Edgar Allan Poe Museum

Edgar Allan Poe never lived in the Old Stone House. The Richmond museum dedicated to him is haunted, but the ghosts most people report aren't him.

Here's the catch that ghost tours tend to skip: Edgar Allan Poe never lived in the building named after him. The Old Stone House at 1914 E. Main Street in Richmond was already nearly a century old by the time Poe walked past it. He didn't write here. He didn't sleep here. The closest he ever got to the building, as far as the record shows, was in 1824, when he was 15 years old and stood honor guard outside it with the Junior Morgan Riflemen while the Marquis de Lafayette visited Richmond.

One afternoon, on the sidewalk, as a teenager in a militia uniform. The entire documented Poe connection to the place fits in that sentence.

The house itself belongs to Jacob Ege, a German immigrant who built it around 1740. Dendrochronology dates additional construction to 1754. Ege died in 1762. His family kept the property for 150 years, until 1911, when Preservation Virginia bought it. The museum opened in 1922. It's the oldest original residential building in Richmond, listed on the National Register of Historic Places on November 14, 1973, and it was a private home for the entire Revolutionary, Federal, Civil War, and Reconstruction periods. No documented death, fire, or tragedy is recorded in it. The Eges just lived there.

Which makes the haunting interesting, because the ghosts most often reported aren't tied to the building's history at all.

In the Enchanted Garden, the museum's brick courtyard inspired by Poe's "To One in Paradise," visitors describe young boys playing with the resident black cats. The cats are real and named. Edgar and Pluto were found as kittens in the garden in November 2012. The boys are not real, or at least nobody's been able to find a record of them. Most ghost-tour accounts describe a pair of blond boys, though a few sources only say "young boys" or describe a single apparition, so the "two boys" framing is the dominant version but not unanimous. They turn up in wedding photos. They have no names that can be sourced, no death dates, no story. The Haunts of Richmond site calls one of them Jonathan, but that name appears nowhere else, so treat it lightly. Whoever they are, they aren't Poe-family, they aren't Allan-family, and they aren't Ege-family that anyone can prove.

The other regular sighting is a shadowy male figure that ghost-tour photos catch hovering near two specific objects inside the memorial building: Poe's walking stick and a hand mirror that belonged to his wife, Virginia Clemm. Visitors and tour guides like to call him Poe. Museum staff don't. Staff and US Ghost Adventures point at James H. Whitty instead, the collector who founded the Poe Memorial Association in 1906 and built the museum's holdings from nothing. A ghost in 1920s clothing has been reported in the garden, and that one is almost universally attributed to Whitty, not Poe. There's no proof for either identification. Two competing pieces of speculation.

Then there's the staircase. At the top of a flight inside the Elizabeth Arnold Poe Memorial Building, visitors say they feel a hand press on their back. The story attaches the hand to John Allan, Poe's foster father, because the staircase came from the Allan family home before that home was demolished. The whole staircase was lifted out and rebuilt here. No record exists of John Allan haunting anything before the staircase moved, which makes the attribution feel like local lore catching up to architecture. The staircase is real and on the site. The Allan identification is a guess.

The Old Stone House itself has its own quieter list. Rails to Trails cites footsteps on the upper floor, a chair scooting on its own, a ball rolling across the boards. One ghost-blog source, so file it as possible rather than verified. There's also a story about a shipment of Poe bobbleheads found arranged neatly on gift shop shelves overnight with the alarm never tripped, a detail that almost has to be told with a shrug.

Lucy Northup, a museum spokesperson, once said her phone played the Ghostbusters theme by itself while she was alone setting up the gift shop. "If there are spirits at the museum," she told Rails to Trails, "I do think they are pretty happy here and are having a good time in their afterlife." That sentence is the museum's official posture, as close as it gets. The Poe Museum's own website is silent on ghosts.

What's worth defending here is the place itself, not the Poe-haunts-his-own-museum bit. The garden has benches taken from the Yarrington Boarding House, where Poe married Virginia Clemm in 1836. Ivy in the garden was transplanted from his mother Eliza Poe's grave at St. John's Church. The walking stick and Virginia's hand mirror in the photographs are the actual objects. The staircase visitors climb is the actual staircase from Allan's house. The 1740 stone walls are the original walls. The pull of this museum is that it's stitched together from physical pieces of Poe's Richmond, in a building Poe walked past as a teenager guarding Lafayette.

The hauntings are speculation grafted onto that. Two boys nobody can name. A shadow nobody can identify. A hand on a back at the top of a borrowed staircase. The museum hasn't tried to make any of it more than that, which is rare enough to be its own recommendation.

The cats are usually somewhere in the Enchanted Garden, near the Yarrington benches, doing the work the ghost boys are said to come around for.