Ford Mansion (Washington's Headquarters)

At the Ford Mansion in Morristown, New Jersey, a paranormal investigator named Gordon Thomas Ward sat in a room clear across the house from the kitchen and asked the spirit he believed was a servant a quiet question: "What is your favorite memory?" He didn't hear anything in the room. He heard it later, on the recording, an answer he calls one of his best. Clear and concise: "In the kitchen."

This is George Washington's actual Revolutionary War headquarters, a Georgian manor built in 1774 by Colonel Jacob Ford Jr., an iron manufacturer and militia commander. The house earned its ghosts early. In mid-January 1777, with Washington's Light Infantry quartered inside, Ford collapsed with pneumonia and died in the house. "Our whole Light Infantry are quartered in a very large house belonging to Col. Ford," a Delaware captain named Thomas Rodney wrote. Over 40 soldiers were billeted in a two-story home with four rooms a floor, packed in around the bed where the colonel was dying. His father died about a week later, in the same weeks, in the same house.

Washington ordered Ford buried with the honors of war. Forty soldiers, fifes and drums, walked the body to the Presbyterian church by Morristown Green, where his grave is still there to find.

Two winters later, Washington moved in, and the crowding got worse. His party of roughly 30, including a young Alexander Hamilton, took most of the house. Theodosia Ford, the widow, and her four children were squeezed into two ground-floor rooms. Washington wrote that his people and the Fords were "crouded together in her Kitchen, & hardly one of them able to speak for the colds they have caught." It was the Hard Winter, the coldest of the era, 28 snowfalls and an early-January blizzard that dropped about four feet. The kitchen is where everyone went to survive it.

The kitchen is also where the haunting settles. Ward says he documented five distinct spirits in the house, two male voices and three female, and he's careful to say none of them is Washington, who was only here about six months. The best of his recordings came from the woman he read as a kitchen servant, answering a question asked from another room.

Park Ranger Joni Rowe has been on staff since 1985, long enough to stop arguing with the house. She says she feels a presence when she's alone in the mansion, and she's made her peace with it. Now, when she enters, she greets it. She says hello to whoever, or whatever, still resides there before she walks in.