In Brief
James Hornibrook built the grandest mansion in Arkansas and had his face carved in marble, sure he'd die young. He did, dropping dead at his own gate in 1890. Guests at the house, now a bed and breakfast in Little Rock, still report a man in a top hat drifting down the stairs.
The Full Story
James Hornibrook had his own face carved in marble years before he died, convinced he would go young and wanting it preserved while it still lived. The mask is said to hang inside his house in Little Rock to this day. He was right about the dying.
Hornibrook had come to Little Rock from Toronto in 1867 and made his money in saloons and liquor — a trade that kept him rich and out of polite society both. When a rival built himself a grand house, Hornibrook set out to top it, and in 1888 he finished the most extravagant home in the state: a Queen Anne mansion of Arkansas brick with a three-and-a-half-story tower, later called the best Victorian house in Arkansas. He lived in it two years.
On the night of May 24, 1890, he walked home from an evening at his saloon and dropped at his own front gate. A delivery boy found him there at dawn, three hours dead of a stroke. He was forty-nine.
The man people see on the staircase fits him: a figure in a period suit and top hat who nods, smiles, and drifts down the steps. Guests have reported him, owners have reported him, and so did the workers who restored the place. During that restoration a painter found himself locked out of the attic — a door with no handle and no lock yet fitted — and when he came back with a screwdriver, the door stood open and the man in old-fashioned clothes was waiting on the other side.
The house keeps circling back to the top of the tower. Hornibrook had hidden a gambling room up there, high enough to watch for police raids on his saloon downtown. Guests have heard laughter and the clink of glasses from the empty room, and found playing cards scattered across the floor.
The house outlived him by more than a century — a women's college, a boarding house, a nursing home, and a bed and breakfast since. Hornibrook bet he wouldn't see old age, and he didn't. He had the face ready. By most accounts he's still on the stairs to wear it.
