Curran Hall

A brother painted Curran Hall's kitchen black to see a ghost. The Little Rock Visitor Center has been weird ever since.

While his sister was out of town, Alden Woodruff painted the walls and floor of the Curran Hall kitchen entirely black. He was convinced the ghost of Mary Starbuck Walters was in there, and he figured he'd have a better shot at seeing her against a dark room. The Quapaw Quarter Association tells this story through its membership coordinator Shelle Stormoe, and Arkansas Money & Politics ran her version of it. There's no period newspaper backing it up. It's family lore. But it's the story the staff of Little Rock's official Visitor Information Center will tell you if you ask, and it's a useful frame for everything that's happened in the house since.

Mary Starbuck Walters is the person the house was built for. Colonel Ebenezer Walters commissioned it in 1842 as a wedding gift for his pregnant bride, hiring Gideon Shryock, the architect who'd also designed Arkansas's Old State House and the Kentucky State Capitol. Construction wrapped in 1843. Mary never lived in it. She died in childbirth that same summer, according to secondary sources, and her grieving husband sold the place and left Arkansas. The Encyclopedia of Arkansas confirms she died before the home was completed but doesn't name the cause; the childbirth detail comes from secondary sources without primary documentation, so take it with a small grain of salt.

What's not in question is that the bride who was supposed to fill these rooms never did, and the house has been changing hands and accumulating stories ever since.

James Moore Curran, a prominent Little Rock lawyer, bought it in 1849 for his wife Sophia Fulton, daughter of Arkansas's last territorial governor. James died unexpectedly in October 1854. Sophia remarried his law partner George Watkins, who served as chief justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court, and they cleared out before the Civil War. After the war the printer Jacob Frolich moved in, a Confederate veteran and member of the Knights of the White Camelia who was indicted for the murder of Reconstruction agent Albert Parker, fled to Canada, came back, was acquitted, and went on to serve as Arkansas Secretary of State from 1879 to 1885. Wikipedia notes he fortified the residence with trap doors and brought livestock indoors at night for protection. The man was not at peace.

In the early 1880s, Mary Eliza Woodruff Bell bought the house and moved in with her four daughters. She was the daughter of William E. Woodruff, founder of the Arkansas Gazette. (Encyclopedia of Arkansas dates the purchase to 1881; the Quapaw Quarter Association says 1884. Both are solid sources.) It was Mary Eliza's brother Alden Woodruff who, after his own house burned down, came to stay at Curran Hall and decided the kitchen needed to be black.

The house stayed in the Woodruff family for generations. Averell Reynolds Tate, Mary Eliza's granddaughter, was born inside it in 1908 and lived there until 1993. Then it sat empty. By 1996 it was scheduled for demolition. The City of Little Rock and the Little Rock Advertising and Promotion Commission stepped in, spent $1.4 million and six years restoring it, and reopened the place as the Little Rock Visitor Information Center on May 18, 2002. The restoration architects at WER call the interior "the most architecturally unchanged" of any Arkansas antebellum structure still standing. The Quapaw Quarter Association took over management in 2007.

It's the only antebellum home in Little Rock open to the public daily. Walk in and you'll find brochures, a Mayor's Reception Hall, and people on the staff who will calmly tell you the building is haunted.

Rhonda Burton, spokesperson for Arkansas Ghost Catchers, told AY Magazine she's witnessed "an abundance of spiritual activity" at Curran Hall. During one investigation she watched a rocking chair on the back porch move with no one in it. A picture fell off a hallway wall while her team was working. She was touched on the shoulder. The coffee maker in the kitchen has been known to operate while unplugged or empty. The alarm has tripped with no one in the building and no detected entry, which the alarm company couldn't explain.

Linda Howell, who wrote *Haunted Little Rock* for History Press in 2012, runs Haunted Tours of Little Rock and stops at Curran Hall on every run. She brings an EMF detector, a digital recorder, and dowsing rods. She says she met her first spirit while working here. She also claims she captured a female voice on the recorder saying "Mary, that's who I am." The recording exists only in Howell's account, but it's the line she repeats every tour, and it's a clean one if you're trying to identify a ghost: the bride who never made it into the house.

Other things visitors and investigators have described: a woman in a long dress walking back and forth through the front rooms, a man in a Civil War uniform sitting at a table, cold spots, unexplained noises, objects that move. The ghost hunting group Natural State Supernatural reported capturing what they called a "sparkle" on camera; the photograph hasn't been independently published, and the claim sits with the investigators rather than in any documented investigation report.

The Encyclopedia of Arkansas, for its part, doesn't mention any of this. Its entry covers Shryock's architecture, the ownership chain, the NRHP listing on January 1, 1976, the demolition save in 1996, and stops there. All the ghost coverage lives in the regional magazines, Howell's book, and the tour scripts. That's worth knowing. Curran Hall is well-documented as one of the most important antebellum houses in Arkansas. The haunting is well-documented as ghost lore, told by the people who run the place and the investigators who keep coming back.

The house's own Facebook page calls it "one of the most famously haunted sites in Little Rock." A building that survived a planned demolition by a year doesn't really need to argue. Out on the back porch, the rocking chair sits empty.