Attmore-Oliver House

Curator Jim Hodges greets Miss Mary every morning at 7. She died in 1951. The 1790 house on Broad Street has been hers ever since.

Curator Jim Hodges starts every morning the same way. He walks into the Attmore-Oliver House on Broad Street, and before he touches a light switch or a file cabinet, he says out loud, "About seven o'clock, I always say good morning, Miss Mary. So I've tried to stay in her favor."

Miss Mary is Mary Taylor Oliver, the last person to live in the house. She moved out feet-first in 1951, the final branch of a family that had held the property since 1834. Hodges describes her as "a character" who "was used to having her own way." She had no children. By most of the measurable standards of 1951, her line ended that year. By the standards of the people who work at 511 Broad Street now, she's still choosing what gets moved and when.

The house itself is a three-story white clapboard built around 1790 and enlarged in 1834, sitting in the middle of New Bern's National Register district. The New Bern Historical Society uses it as offices and event space, which means a small staff spends long stretches alone in a 230-year-old building with Miss Mary's preferences intact. Programs director Marissa Moore has given up trying to explain what she sees. "Sometimes I'll be working and I hear something. I look over and the cabinet door just opens. And then I come back in later, and it's closed. You don't know, she's just making her presence known."

Staff working on the first floor regularly hear someone walking the second floor when the building is locked and empty. Several have heard what sounds like drawers being opened and rifled in Miss Mary's old bedroom. No one goes up to check anymore. The sound stops on its own, and the room is always exactly as it was left.

The society brought in the North Carolina Ghost Hunters Society in 2006 to put some structure around what people had been experiencing for years. The team spent the night, documented orbs and field readings in multiple rooms, and concluded the attic was the epicenter. "All the evidence suggests that there is definitely some type of paranormal activity," Hodges said afterward. Not the most colorful quote, but coming from a museum curator whose job is to avoid overpromising, it's louder than it sounds.

A secondary theory floats around the house. One of the 18th-century smallpox epidemics that swept eastern North Carolina may have killed multiple residents inside these walls, and some of the shuffling and muttering reported upstairs is attributed to them rather than to Miss Mary. The society doesn't push the theory. They don't push Miss Mary either. They just keep the building open, greet her at seven, and let visitors decide.

New Bern regularly gets called the most haunted town in North Carolina, a title that means nothing until you spend a night in one of its houses. The Attmore-Oliver is a good place to test it. There's no show, no red rope, no paid medium. There's a curator who says good morning to someone no one else can see, and a cabinet door in the corner of Marissa Moore's eye doing what it does.