Lilburn Mansion

A Gothic mansion in Ellicott City where Henry Hazelhurst buried multiple daughters between 1858 and 1895. The ghost called "Margaret" swings the dining room chandelier during family gatherings, and residents have learned to address her by name to make it stop.

Police in Ellicott City once responded to calls about a woman sitting in her car outside a granite mansion on College Avenue, crying for an hour straight. Judy, who spoke to a paranormal researcher years later, couldn't explain why. "For some reason I connected with a woman in the house, who was very, very sad," she recalled. "I'm surprised no one ever called the cops on me."

The mansion is Lilburn, a 7,000-square-foot Gothic and Romanesque Revival castle that Henry Richard Hazelhurst built in 1857 after making his fortune in Baltimore's iron industry. Twenty rooms, a four-story medieval tower, twelve-foot ceilings, seven marble fireplaces. Hazelhurst came from Abington, Berkshire, England, and wanted a home that matched his ambitions. He got one. He also got a house that would outlive most of his children.

Maria Eleanor died at age three in 1858, barely a year after the family moved in. Julia labored in the mansion's tower room in 1893, trying to deliver her first child at thirty-one. Neither she nor the baby survived. Margaret died two years later at thirty-six under circumstances nobody bothered to record. Henry called Lilburn "a place of tragic memories." He died in 1900 at eighty-five, having buried daughter after daughter in a house he'd built for a growing family.

During the Civil War, the Hazelhursts opened Lilburn as a hospital for wounded soldiers. After Henry's death, a recluse named Wells bought the place and planted a seven-foot hedge around the property so nobody could see in. His family only emerged on Sunday mornings for church. Wells died in the mansion library.

John McGinnis purchased Lilburn in 1923, but a Christmas fire tore through the front parlor. During reconstruction, McGinnis replaced the original gothic tower spires with stone battlements. Locals noticed the activity picked up after that, as if the house resented the changes.

The ghost residents call "Margaret" became the dominant presence. An elderly neighbor on College Avenue told stories about Margaret for twenty years. The dining room chandelier is the signature. During a 1960 family gathering, the heavy fixture began swinging with force. No wind, no vibration, no explanation. Later owners saw it happen again decades later. The household solution was practical rather than panicked: address the chandelier directly. "Now, Margaret" became the standard command to get it to stop.

Housekeepers have spotted a young girl in a chiffon dress playing in different rooms, sometimes walking down a hallway beside a male figure that people believe is Henry himself. Cigar smoke drifts through the library when no one is there. The man was a smoker, and that scent clings to the room where he spent his last years.

The tower produces the wildest accounts. Heavy footsteps climb the stairs when nobody is up there. Windows open on their own and refuse to close. One determined resident tied them shut with rope, walked outside, and found them untied and wide open. A child's crying comes from an upstairs bedroom. One family reported their dog refused to enter that second-floor room, full stop. A vase of flowers once turned itself upside down and emptied onto the floor.

Lilburn has been featured on Discovery Channel, Discovery Science, and A&E. The mansion now operates as a haunted Airbnb where guests sleep among whatever remains of the Hazelhurst family. Local ghost tours consider it the most haunted residence in Ellicott City, with documented encounters spanning more than a century.

The crying from the tower, the chandelier that swings during family dinners, Margaret responding to her name, Judy sobbing in her car outside for reasons she still can't articulate. Lilburn collects grief the way other old houses collect dust.