The face is right here.

Lightning Portrait of Henry Wells

Carrollton, Alabama

Towns will sometimes go to great effort and expense to enhance their municipal buildings, adding sculptures and monuments. Those communities only wish they could have a structure as unforgettable as the Pickens County Courthouse, legendary for its mysterious face in a window, known as, "The Lightning Portrait of Henry Wells."

According to local lore, Wells, formerly enslaved, was accused of burning the original Pickens County Courthouse. For some reason it took 14 months to arrest him. The town had no jail, so Wells was locked in the garret of the new courthouse. When a mob of locals gathered outside to lynch him, Wells supposedly vowed that Carrollton would never be rid of him if he was harmed.

Pickens County Courthouse. That tiny window and arrow up top is what makes the building famous.

As Wells peered out of a garret window on January 29, 1878, a bolt of lightning struck nearby and permanently etched his terrified expression into the windowpane. The lightning also apparently scattered the mob, but Wells' good luck was short-lived. He died less than two months later, according to local accounts, "of wounds received while attempting to escape."

The lightning photo is still visible today, but only from the outside. An arrow bolted to the exterior wall, three floors up, directs you to the miraculous face.

According to one RA tipster: "Through all the years, in spite of hail and storm, which has destroyed all the windows in the courthouse, this one pane has remained intact. It has been scrubbed with soap and rubbed with gasoline by those who doubt its permanence, but it has met every test and the face remains unchanged. At close range the pane looks clear and flawless, but viewed from the ground where once gathered an angry mob, the fear-distorted face of Henry Wells can be clearly seen!"

Another lightning portrait has been reported in Clay's Ferry, Kentucky, of an enslaved person's face burned into the upper window of a three story house. Also in Kentucky, the lightning portrait of an angry bather supposedly haunts the turret window of an old house on Highway 79 in Russelville.

We were told by the Carrollton town clerk that despite one-time reports that the Pickens County Courthouse had been threatened with demolition, it wasn't so; the building had simply been off-limits for a time as it was being renovated. "We know it's there," she said of the lightning portrait, and added that Carrollton would never tear down its most famous building, even though it perpetuates the I-am-never-leaving-you curse of Henry Wells.