In Brief
At Korner's Folly in Kernersville, North Carolina, a paranormal team left a recorder running in an empty playroom with 5.5-foot ceilings and came back to a little girl's voice on the tape. She says "peek-a-boo." No child is recorded as having died here.
The Full Story
The Children's Play Room at Korner's Folly in Kernersville, North Carolina has 5.5-foot ceilings, built to a child's scale. In 2009 a paranormal team called SPARS left a static recorder running in that empty room with no one inside and walked out. When they played the tape back, a little girl's voice said "peek-a-boo." Later, in the same room, a man's voice answered an investigator with a single word: "haunted."
No child is recorded as having died in this house. That is the part the staff keep running into. A Kernersville resident sees a child standing on the front porch at dusk. Audiences at daytime lectures in the top-floor theater have watched a little girl appear on the stage and then simply not be there. The teams that came in after SPARS — and there were several — describe the same thing the first one did: a playful, childlike presence, orbs, nothing frightening. One investigator's group reported a male voice that kept turning up across the theater, the outhouse, and the foyer, on different teams' equipment, years apart.
The man who built the place wanted it remembered. Jule Körner made his fortune painting Bull Durham tobacco bulls on barns up and down the East Coast, signing the work with a brush-name, Reuben Rink. He started the house in 1878 and finished it in 1880, and the story goes that a passerby called it "Jule Körner's folly." He liked the description so much he kept it. What he built is 22 rooms, 15 fireplaces, a hearth tiled with a green swamp scene, a ceiling mural of Cupid, and staggered floors that don't line up the way a house is supposed to.
After he married Polly Alice Masten, she founded the Juvenile Lyceum in 1896, a children's dramatics group for ages 7 to 13. For decades, neighborhood children ran lines and rehearsed through these rooms, including the little theater on the top floor that the family called the first private one in America. None of those children is the girl on the tape, as far as anyone can prove. There is no name, no grave, no documented death to attach to her — only the voice, and the figure people keep meeting on the porch and the stage.
The house is a museum now, drawing over 16,000 visitors a year. A book on the region's ghosts calls its spirits "warm and welcoming." Körner's granddaughter is said to have remarked he would have been "thrilled to know" the house is now home to them. He built it to be unforgettable. Six generations later, it is remembering back.
