In Brief
The Ace of Clubs House in Texarkana is a mansion shaped like a playing card, built by James Draughon on a poker hand. The story goes the boy who still turns up in the front yard is his own youngest son — a child the house's records never kept.
The Full Story
The Ace of Clubs House in Texarkana, Arkansas keeps a little boy, and the story goes that he belonged to the man who built it. James H. Draughon's youngest son, the lore says, fell from a tree in the front yard and died — and a child still turns up near where the tree once stood, on the lawn of his own father's house.
Draughon built that house to be remembered. He was a self-made man who wanted a monument and got a strange one. The legend the town still tells is that he paid for it with a single poker hand: $10,000 won in one game, the ace of clubs the card that took the pot. He liked the story enough to carve it into the building. Look down at the floor plan and you see the club suit: three octagonal wings around a central rotunda, a rectangular wing trailing off as the stem, a 20-foot tower with a spiral staircase coiled inside.
That's what the house kept: a card trick, set in brick, where anyone can still read it.
What it didn't keep is the boy. No obituary, no census line, no family record of a fall. The Encyclopedia of Arkansas lists Draughon's nine children and notes only that one died in infancy — no name, no tree, no age. The man built something to hold a poker bluff forever, and lost track of his own child.
Draughon left Texarkana around 1890. The house passed down a short line of families until Olivia Moore, the last private owner, died in 1985 and willed it to the Texarkana Museums System. No paranormal team has ever worked the place. No recordings, no cable crews. The museum doesn't sell it as haunted at all. It sells the after-dark walk that starts here and threads downtown past the Hotel Grim and the Silvermoon Theater, "some of the history of Texarkana not often told, along with some of the unexplained legends."
The poker hand is still legible in the floor plan, every wing of the club suit exactly where Draughon set it. The boy is harder to find: no name in the records, no year, no grave — just the patch of front lawn where a tree once stood, and the story that he never left it.
