In Brief
At the Attmore-Oliver House in New Bern, North Carolina, the curator walks in around seven each morning and says good morning to a woman who died in 1951. Staff hear her upstairs in the bedroom she never gave up.
The Full Story
At the Attmore-Oliver House in New Bern, North Carolina, the curator says good morning to a dead woman every day. Jim Hodges runs the place for the New Bern Historical Society, and around seven each morning he walks in and greets Mary Taylor Oliver, the last of the family to live in the house. She died in 1951. He does it, in his words, to stay in her favor.
Staff have their reasons not to argue with him. When the building is empty, they hear someone walking the second floor, and drawers being rifled in Miss Mary's old bedroom. No one goes up to check anymore. On the first floor, cabinet doors open on their own. A seasonal worker named Molly once said she looked up and saw a woman watching her from the very top level, clear as day.
Mary was born in 1859 and was the last of her line, a woman who inherited the house as an adult and lived in it into her early nineties. She had no children. She ran her father's insurance business and rented rooms to single schoolteachers, and Hodges describes her plainly. "She was a character," he says. "She was used to having her own way." The white three-story house had stood on Broad Street since about 1790, passing through Continental officers and merchant families before it came to her. When she died in 1951, her nephews sold it to the Historical Society, which has used it as offices ever since.
In 2006 the North Carolina Ghost Hunters Society spent a night inside and came back with orbs and readings across several rooms. They named the attic as the center of it. "All the evidence suggests that there is definitely some type of paranormal activity," Hodges said afterward. Some tell a different story entirely, that the haunting traces to a smallpox death from one of the region's old epidemics rather than to Miss Mary, though no record places that death in this house. Roger Manley's *Weird Carolinas* calls it supposedly one of the most haunted houses in New Bern, a town that wears the same reputation across the whole of it.
The strange part is the posture. The Society neither sells the ghost nor denies her. There is no tour script, no rope, no paid medium downstairs. There is only a curator who lets himself in before the workday starts, calls up the stairs to a woman who has been gone since 1951, and tries to stay on her good side.
