The Haunted Book Shop Continues Its Legacy

With a long history and family ties, Mobile’s downtown spooky bookstore continues to inspire and bring together the bay area’s readers and authors.

by Sophie Goodwin

Nestled on the corner of South Joachim and Conti streets in the heart of downtown Mobile sits a welcoming haven for book lovers and history buffs of all ages: The Haunted Book Shop. Yet, this is not the first iteration of the city’s cozy bookshop. In 1941, Adelaide Trigg and Cameron Plummer each pooled together $500 to open Mobile’s original spooky bookstore. Named after Adelaide’s favorite book – The Haunted Bookshop by Christopher Morley – the hub for Mobile’s literary community served local writers, soldiers coming through Brookley Army Air Field and American screenwriter and author Eugene Walter. Plummer ran the bookshop for most of its 50 years after Adelaide sold her share in it early on. In 1991, the shop closed its doors, but would continue to live on through Adelaide’s granddaughter, who moved to Mobile in 2009 after her grandmother’s passing and was determined to open a bookshop of her own.

Playing library with her own Dewey Decimal System and library cards as a child, Angela Trigg has always been surrounded by books. She worked in a well-known indie bookstore, Oxford Books, in Atlanta after graduating from Emory University with a degree in anthropology and international studies. She went on to get her master’s degree in heritage preservation at Georgia State University and direct a history museum outside of Atlanta. However, she never stopped dreaming of following in her grandmother’s footsteps.

After moving to Mobile to live in her late grandmother’s house, Termite Hall (also a historical literary salon), Angela started working at Bienville Books in addition to becoming a romance novelist, publishing 10 novels under the name Angela Quarles. When Bienville Books closed, Angela began her own bookshop story. Now, down the street from her grandmother’s original location and near the Saenger Theatre, The Haunted Book Shop continues its legacy of inspiring curiosity and conversation around books, with a furry addition to the staff: the resident cat, Mr. Bingley. Your author (SG) had the privilege of sitting down with Angela Trigg (AT) to hear about The Haunted Book Shop’s past, present and future.

SG: Please tell me a bit about yourself and your passion for books.

AT: I’ve loved books my whole life. I’ve always been a reader and book collector. And I always wanted to have a bookstore. I knew eventually I would open my own bookstore, and if I did, it was going to be The Haunted Book Shop.

SG: When, where and how did your version of the bookshop start? 

AT: I started working for Bienville Books around 2011 and worked there for seven years. Then, when owner Russ Adams said he was closing his store, I knew it was time for me to open The Haunted Book Shop. I had just gotten my business license, because I knew it was going to happen, I just didn’t know how. I had inherited some money from my grandmother, which, in today’s dollars, was the same amount of money that she had borrowed from her mother to open her bookshop. So, I cashed that. I was looking around, talking to different people and had some different irons in the fire as far as where to do it. Then Russ told me that he benefited from The Haunted Book Shop when he opened his store, and he wanted to pay it forward but also pay it back. So, he basically incubated me for a bit, renting me the Bienville Books space for way below market value. I bought his sci-fi and fantasy section because I knew it was going to be hard for me to find that used out in the wild. I opened The Haunted Book Shop on Dauphin Street in 2018.

SG: When did you move locations? What motivated the move?

AT: We moved locations in August 2022. Basically, I could only get a monthly lease after Russ passed away. And I knew the building was likely going to be put up for sale. It was just an uncertain location. I knew I needed to be downtown, so I decided to be proactive instead of reactive. I started looking around, and my initial thought was to get a second location out in Midtown. I had just made an offer on a place on Upham Street that was rejected. I was coming up with a counteroffer when the owner of this building walked into the bookshop and said, “Hey, I hear you’re looking for a place to rent.” He brought me over and showed me this building. I waited a month before deciding, because I didn’t want to make the decision emotionally since I was totally in love with the building.

SG: How has the community reacted to the move? 

AT: Everybody seems to really like the new location. I was worried about no longer being on Dauphin Street, but it turned out to be better for the shop. This is the busiest block of Dauphin Street, so we put a sign on the corner and direct people to the shop. The space just reflects our brand so much better. We’re also able to be the size we want to be and host events more easily.

SG: Can you tell me about how you source your books? Is there a local influence? 

AT: We started out with mainly used and maybe only 10% new. Now, it’s completely flip-flopped. We’re now 85-90% new and the rest used. The new books we source from the distributor or the publisher. There’s one main distributor, Ingram, so we get new books from them, or shipped straight from the publisher, and they’re chosen by myself and my staff. We get catalogs and look through them. They flag books for me to order. We also just listen to the customers coming in. If they tell us about something cool, then we’re like, “Oh, we need to get that.” Some of our sections have grown based on customers, the children’s section is a great example of that. It kept growing and growing in the old store.

