Burgwin-Wright House

Port City Paranormal hit record in the subbasement. A female voice said "Stephanie." The stones used to be a colonial jail.

When Port City Paranormal set up recording equipment in the subbasement of the Burgwin-Wright House in Wilmington, they weren't in a basement at all. They were in a colonial jail cell. The stone foundation they stood on was the remnant of Wilmington's first jailhouse, which stood on this spot from 1744 until it burned in 1768. Men had been held here waiting to die on what locals called Gallows Hill. The investigators went quiet and hit record.

The playback caught a voice saying "Right, that time." Another female voice said "Stephanie." Somebody coughed. A woman sobbed.

The elegant Georgian townhouse above was built two years after the jail fire, in 1770, by merchant John Burgwin, who either didn't know or didn't care that he was laying his floorboards over a place where men had awaited the rope. The house is now the only colonial-era structure in Wilmington open to the public, and staff there will tell you the subbasement never stopped being what it was.

During the Revolutionary War, Lord Cornwallis used the house as his headquarters during the British campaign through North Carolina in 1781. He didn't stay long, but he left a reputation, and some of the unexplained footsteps heard on the upper floors have been attributed to him or his officers. The Wright family bought the property in 1799 and stayed until 1869. Every era stacked another layer of story onto a foundation that was already humming.

The antique spinning wheel in the parlor is the most-documented object in the house. A tour group once watched it start turning on its own. When one of the guests stepped toward it to look closer, the wheel froze. A woman has been seen sitting at it on more than one occasion, working calmly, then gone. Museum docent Ardell Tiller described the Blue Bedroom problem: she'll close the door when she locks up at night and come back the next morning to find it standing open. Executive director Joy Allen has looked up from her desk and caught figures moving past her office that aren't there when she turns her head.

The subbasement is the part of the tour that makes people leave. Wilmington Paranormal Research recorded what they described as indiscernible voices coming out of the empty stone chamber. Visitors describe hearing a low, steady muttering, as if several people are carrying on a conversation just below the threshold of understanding. The anxiety in that room has been intense enough that guests have walked out of tours partway through, declining to finish.

The Burgwin-Wright Museum leans into all of this without overplaying it. First-Friday interpreter-led night tours focus on colonial nightlife, superstition, and the rituals people used to keep the dark at bay. Daytime visitors get the Georgian architecture and the Cornwallis history and the well-kept gardens. The subbasement is still down there either way.

For a house at 224 Market Street that looks, from the sidewalk, like a tidy piece of colonial preservation, the Burgwin-Wright has a lot going on underneath it. Men died on this ground before the first brick of the house was laid. One of them, or someone who knew one of them, answered the investigators by name when they asked.