Hunt-Phelan Home

A servant buried the Hunt family gold during the 1873 yellow fever outbreak, then died with the location. His ghost gestures at the dirt nightly.

Yellow fever swept through Memphis in 1873 and the Hunt family fled the city so fast they left their gold behind. They trusted a longtime servant to bury the chest somewhere on the property until they could come back for it. When they returned, the servant was dead in his quarters and the gold was gone. He's the ghost most witnesses at the Hunt-Phelan Home keep describing, a Black man in a nineteenth-century livery uniform, walking the grounds, trying to point at the ground.

Whether the chest is actually buried somewhere on the nine-acre lot at 533 Beale Street has never been answered. The servant figure has been spotted by tour guides, by event staff, and by guests who paid for a room at the boutique inn that operated inside the building from 2005 until it shut down in the past few years. He doesn't speak. He gestures.

The mansion itself was built around 1830 for George Wyatt and substantially expanded by Eli and Julia Driver in 1850, who added the two-story Ionic portico the building is known for. The Greek Revival design hides one detail most visitors miss: an escape tunnel that runs out of the basement. That tunnel is the reason both armies wanted the building during the Civil War.

Confederate General Leonidas Polk used the Hunt-Phelan Home as a headquarters and planned the Battle of Corinth in its rooms. After the fall of Forts Henry and Donelson and the surrender of Memphis in 1862, the federal army took the house. Ulysses S. Grant moved in on June 27, 1862, and stayed for two weeks. He planned the entire Vicksburg campaign in the library on the first floor. Union officers used the same tunnel Polk's men had used, this time to relay messages back and forth past the rebel lines.

After Grant rode south, the building converted again. The Western Sanitary Commission ran it as a soldiers' home through the end of the war, and the Freedmen's Bureau housed teachers there who taught newly freed Black Memphians to read on the back grounds. Two hundred and fifty thousand Union soldiers passed through the front gates between 1862 and 1865. A cemetery still sits on the property holding remains the original family chose not to relocate.

The library is where the activity gets reported most often. Footsteps cross the room when no one is there. Books shift on the shelves. Cold air pushes through that one room when the rest of the house is warm. The historical interpretation has always been that something residual got left behind by the men who planned the war from those chairs, but no one's ever pinned it on a specific officer. Visitors have also described a young girl on the staircase and an older woman near the kitchen wing.

Stephen Rice Phelan, a Standard Oil geologist, inherited the house and let it deteriorate badly through the mid-twentieth century. His nephew Bill Day spent the 1990s restoring it, and the building reopened as a tour site, then a wedding venue, then in 2005 as the Inn at Hunt-Phelan with seventy-six rooms in a combination of the historic structure and new construction. The inn closed in the 2020s. The historic mansion is still on Beale Street, listed on the National Register since 1971, owned by the family trust.

The Confederate president, a future US president, and a sitting US president all slept under that roof. Jefferson Davis visited before the war and again after. Andrew Johnson stayed there. Grant planned Vicksburg from the library. And the figure tour guides most often describe on the grounds isn't any of them. It's the servant in livery who was left alone with the gold.