Clayton House

The man who built the Clayton House into what it is helped send dozens of men to the gallows. William Henry Harrison Clayton was the U.S. Attorney in Fort Smith, Arkansas, working the courtroom of Isaac Parker — the Hanging Judge — and over fourteen years he won eighty murder convictions, a record the museum calls unmatched in American law. You'd expect his house to be haunted by the men he helped hang.

It isn't. What people report instead is a cat.

You don't see it. Something rubs against your leg in a hallway, you look down for a tabby, and there's nothing there. Curtains shift in rooms with no open window. A paranormal team that has worked the house more than once came away with a recording that sounds like a cat meowing in a room where no cat lives.

Then there's the tall man in boots who keeps to the second floor. Staff hear his footfalls overhead and climb up to check, and the rooms are always empty. He never appears. He just walks.

And a woman in a brown dress, first seen standing in Clayton's old study — gray hair in a tight bun, a plain brown skirt. The current director guesses she's Florence Clayton, William's wife, who raised seven children here. That's a guess. The brown dress is what people actually see. "We have at least three resident ghosts here," the director has said. "A cat, a tall man in boots, and a woman in a brown dress."

The strangest thing in the house keeps to a locked glass case. The museum displays porcelain dolls of America's first ladies, and they don't stay put. Staff find them turned to face one another overnight, repositioned behind glass while the case stayed locked. They set the dolls right. A few days later, the dolls have moved again.

The man who lived here spent his life proving what happened, and to whom. The house he left behind won't give a straight answer about anyone in it.