The Empress of Little Rock

Built in 1888 in the Quapaw Quarter, this ornate Victorian mansion has served as a women's college, boarding house, nursing home, and apartments before becoming an award-winning B&B.

James H. Hornibrook immigrated from Toronto, Canada, to Little Rock in 1867 and entered a partnership with Miles Q. Townsend in the liquor sales and saloon business. Despite his considerable wealth, Hornibrook was shunned from the proper Scott Street society because of his occupation. When Angelo Marre completed his elegant Villa Marre nearby, Hornibrook resolved to build the most extravagant dwelling in the state. He commissioned architects Max Orlopp and Casper Kusener to design the mansion, and construction stretched from 1881 to 1888 at a cost of twenty thousand dollars, using only Arkansas materials. The resulting 7,200-square-foot residence is described in the National Register of Historic Places as the best example of ornate Victorian architecture in Arkansas and the most important existing example of Gothic Queen Anne style in the region. The mansion features a divided stairway, a three-and-a-half-story corner tower, a stained glass skylight, octagonal shaped rooms, parquet flooring, a wraparound porch, small-paned windows, decorative woodwork, and multiple bays with roof levels creating what the Register called late-nineteenth-century architecture in its most flamboyant style.

Hornibrook enjoyed his masterpiece for barely two years. On a night in 1890, while playing cards with friends in the house, he suffered an apoplectic stroke and died at the age of forty-nine. His wife Margaret remained in the home until her own death in 1893. The mansion then passed through a series of incarnations: it became the Arkansas Women's College in 1897, the state's first institution of higher education for women. At the turn of the century, federal marshal and insurance agent Asbury Fowler took residence. By the Depression it stood vacant. In the 1940s it served as a women's rooming house, and by the 1970s Claire Freeman operated it as a nursing home. Sharon Welch-Blair and Robert Blair undertook an extensive restoration beginning in 1993, reopening the mansion as the Empress of Little Rock bed and breakfast. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places on July 30, 1974. In 2019, Antonio Figueroa and Keith Sandridge purchased the property.

At least four distinct spirits are reported to inhabit the Empress. Hornibrook himself appears as a period-dressed gentleman in a top hat, seen floating down the grand staircase. Playing cards have been found mysteriously strewn across the floor of his game room, and the electric fireplace controller in that room has been moved overnight when no one was present. In the secret poker room hidden in the attic, a hired painter found himself locked out of the room. When he returned with a screwdriver, the door stood open and the same apparition of a man appeared before him.

An African American maid from the home's early years is the most frequently encountered spirit on the second floor. Workers and guests spot her standing quietly in rooms before she vanishes into closets, apparently continuing her duties in death as she did in life. A Lady in Pink stands in the hall outside guest rooms, her identity unknown but her presence consistent enough that multiple guests have reported her independently. An old sea captain has been observed moving through several guestrooms, an unexplained figure whose connection to the house remains a mystery given that Little Rock sits far from any coast.

Guests report phantom footsteps approaching their rooms at all hours. In one documented incident, a guest heard footsteps coming toward their door, then something jiggled the handle, opened the door, and revealed an empty doorway with no one in the hall. Disembodied voices have been heard in rooms that were confirmed empty for the night. The activity spans the entire mansion, from the grand stairway where the gentleman in the top hat descends to the attic poker room where Hornibrook may still be dealing cards to friends who died more than a century ago.

The Empress operates as a luxury bed and breakfast at 2120 South Louisiana Street in Little Rock, offering overnight stays in one of the most architecturally significant and reputedly haunted properties in Arkansas.