Korner's Folly

SPARS recorded a little girl saying "peek-a-boo" inside the Children's Play Room at Korner's Folly, the strangest house in America.

A little girl saying "peek-a-boo." The SPARS paranormal team captured that EVP in the Children's Play Room at Korner's Folly in 2009, on the first paranormal investigation ever conducted inside the house. They also picked up a male voice in the same room saying "haunted."

Jule Gilmer Körner built the place starting in 1878 in Kernersville, and it's one of the strangest houses in America. Seven levels stacked into a three-and-a-half-story brick footprint, 22 rooms, 15 fireplaces, ceilings that shift from six feet to twenty-five feet room to room, and a carriageway that originally ran straight through the middle of the house. Körner made his fortune as an advertising painter. He put Bull Durham Smoking Tobacco bulls on barn walls all up the East Coast in the 1870s and came home with enough money to build a home that functioned as a combination residence, stable, decorating-business showroom, and art project. Neighbors called it Körner's Folly before he finished. He kept the name.

Körner died in the master bedroom on Thanksgiving Day, 1924. His wife Polly Alice Masten outlived him by a decade. The third-floor theater they built for their kids and the neighborhood children, Cupid's Park, is the oldest private theater in America. After Körner's death the house went through a rough stretch (briefly a funeral parlor, later an antique shop, eventually abandoned), and then was rescued and reopened as a museum. That gap is when the strange stuff started getting documented.

The EVP inventory from the teams that have worked the house is long. SPARS got the "peek-a-boo" and "haunted" recordings in 2009. Later teams (Haunted North Carolina, North Carolina Paranormal Society, Para Probers, P.S.I., PINC) captured a recurring male voice in the theater, the outhouse, and the foyer, answering questions on camera. A local resident running her own recorder in Cupid's Park caught the same male voice on a separate night. The house keeps producing the same speakers on different equipment, which is either a recurring haunting or a recurring quirk in the walls.

The physical stuff is harder to dismiss. Antique-store employees during the house's shop period found furniture rearranged overnight with nobody in the building. A volunteer grandmother heard footsteps coming down the stairs while she was alone on the first floor. One investigator in Cupid's Park felt three taps on the brim of his hat. A male investigator on the theater stage got three taps on his shoulder. Theater lights switched off after hours have turned themselves back on. IR cameras have picked up a glowing sphere following an investigator through multiple rooms. Temperature probes recorded a ten-degree difference on surfaces where an investigator was touched.

The little girl is the one the living see. A Kernersville resident reports seeing a child on the front porch in the evenings. Audience members at daytime lectures in Cupid's Park have watched a little girl appear on stage and then not be there. No Körner child died in the house, but the couple's Juvenile Lyceum (the charitable arts program that originally filled the theater with neighborhood kids) put a lot of children through the rooms over the decades, and the staff accept the girl as one of them.

The granddaughter Polly Wolfe Körner, before she died, told a visitor she thought her grandfather would have been "thrilled to know" his masterpiece was now home to ghosts. That quote gets used a lot in the foundation's material, and it fits. Jule Körner designed the house as a piece of advertising for himself. He wanted it memorable. Six generations into the building's life, it's delivering on that original plan in ways he probably didn't expect.

The museum is open Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. You can walk the seven levels, see Cupid's Park, and check the Children's Play Room where the SPARS recording came from. The museum doesn't pitch itself as a paranormal destination. The ghost activity is a layer under a preservation project, and that restraint is part of why the ghost material lands at all.