Horace Williams House

Philosophy professor Horace Williams lived and taught at 610 East Rosemary for 43 years. Tenants still find his rocking chair moving on its own.

Catherine Berryhill Williams was a child when she lived at 610 East Rosemary Street. She kept finding the fire utensils in the wrong spots. Her sister went further and said she'd talked with Horace Williams's ghost several times. A caretaker in the same period described a rocking chair moving hard enough that wind or a fan couldn't explain it.

Horace Williams is the reason the house is famous. He bought it in 1897 for fourteen hundred and fifty dollars, already on track to become one of UNC's strangest and most durable professors. He'd graduated from UNC in 1883 as the first person awarded a Master of Arts degree at Carolina, come back to teach philosophy and psychology in 1891, and would eventually found and chair the philosophy department. He taught Thomas Wolfe. When Chapel Hill installed a town sewer system in 1913, Williams refused to connect the house to it, which got him arrested on the order of Mayor L.P. McClendon. He lived in the house until he died in 1940, and he left it to the University on one condition: no significant alterations.

The house itself is older than Williams. Benjamin Sherwood Hedrick, a UNC chemistry professor, built it in 1854 on a lot he bought from the University for three hundred dollars and added an eight-sided room with a central fireplace (that octagonal room is still there). Hedrick lasted two years. In 1856 he publicly supported Republican presidential candidate John C. Fremont, whose Free Soil platform opposed the expansion of slavery, and the University fired him that November. It was the only UNC faculty termination for political reasons on record. Hedrick left North Carolina entirely. Latin professor George T. Winston bought the house in 1879 and added the front parlor, the porch, and a window marked with a W.

After Williams died, the University rented the house to professors and their families while it slowly fell apart. That's when the ghost stories started. Catherine and her sister are the earliest named witnesses. Author Terrance Zepke documented their accounts, and subsequent tenants added their own: toilets flushing on their own, footsteps in empty rooms, objects rearranged overnight, an elderly man matching Williams's description seen briefly and then gone when approached.

There's a second ghost that doesn't match Williams at all. Paranormal investigators working the property captured audio of a little girl singing in the backyard. No one has identified her. Williams had no children, the Hedrick and Winston families are well-documented, and none of the recorded deaths in the house's history involve a child. The singing has been reported often enough that tour guides at Preservation Chapel Hill include her in the rotation, but she's an open question in the house's file.

Preservation Chapel Hill took over the Horace Williams House and now keeps it as the only historic house open to the public in Chapel Hill. The building hosts art exhibitions, community events, and the administrative offices of the foundation. Hedrick's octagonal room is intact. Williams's front-room study is intact. The house looks much the way it did when a philosophy professor was refusing to hook up to municipal sewer out of sheer principle.

The rocking-chair story is the one that sticks. Everything else on the list (the flushing toilets, the missing utensils, the man in the hallway) is the grammar of an old house settling and tenants remembering. A rocking chair moving by itself with enough force that a caretaker rules out wind is harder to reframe. Williams sat in that front room for forty-three years, teaching students who would go on to write the books Chapel Hill reads to this day. If any part of him kept his chair after 1940, the caretaker's rocking chair is where you'd expect to find him.