The Historic Strickland House that once belonged to Alice Strickland.
Sue Howard and husband, Bob great-grandson of Alice Harrell Strickland, live in the Strickland house in Duluth
The historic Strickland house is up for sale. For $3.5 million, a buyer gets a restored Victorian, three acres of commercial property and a ghost.
The house on Buford Highway in Duluth may not be the best place for a tavern — more on that later — but it could well be perfect for a history buff or a business that would enjoy the spirit of Georgia's first woman mayor, Alice Harrell Strickland
Strickland, a looming figure in Duluth history, is said to still inhabit the house. Even if that is not literally true, her genes have been in the place since it was built about 1898, said her granddaughter Alice Ziegler, who owns the property.
The house has been handed down to family members — first Ziegler's mother and aunt, then Ziegler and her second husband, and now her son from her first marriage and his family.
"It has been haunted 75 years at least," said Ziegler, 81, who lived in the house for 30 years. "My grandmother loved the house, and she was such a force."
Ziegler's son Bob Howard and his wife, Sue, moved into the Strickland house two years ago after the Zieglers moved to a retirement community in Gainesville.
The couple, who share the house with a landscape architecture company, soon learned stories that great-grandmother had refused to vacate after her death in 1947 might be true.
They owned a broken antique clock that had once belonged to Strickland. Shortly after they moved into the Victorian, the clock started.
"The clock had not been wound, I'll betcha, in 30 years," Sue Howard said. "We could never get it to work. About 3 o'clock in the morning, that clock started chiming, and it sounded like it was brand new.
"Bob sat straight up in the bed and said, 'That's impossible. That clock can't go off.' It kept doing it every hour on the hour until about 7 o'clock."
The chiming was a one-time phenomenon, and the timepiece has since sat quietly on a bookshelf, Howard said. During the next two years, however, the Howards noticed noises in the attic, moved objects and other signs of Strickland's spirit.
But Sue Howard, who does not want to move, insisted that great-grandmother isn't scary. "There is a spook here, but it doesn't frighten me," she said. "It's not a bad ghost. It is a funny ghost.
Yet, from an historical standpoint, the idea of a nonthreatening Alice Harrell Strickland might strike one as curious.
Strickland was a political pioneer. Raised as a genteel lady, she married Duluth lawyer Henry Strickland in 1881 and they built the Victorian about 1898.
After Henry died in 1915, Alice immersed herself in her civic work, and in 1922 she was elected Georgia's first female mayor — two years after the 19th Amendment ensured women the right to vote.
She was elected while promising to rid then-rowdy Duluth of demon rum — undoubtedly capitalizing on the new female vote and possibly male drunkenness on Election Day. From her perch at 2956 Buford Highway, Strickland had a bird's-eye view of bootleggers using the then-dirt road to make deliveries during Prohibition.
As mayor, she reputedly enacted maximum fines on bootleggers, but she was "considerate" to petty offenders, according to a history Web site, www.georgiawomen.org. She served only one term and died in 1947.
A few years after her death, the historic mayor became a legend.
A pair of relatives were visiting Duluth and sleeping in the former mayor's bedroom; they made the first reported spotting of a spectral Strickland. The couple told relatives the bedroom door opened from the hallway and a scowling gray-haired woman wearing iron-rimmed glasses placed a red overnight bag in the room and then left. The couple fled, but, according to the Strickland clan, their description of the old woman matched the departed mayor.
Ziegler, the granddaughter selling the house, described Strickland as stern but kind, noting that after her husband died, the widow opened her large home as a tonsillectomy clinic for children. She was an early environmentalist who helped establish one of the first conservation forests in Georgia. But she also once confronted Georgia Power workers with her shotgun to block the stringing of electrical lines across her land, according to the history Web site.
Ziegler contends if grandmother still roams the house, she would tolerate any business that set up shop. She notes that grandmother probably has changed with the times so even an alcohol-serving restaurant would probably be safe.
The house has been on the market for a few months. Ziegler suspects the price — not the ghost — might have deterred a few buyers. But she noted that if the haunting caused any hesitation, a buyer could always just flatten the house and replace it with a sterile, modern building.
Any demolition, however, would be painful for Ziegler. She and her husband, Frank, lovingly restored the Victorian and she would like to see it remain standing as a testament to Duluth history and to a simpler time.
Her aunt, Ellyne Strickland, who was the first female graduate of Emory law school, had her law office in the house when she lived there with Ziegler's mother; and Ziegler's daughter, Robin Burch, remembers spending summers visiting.
It was a lovely place and still is — even with a four-lane Buford Highway out front.
Ziegler firmly believes her grandmother would approve of letting the property leave the family after 108 years. After all, $3.5 million is a lot of money, and Alice Harrell Strickland was a practical woman who understood times change.
"She would say, 'Move on,'" Ziegler said. "I hope they won't knock it down but ... I guess if someone paid millions, we would all change our minds. It sounds bad to say that, but I would not try and rule from my grave.
"That's something that my grandmother might do."
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