In Brief
The Burgwin-Wright House in Wilmington, North Carolina is an elegant Georgian townhouse built over the stone walls of the city's first jail. The cells survive in the sub-basement, and that's where people keep recording voices from an empty room.
The Full Story
The Burgwin-Wright House stands at the corner of Market and Third in Wilmington, North Carolina, the only colonial-era building in the city open to the public. The tour shows you fine Georgian rooms and a walled garden. The part people talk about is what's underneath.
John Burgwin laid the floorboards in 1770, but he built on top of something older. The ballast-stone walls below the house belonged to Wilmington's first city jail, which stood on this corner from around 1744 until it burned in 1768. The outdoor cells and the sub-basement cells survived the fire. Nearby was the courtyard where the town hanged and pilloried its debtors and lawbreakers.
Two centuries later, those cells are where the recordings happen.
Visitors describe a low, indiscernible muttering throughout the building, and some have walked out of the tour partway through, unable to stay in the sub-basement. Paranormal groups have come down to the old jail to listen. When Port City Paranormal ran a session in those cells, investigators say the playback caught a voice saying "Right, that time," a woman's voice saying "Stephanie," a cough, and a woman sobbing. There is no record of any Stephanie tied to the jail or the house. A separate group, the Wilmington Paranormal Research Group, said they recorded indiscernible voices in the background while sitting for an interview in 2015.
Upstairs has its own stories. A tour group years ago watched an antique spinning wheel turn on its own, and a woman has been seen seated at it. A docent named Ardell Tiller said she closed the Blue Bedroom door each night when locking up and found it open the next morning. The executive director, Joy Allen, who calls herself "neither a believer nor a disbeliever in ghosts," said she once watched someone walk past while she sat at her desk. During a 2018 session in the Master Bedroom, an investigator named Nelson Nauss said a recorder caught the line, "Now if you don't want me to open that door feel free to close it."
The house wears its history well. British General Lord Cornwallis used it as his headquarters for a stretch in April 1781, and locals still call it the Cornwallis House. The Wright family lived here through the 1860s. The Colonial Dames opened the house as a museum in 1951, and they run night tours now, leaning into the colonial history behind the ghost stories. The tour ends where it always does, down in the cells, in the dark, where the muttering doesn't stop.
