In Brief
At Blandwood Mansion in Greensboro, North Carolina, people walking up the drive at night report a small flickering light in the tower window. The story says it's Letitia Morehead, the governor's daughter, watching the road for a husband who never came back.
The Full Story
At Blandwood Mansion in Greensboro, North Carolina, people walking up the drive after dark keep reporting the same thing: a small light, about the size of a candle flame, flickering in the window of the central tower. Nothing chases them. The light just sits there, high in the dark, like someone is up there waiting.
The story told at Blandwood is that the someone is Letitia Morehead. Her father, John Motley Morehead, was the state's 29th governor and owned the house from 1827 until his death in 1866. As the legend goes, Letitia would climb to the tower and watch the road for a husband who rode off and never came home. The historical record complicates the tale. By most accounts her husband had already died in 1855, years before the war that the lore tends to attach the vigil to. But the story stays fixed to that tower, which is no accident. The three-story belvedere, about 38 feet tall, is the most distinctive thing about the house. Architect Alexander Jackson Davis designed it in 1844, and it made Blandwood the prototype for the Italian Villa style in America. The ghost and the landmark are the same window.
The house Davis worked on was already old by then. It started around 1795 as a four-room Federal farmhouse, grew to six rooms under a later owner in 1822, and only became the villa with the tower when the 1844 renovation went up. By the 1860s the war had moved through its rooms. Confederate generals stayed here, then Union ones, and North Carolina's surrender to the U.S. Army is said to have happened in the main parlor in May 1865.
The house has more behind it than the legend. From the early 1900s to the early 1960s, Blandwood ran as a Keeley Institute, a rehabilitation hospital that dosed patients on the second floor with a proprietary "gold cure" of gold salts. Several Morehead family members are said to have died of tuberculosis inside the walls. Staff over the years have reported footsteps overhead in the middle of the afternoon, and visitors describe orbs and a face at the tower glass.
The ghost lore was collected by Greensboro storyteller Cynthia Moore Brown. She doesn't think the spirits mean harm. "I feel like they really want to keep a connection to the people here now," she said, "and miss the people who were there then."
A waiting house, for people who never stopped waiting.
