Bellamy Mansion

Built on Wilmington's old gallows in 1861, occupied by Federal officers in 1865. Conjure charms turned up in the slave quarters during restoration.

Before Dr. John Dillard Bellamy built his 22-room mansion on Market Street, the lot was Gallows Hill. Wilmington hanged people there. The mansion was finished in 1861, about five months before the Civil War started, on the bones of the town's execution ground, built largely by the hands of the enslaved and free Black artisans the Bellamy family owned or hired. The house was destined to be heavy before anyone moved in.

Dr. Bellamy was an ardent secessionist who held more than a hundred people in bondage across North Carolina. In early 1865 yellow fever and the advancing Union Army drove his family out of Wilmington, and Federal officers moved in and used the mansion as a headquarters through the end of the war. One of the people enslaved on the property, a man named William Gould, escaped from the brick slave quarters behind the house in a rowboat, rowed down the Cape Fear until he reached a Union gunboat, and enlisted in the U.S. Navy the same day. His wartime diary was eventually published. Gould is a reminder that the mansion's history is not only a ghost story, but the ghost story exists because of that history.

The haunting tracks the house's stratigraphy. Employees hear heavy boots walking the wooden floors on the second and third stories, usually belonging to no one they can see, and several describe an ongoing encounter with a man in a Union officer's dark uniform. Alarms trip in empty rooms. Ellen Bellamy's wheelchair, which is part of the museum collection, turns up in different parts of the house between openings, which Preservation North Carolina staff can't explain and have stopped trying to.

The fourth floor, originally the children's living quarters, is the part of the house most people don't want to be in. Visitors report nausea climbing the final staircase. Piano keys play themselves in a room without a piano. A self-described skeptic on a 2010s tour reported seeing a woman in the corner of his eye on the top floor, assumed it was his wife, and turned to find himself completely alone on the floor. He didn't finish the tour.

Restoration workers found talismans buried in the corners of the brick slave quarters during a 1990s preservation project: a small clay pipe and an animal's jawbone. Those are conjure objects, charms hidden by enslaved people for protection against evil or against the people enslaving them. The artifacts moved from the ground of the property into the museum's interpretation of the site, which is the correct move. They say something about what the people in that quarter believed they needed defending from, and that context matters to the haunting: the fourth-floor dread, the boots, the officer, the piano all share the property with something much older and much more deliberate.

The house has been a museum since 1994, run by Preservation North Carolina, and its programming has spent the last decade integrating the slave quarters and the Gould story into the main tour. What that does to the ghosts is hard to say. Employees still hear the boots upstairs. The wheelchair keeps turning up in rooms nobody moved it to. Dr. Bellamy built his 22 rooms on Gallows Hill in 1861, and the house has been carrying the weight of that foundation ever since.