When MCA Nashville Records president Tony Brown bought the former homesite of imprisoned religious leader Tony Alamo, he began hearing the stories.
Alamo had kept the embalmed body of his late wife in the house while followers prayed for her resurrection, people said. The much-neglected property at the corner of Tyne Boulevard and Lealand Avenue was haunted, others told him.
Tony and Susan Alamo, or their affiliated churches, had owned the property from 1976 until 1996. Most of the rumors about odd Alamo behavior at the homesite, Brown discovered, were actually false. For instance, Susan’s body was actually kept inside a building at the Holy Alamo Christian Church in Dyer, Ark.—not at the Tyne Boulevard home.
Nothing Brown heard was enough to prevent him from buying the land. But he did seek the guidance of Chris Faulconer, a Nashville woman who deals with spiritual matters. After assessing the situation, she determined that to revive the area, which had become devoid of blooming trees and chirping birds, a spiritual cleansing was needed.
In the spring, Faulconer and Brown burned sage and said a few words as she and Brown walked around the property. Unfortunately, that spurred neighbors to call police with a report about teenagers smoking dope.
”I took it all seriously,“ Brown says. ”I figured if I was going to buy into this piece of property, then I was going to bring it back to life no matter what the neighbors thought.“
While the lot’s most obvious connections are with Alamo—who was best known for his gaudy clothing line and religious pamphlets before being convicted in 1994 on tax-related charges—Faulconer found that the real demons on the lot were connected to the Civil War. She told Brown that a bloody Civil War battle had been fought nearby; many of the soldiers had died on the fields and were never buried. She told Brown to have someone play taps so the soldiers could go home. So he did a month later.
”The guy who played taps said, åI feel kind of crazy,’ “ Brown says.
”I said, åJust shut up and play them.’ “ Two days later, a friend called with bad news: Confederate soldiers didn’t honor taps. So Brown sent a coworker to the library, where she discovered that taps were honored by Southern soldiers.
Brown says he can already feel a difference in the land. His 9,000-square-foot home should be finished in two years. ”I know some of the neighbors were curious about what I was doing, but you can feel it’s alive again,“ he says.
Brown says he’ll have no qualms about living in a house that sits atop so much mystery. ”The only scary thing about living there is my next-door neighbor is [fellow producer] James Stroud,“ he says. ”Can we talk about that?“
