In Brief
At Barnsley Gardens in Adairsville, Georgia, guests keep seeing a woman standing in the garden before the roofless brick manor. Staff call her the Guardian of the Gardens — said to be Julia Barnsley, who died before the house she lived in was ever finished.
The Full Story
At the center of Barnsley Gardens, a resort in Adairsville, Georgia, stand the roofless brick ruins of a manor called Woodlands — open walls and empty arched windows framing the sky. Guests keep reporting a woman in the garden out front. Staff have a name for her. They call her the Guardian of the Gardens, and they say she's Julia Barnsley, the woman the whole place was built for.
Godfrey Barnsley was an English cotton broker who emigrated from Liverpool in 1824 and made his fortune in Savannah. In 1841 he started building Woodlands in the north Georgia wilderness — a 24-room Italian villa with hot and cold running water, imported marble mantels, and London-crafted cabinetry — as a retreat for his wife Julia, who had consumption. She died of it in the summer of 1845, before the house was done. Godfrey stopped building.
The story goes that he started again because she told him to, from beyond the grave. He had taken up spiritualism, and believed he could still reach her.
What followed reads like a family someone had cursed. A son was killed by pirates in 1862, sourcing plants for the gardens abroad. A daughter died in the house in 1858. In 1864 a Confederate officer, Colonel Earle of the Second Alabama Light Cavalry, rode to warn the family of approaching Union troops and was shot down a stone's throw from the house. A 1906 tornado tore off the roof, and the family, unable to afford repairs, moved into the kitchen wing and never restored the rest.
Then there's the bloodstain. In 1935 Godfrey's great-grandson Preston Saylor — a prizefighter who boxed as "K.O. Dugan" until ring injuries unsettled his mind — shot his brother Harry inside the house. Accounts disagree on which room; the stain is preserved today in the kitchen museum, under a plaque.
It still reads: "BLOOD STAIN FROM MORTAL WOUND TO HARRY SAYLOR INFLICTED BY K.O. DUGAN 11-5-35."
