, can not be disentangled from the biography of its oft-married mistress, Mrs. Elizabeth Evans Dale Gibbons Flannigan Jeffries  High Brown Routt.

The well-educated daughter of a Tennessee aristocrat, the, captivating Mrs. Flannigan, as she was known at the time, had an almost hypnotic appeal to gentlemen whose wealth could be added to her own. She was brought to Hazel Green by an early settler of Madison County, Alexander Jeffries. Her first two marriages, to Gibbons and Flannigan, had been brief, and each husband had been dispatched to eternity rather mysteriously a short time after they said their vows.

Elizabeth bore two children during her eight year marriage to Mr. Jeffries, although her daughter died at the age of seven and was buried on the plantation.

After the death of her third husband, Mrs. Jeffries' lovely dark. brown eyes and fair complexion, framed by a wealth of auburn hair, brought suitors in numbers to console the bereaved widow, who managed to abandon her period of mourning by accepting the proposal of Robert A. High, a Limestone County man who cut a  dashing figure in,the state legislature.

Unfortunately, with  in a very few years,
the politician followed his aristocratic farmer
predecessor to the burial ground, on his widow's plantation.

The disconsolate beauty lived: a lonely existence from High's death in 1839 until she journeyed once again to the now familiar altar in 1846 on the arm of a New Market merchant, Absalom Brown.

As Mrs. Brown,, she saw the completion of the home of her dreams, to which she would be proud to invite Madison County's most prominent families. Already known, for her exquisite taste for fine clothes, fine horses, and the most modern conveniences available, Mrs, Brown decorated and furnished the mansion in such a fashion as to focus the admiring attention of all eyes upon her accomplishment.

Never satisfied, however, she was always on the lookout for tall mirrors and costly mantlepieces, which she was unable to acquire before her considerable fortune was drained.

The Browns lived, one assumes, in conubial bliss, until the unfortunate Absalom -- five years after taking Elizabeth to wife -- died of a mysterious malady which caused his body to swell so that it was necessary to bury him the same night. By the, light of lanterns held in the hands of quaking, slaves, ground', was broken for the final resting place of Absalom, Brown.

His interment, however, did not end the widow's, matrimonial adventures. The following May, she was married to Willis Routt, her sixth husband, who passed the, way of the others within a sohrt while.

It was about this time that Mrs. Routt be ____  controversy with her neighbor, Abner Tate, who seemed to be the one man in her life who never succumed to her feminine charm. Indeed, after several violent squabbles with her over loose livestock and other plantation matters, he openly charged her with murdering her husband.

Suits and counter suits were filed in the circuit courts by the feuding neighbors, until the widow- Routt finally sold the home where she had kept a hall tree covered with hats belonging to her six deceased husbands, and she went. with her son, W. A. Jeffires, to Marshall County, Mississippi. Records here do not indicate whether or not she ever married D. H. Bingham, a, schoolteacher who was courting her at the time of her departure from Hazel Green. At sixty, she was still beautiful, and still attracting ardent suitors.

Neither is it known whether her matrimonial career continued in kind after she crossed the state line, or whether her ties to that new soil were sufficiently strong enough to make her restless spirit return to her Mississippi home.

It is not known whether the fire which consumed the Hazel Green mansion was set by arson or accident, for it has been abandoned for some years. Apparently, however, flames do not exorcize strong-willed spirits, for the red-haired wraith,' it., is said, still glides on moonlit nights  around the once verdant "rounds looking

for traces of the graves of some of the half-dozen husbands who preceeded her to eternal rest.