Troup County Historical Society Production · Seasonally Active Since at Least 2019 · Covers 1896 Lafayette Square Murder
Strange LaGrange is a product of the Troup County Historical Society, operating through its Eventbrite booking platform and promoted by Visit LaGrange, the city's official tourism organization. The tour is led by Lewis Powell, described in published tour reviews as a gregarious Southern historian and docent with deep knowledge of Troup County's past.
The tour departs at 7 PM from the sidewalk in front of 136 Main Street — the Legacy Museum on Main, which itself occupies the 1917 LaGrange National Banking Co. building. From there, Powell leads walkers through approximately three hours of downtown streets, covering sites that range from a documented 1896 murder on Lafayette Square to the LaGrange Art Museum, housed in the former 1890s county jail where executions took place. The tour also passes LaGrange City Hall and ends at Hillview Cemetery, the city's historic burial ground.
FOX 5 Atlanta covered the tour as a feature segment, describing it as historically grounded and commercially active. The Southern Spirit Guide, an independent regional travel publication, reviewed the tour and corroborated its stops and historical framing. The tour runs on fall Friday nights from September through mid-November and is ticketed through Eventbrite, with pricing set at $20 for adults, $18 for seniors, and $15 for children ages 5–12.
The tour has also visited Smith Hall at LaGrange College, where staff and students have reported unexplained tripping incidents on the stairs, and has touched on the Troup-Heard Corridor's association with 1990s UFO sightings. The range of subjects reflects Powell's approach to Strange LaGrange as a broad-tent dark history tour rather than a strictly paranormal one.
Sources
- https://visitlagrange.com/things-to-do/strange-lagrange-tour/
- https://www.southernspiritguide.org/strange-lagrange/
- https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/strange-lagrange-walking-tour-mixes-history-and-haunts
Self-operating elevator (Legacy Museum)Apparition sightings (Lafayette Square)
The Strange LaGrange tour's most distinctive paranormal narrative belongs to the building where it begins: the Legacy Museum on Main at 136 Main Street, where Lewis Powell has witnessed the building's elevator open spontaneously on two occasions at the moment he spoke the name of Hatton Lovejoy, a deceased local attorney, during his tour introduction.
The tour's historical spine runs alongside the paranormal. At Lafayette Square, Powell documents the December 24, 1896 shooting death of Claude Dunson, killed by Douglas Cooper over a dispute about a bent dime — an incident drawn from period newspaper accounts and included in Visit LaGrange's official dark-history documentation. The former county jail, now the LaGrange Art Museum on Lafayette Parkway, is presented with its record of documented executions, providing the factual anchor for the building's ghost lore.
At Hillview Cemetery, the tour terminus, Powell presents stories of notable residents and the circumstances of their deaths. The cemetery's age — opened in the decades following LaGrange's 1828 incorporation — provides the setting. Southern Spirit Guide reviewer noted that the cemetery stop was atmospheric enough that it warranted its own photograph in their write-up.
The tour has attracted coverage from FOX 5 Atlanta and repeated positive notice from regional paranormal and travel publications, establishing it as the primary organized dark-tourism offering in Troup County.
Notable Entities
Hatton LovejoyClaude Dunson
Media Appearances
- Strange LaGrange Walking Tour (Television, 2023)