Dorr House

At the Dorr House in Pensacola, Florida, women keep feeling a hand at their hem. They're standing in the formal sitting room, in front of the floor-to-ceiling mirror, and the story goes that something tugs the bottom of a short skirt downward, as if to make it longer. The lore names the culprit: Clara Barkley Dorr, who ran this house as its lady for a quarter century and is said to still be policing the manners of everyone who walks through it.

Clara built the place in 1871. Her husband, Eben, a lumberman at the mill in Bagdad, had died of yellow fever the year before, and she used her inherited share of the mill to put up a two-story Greek Revival home for herself and her five children, on South Adams Street beside Seville Square. She lived there until 1896, then moved to a hotel, where she died in the late 1890s. She is buried across town at St. John's Cemetery.

She never died in the house. The haunting isn't pinned to a last breath in an upstairs room — it's pinned to the woman herself, and to twenty-five years of running a proper home.

So the signs people report are the signs of a hostess who never went off duty. Roses were her favorite flower, and visitors and guides say they catch the smell of fresh-cut ones at intervals, trailed every time by a sudden cold spot. Rude guests, the tour-tellers say, are made to feel so unwelcome they want to leave at once. From the sewing room, which doubled as the family sick room, comes the soft crying of a woman.

The Heritage Foundation bought the deteriorated house in 1965 and restored it as a museum, and only one piece of the original furniture survived the years it spent as a boarding house. As one ghost-tour account tells it, Mrs. Dorr surfaces — a translucent woman of about thirty-five in a Victorian dress, dancing across an upper room — whenever a favorite possession is moved to a different spot. She built the place to her standard. She is still, apparently, correcting yours.