Linden Row Inn

A row of Greek Revival townhouses from the 1840s, now a boutique hotel. Edgar Allan Poe reportedly courted his childhood sweetheart Elmira in the garden out back.

"There is one room that gives me an eerie feeling whenever I go in," a staff member at the Linden Row Inn has admitted. "Anyone who checks in there... they usually leave right quick."

The hotel brought in paranormal investigators years ago who "did pick up something" in the dining room -- a space converted from the original stables. Guests have reported alarm clocks going off when no one had set them, odd noises in empty hallways, and an overall eerie feeling in certain rooms. But the most persistent ghost story -- that Edgar Allan Poe's mother Eliza haunts the buildings -- is, according to the inn's own director, false.

"One of the ghost stories out there -- that is false -- is that his mother Eliza Poe's ghost roams the buildings," explains Vishal Savani, director of the Linden Row Inn. "The story is her ghost is here because she stayed in one of the townhouses, but these buildings hadn't been built in Eliza Poe's lifetime. Edgar hadn't even played in the gardens that were here until after her death." Eliza Poe, a traveling actress, died of consumption in Richmond in December 1811, orphaning her two-year-old son. The first townhouses weren't completed until 1847.

Yet the hauntings persist, even if their source remains mysterious.

POE'S ENCHANTED GARDEN

Before the red brick facades rose along Franklin Street, this land held a garden that would inspire one of America's greatest poets. Charles Ellis purchased the property in 1816 and cultivated a formal garden renowned for its roses, jasmine, and the linden trees that would give the row its name. "In Poe's time, the whole block was a big garden surrounded by a brick wall, and everybody in the neighborhood would hang out there," explains Chris Semtner, curator at the Poe Museum. "It was filled with linden trees and roses. They say you could smell the roses from a block away."

A young Edgar Allan Poe, living across the street with his adoptive parents John and Frances Allan, played among the fragrant blooms with the Ellis children. More importantly, it was in this garden that teenage Poe first courted Sarah Elmira Royster, his "life-long love." The garden would later be immortalized in his 1848 poem "To Helen," with its evocative lines about "a thousand Roses that grew in an enchanted garden, Where no wind dared to stir, unless on tiptoe."

THE TOWNHOUSES

Fleming James purchased the land in 1839 and commissioned architect Otis Manson to design the row. The eastern five houses, known as Linden Square, were completed in 1847. Samuel and Alexander Rutherfoord added five more in 1853. Originally ten houses, two were demolished in 1922.

Three prestigious girls' schools operated from Linden Row. Mrs. Virginia Johnson Pegram ran her school at 106-108 Franklin Street from 1856 to 1866. She had been widowed when her husband James West Pegram, a prominent attorney and bank president, was killed in a steamboat explosion on the Ohio River in 1844. She opened the school to support her five children, including future Confederate generals John Pegram and William "Willie" Pegram -- both of whom would die in battle in 1865, just weeks apart. John was killed at Hatcher's Run on February 6, three weeks after his wedding to Hetty Cary. Willie fell mortally wounded at Five Forks on April 2.

D. Lee Powell's Southern Female Institute occupied two houses from 1853 to 1865, with two Parisian instructors teaching French. Miss Virginia Randolph Ellett ran her school from 1895 to 1906. Among her pupils were the famous Langhorne sisters: Irene, who became the "Gibson Girl" as the wife of illustrator Charles Dana Gibson, and Nancy, who would become Lady Nancy Astor, the first female member of British Parliament.

Novelist Mary Johnston lived in one of the townhouses, publishing the 1900 bestseller "To Have and to Hold" and the feminist novel "Hagar" while residing at Linden Row.

The property's connection to slavery is marked by the former slave dwellings that still stand behind the main structures.

With its enormous rooms, winding staircases that "list charmingly toward the banisters," and antique furnishings from the 1800s, the inn has the atmosphere of a place where, as one visitor wrote, "you can easily imagine encountering a spectral vision in crinoline in an upstairs hallway or floating on the long, romantic veranda on a moonless night." The property is featured on the Phantoms of Franklin Ghost Tour.

Preservationist Mary Wingfield Scott saved the remaining eight houses from demolition between 1950 and 1957, donating them to the Historic Richmond Foundation in 1980. The property was restored and opened as the Linden Row Inn in 1988. Today, the same linden trees that shaded Poe's garden still stand in the courtyard, their branches reaching toward windows behind which unknown spirits may still roam -- searching for something that cannot be named.