Baker Peters House

Two bullet holes in an upstairs door mark where Union soldiers killed Dr. Baker in 1863. His son Abner haunts the staircase.

There are two bullet holes in an interior bedroom door at the Baker Peters House in Knoxville, and the door is still in the building. The man on the other side, Dr. James Harvey Baker, was killed by Union soldiers who fired through the wood at him in June 1863. The current owners kept the door because the story doesn't really work without it.

Dr. Baker built the brick house in 1840 on what was then a country road called Kingston Pike. He was a Confederate sympathizer in a city that was about to be overrun by Union forces, and he ran an unofficial field hospital out of the home for wounded Confederate soldiers. When Union troops swept through Knoxville in 1863, they came for him. He barricaded himself in his upstairs bedroom. The soldiers fired through the door. The two holes still line up at chest height.

His son Abner Baker was off fighting for the Confederacy when his father was killed. He came back to Knoxville in 1865 and walked straight to the office of William Hall, a man he believed had informed on his father. He shot Hall dead. Abner was arrested and locked in the Knox County jail. A Unionist mob broke into the building that night, dragged Abner out into downtown Knoxville, and hanged him from a tree. He was twenty-six years old.

Two violent deaths in two years tied to the same family in the same house. What people report inside the building today rests on that foundation.

The figure most often described is Abner. Visitors and staff describe a young man leaning on the second-floor staircase railing, and others have spotted the same figure in upstairs windows from outside on the lawn. He doesn't speak. People who've turned around to look at someone they thought brushed past them on the stairs find no one there, and a few have felt a hand close on their shoulder from behind in empty rooms.

The activity isn't always Abner. Past tenants of the building, including a jazz club operator and several restaurant managers, have reported objects sliding off shelves and breaking on the floor when nobody was near them. Whispering near the bar after closing. The smell of cigar smoke in rooms where smoking has been banned for years. One Knox Paranormal Researchers investigation produced a photograph the team identifies as Abner himself, which was displayed on the wall of the building for a stretch of years afterward.

The house has changed hands many times since the killings. The downstairs has operated as a dental office since 1989. The upper floors have rotated through a fine-dining restaurant, the Baker Peters Jazz Club, and most recently a piano bar. The jazz club closed in the mid-2020s. The building is still standing, still privately occupied, and still listed on every Knoxville haunted tour route.

What separates this story from the standard Civil War haunting boilerplate is the door. A lot of antebellum Tennessee ghost stories are built on rumor and Confederate atmospherics. The Baker Peters House has a piece of physical evidence that matches the killing exactly. Two holes through a thick wooden door, at the height of a man standing inside a small room. You can put your finger through them. The next morning Dr. Baker was dead on the other side, and the rest of his family had to live with that door for the rest of their time in the house.

Abner had to come home and see it. Then he made his choice, and the mob made theirs, and now the people who work upstairs say the man at the railing is the son who came back.