Kathryn Tucker Windham ::

I just read the news that Mrs. Windham has passed away. I always loved listening to her stories on the local NPR station at 9:30 am each Monday morning and I can't imagine anyone ever being able to fill her shoes!

Kathryn Tucker Windham, a journalist and historian whose later-in-life storytelling career turned her into an Alabama legend, died today. She was 93.
Mrs. Windham died in her Selma home surrounded by family and friends after a year of health problems, said her daughter, Dilcy Windham Hilley.
Mrs. Windham shared that home with a ghost named Jeffrey, she said, a spirit that in the late 1950s made his presence known and launched her on a storied path.
She and folklore teacher Margaret Gillis Figh published "13 Alabama Ghosts and Jeffrey" in 1969. It was the first of a number of books about Southern ghosts, and it led to an acclaimed career as a storyteller on stages around the country.
"She was an absolute legend," Wayne Flynt, an Alabama historian and professor emeritus at Auburn University, said today. "She was certainly the premiere storyteller in Alabama, and maybe one of the premiere storytellers in the South ... And, of course, she was a bang-up good journalist."

The entire obit can be read here.