Dr. Josephus Hall House

Dr. Josephus Hall ran surgery at Salisbury Prison while the camp killed thousands. His 1820 home is rich with history, light on ghosts.

"It is not a ghost tour," says Brian M. Davis, the executive director of the Historic Salisbury Foundation. "None of us have had any experiences here, and I've been here at all times, day and night."

That quote, published in the Salisbury Post in 2014, is the most honest thing anyone has said about the Josephus Hall House. The foundation runs special evening tours in October that dig into the 1820 building's history, and the foundation wants people to know up front that the tours are not selling ghosts. The ghost guild that occasionally investigates the property has logged visits but published no phenomena. There are no named apparitions. No documented EVPs. No witness quotes in circulation.

What the Hall House does have is one of the darkest backstories of any home in North Carolina, and that's what brings the paranormal interest even when the paranormal itself doesn't show up.

The building went up around 1820 as a two-story frame dwelling, and it served as the Salisbury Female Academy until about 1825, when it was converted to a residence. Dr. Josephus Hall bought the house in 1859. Two years later the Civil War started, and Hall took a position as chief surgeon at the Salisbury Confederate Prison. His son-in-law also worked as a prison doctor. The prison itself became infamous. Between late 1864 and early 1865, overcrowding and disease killed between 4,000 and 11,000 Union soldiers there, depending on which count you trust. Historians still argue the number. Either way, it was one of the deadliest Confederate prisons in the war.

Dr. Hall's work was to treat the men dying of dysentery, pneumonia, exposure, and starvation. Some accounts hold that Union prisoners who were briefly stable enough to move were brought to the Hall House itself to recuperate, then returned to the prison. A cannon from Salisbury Prison now sits on the grounds of the house, left in place as a marker. When Union General George Stoneman's raid reached Salisbury in April 1865, federal troops took over the front rooms of the Hall House and paid the Hall family rent. The family moved to the back of the home and lived there alongside their occupiers while the war ended around them.

Thousands of men died within a short walk of the front door. A physician and his family lived in rooms where some of those men may have taken their last breath. The foundation's tours walk visitors through this history carefully because it doesn't need embellishment.

The Ghost Guild, a North Carolina paranormal research organization, investigated the property three times in 2021, on March 21, May 2, and June 19. Their site lists the investigations but publishes none of the findings. Whatever they recorded, they kept it. The foundation has described the group as "one of the best teams we have had here," which suggests the visits were serious even if the public documentation is thin.

The Hall House still stands in downtown Salisbury, operated by Historic Salisbury Foundation. Much of the original 1820 structure survives, along with furnishings from Hall's period and his son-in-law's prison-era medical tools. Tours focus on the lives of the family and the men Hall treated. If you go in October, you'll get the nighttime version, which handles the Civil War material in detail.

What you won't get is a ghost story with names and dates. The Hall House has something weirder: a building that should be haunted by every rule of Southern paranormal lore and apparently isn't. The director has walked it at every hour. He's seen nothing. That absence, in a house this close to that much death, is its own kind of strange.