We have a local history section, and we carry a lot of local authors, too. Instead of having one separate local author section – which a lot of bookstores do – we decided to shelve them in two spots. One place is in the section in which the books would typically belong in. If the author writes sci-fi, they’re amongst everybody else in the sci-fi section, for example. This helps with discoverability. Instead of just being a big wall of local authors, we integrate them and that carries into the philosophy that we have in the store in general. We’re big on hyper-categorization to try to help with discoverability. We also have a consignment program that authors take advantage of. On Art Walk nights, we have local authors come in and sell their books during the event. That’s a great way for local authors who don’t have any kind of fanbase yet to have a built-in audience coming through. We also partner with the Mobile Writers Guild. We’re the bookstore that does the pop-up for the Mobile Literary Festival, put on by the Writers Guild. So, we have a lot of crossover with he writers’ community, which entails the local authors.

SG: What have these relationships with local authors brought to the shop?

AT: Two of my employees! My second hire was Candice Conner, who I met at the Mobile Writers Guild. I was an author before I was a bookstore owner, so I was a member and past president of the Mobile Writers Guild. When I was president, she was treasurer. When I was looking for another person to hire, I thought Candice would be a good fit, so I brought her on. A couple of years ago, I knew I needed to have someone to take over event planning. I tapped Jodie Cain Smith, who is the one who puts on the literary festival, for event coordination. One of the other members of the Writers Guild, who’s also a local author, is my one and only book scout. She likes to look through thrift stores and estate sales for what I need, then come and resell the books to me. Besides bringing me great employees, when we had our grand reopening at the new location, we actually had a bunch of local authors come and be the ambassadors for the shop.

SG: Can you tell me about the kinds of events that the shop hosts?

AT: We do book signings, which usually consist of a Q&A and the signing. We do some authorless events, like our midnight release parties. We did a coffee and donuts early opening for the newest Freida McFadden book, The Tenant. We’re having another one like that soon. 

We were able to hold a huge event for Tessa Bailey, one of the top romance authors. We knew we couldn’t host it here because we sold 80 tickets on the first day, and we sold out of 200 tickets in the first two weeks. So, we were talking to the Arts Council across the street, and they said we could have the Q&A there. And I thought, well, we’re going to have people walking back and forth between there and the bookshop, and we had already talked with Alchemy about doing Tessa Bailey-themed cocktails there. And I remember saying, “We should block off the street and have a block party!” So, I ran that by Jodie, and we got permission from the city. We blocked off the street and put a big banner at the end that said, “Welcome, Tessa Bailey fans!” We decorated the whole street to match the book, got vendors on the street and it was just a blast.

Our philosophy with the events, just like with the store, is that we’re not just pushing products. You’re not here just to stand in line. So, we try to make an event out of it, an experience out of it. We actually have a group of women from Pensacola who met at the first Tessa Bailey block party and now they carpool to the events here or meet up here before the event. We call them The Maggies because a lot of them have the first name Maggie. So, we’re having people making friends and finding like-minded people. It’s been great.

SG: What are the shop’s best sellers? 

AT: Romance and fantasy are the two biggest sellers, followed by local history. The citizens of Mobile like their history. So, a lot of the history customers are locals, along with tourists.

SG: Do you have any future plans for the shop? 

AT: I would love to keep doing the big block parties. I’m always scrounging Facebook Marketplace looking for cute little trailers or old pickup trucks to make a little mobile bookstore. We eventually want to be able to renovate the upstairs space to create an exhibit on the original Haunted Book Shop. I also want to re-establish something that was part of the old Haunted Book Shop, which was that they used to publish books. Some of our great local history books that we have are because of The Haunted Book Shop. They were the ones who published those books, so I’d like to start publishing again at some point.

I hope to keep having wonderful authors and seeing little kids coming through. We have kids coming in all the time that don’t want to leave, and I just love it. One mom tried to bribe her kid out of the shop by saying, “Let’s go get ice cream.” And he was like, “I don’t want ice cream. I want to stay here.” And I thought, “Yes! We beat ice cream!” That’s why I made the kids’ tent and the play area because I wanted to associate books with magic and a special place. It sort of solidifies that books are special and fun and magic in a kid’s mind. So, I hope that keeps going.

SG: For my last question – I just have to ask – have you ever felt like the shop, this version or the old version, was actually haunted?

AT: Oh no, I’ve never been someone that senses that. Supposedly, Termite Hall was haunted, but I never encountered anything like that. We have had some things. There was one time I was in here with one of my employees before we opened. We were painting, and she said she saw something leaving the bookshelf and going straight across the room and then falling down. But I’ve never seen anything.