The Lotz House

A cannonball burned a hole in this 1858 Franklin house during the 1864 battle. Travel Channel named it the second-most terrifying place in America.

A cannonball came through the second floor of the Lotz House on November 30, 1864, fell into the wood floor of one of the bedrooms, and burned a hole through it that's still there. You can stand on that floor today, look down at the scorch mark, and put your hand on a wall full of similar burn pocks where pieces of metal stopped dead in the plaster. The house at 1111 Columbia Avenue in Franklin, Tennessee, took the Battle of Franklin directly through its body and was rebuilt around the damage instead of having it patched.

Johann Albert Lotz was a German immigrant carpenter who built the house himself in 1858. He refused to use slave labor on the construction. The four-column Greek Revival design, the solid black walnut handrail on the staircase, the carved fireplace mantels, all his hands. He, his wife Margaretha, and their four children were living in the house when General John Bell Hood marched eighteen thousand Confederate soldiers across their front yard against entrenched Union positions on the afternoon of November 30, 1864.

The Lotz family didn't stay in the house. They ran across Columbia Avenue and hid in the brick basement of their neighbors, the Carters, and rode out the next five hours listening to one of the bloodiest battles of the war happen on top of them. Roughly 10,000 men were casualties. Six Confederate generals died, including Patrick Cleburne. When the Lotzes climbed back out of the Carter basement at sunrise, their yard had bodies piled six feet deep in places and seventeen dead horses. The south wall of the house was gone. The home had immediately been turned into a field hospital and more men were dying inside while the Lotzes stood in the doorway.

That ground is where the haunting starts. The activity at the Lotz House is unusually well-attested. The Travel Channel named it the "Second-Most Terrifying Place in America," and "Haunted Live" filmed an investigation here. The figure people name most often is a Lady in White on the upper floors, whom guides identify variously as the wife of a Confederate soldier or a civilian who died during the battle. There's also a little girl, generally heard rather than seen.

The activity log from staff and visitors runs long. Cannonball fragments displayed on shelves get moved to the corners of rooms. Items in the gift shop get pulled off the displays and thrown to the floor overnight. Photographs taken in the upstairs rooms come back with faces in them that nobody saw at the time of the shot. There are sudden loud knocks on the walls in unoccupied rooms, footsteps walking the stairs at night when the museum is closed, and disembodied yelling that visitors describe as a man in distress, audible from outside the house as well as inside.

The cold doesn't show up in random spots. It shows up in specific rooms, the upstairs bedrooms where the cannonball came through, the back room where soldiers died on tables that have since been replaced. Visitors describe a temperature drop you can step into and step out of inside the same hallway.

The Heritage Foundation bought the building in 1974 to keep it from being torn down. Restoration took decades. It opened to the public as a museum in 2008 and now runs daytime history tours and seasonal Dead of Winter ghost tours through February. The Lotz House and the Carter House across the street are the two surviving civilian witnesses to the Battle of Franklin, and the Lotz House is the more visibly damaged of the two.

A carpenter built a beautiful house from scratch with his own hands in 1858. Six years later, eighteen thousand men fought across his front yard, ten thousand of them ended up casualties, and his daughters returned the next morning to a porch covered in dying men. The Lotz family moved back in anyway. They lived in the house for another five years before finally leaving for Missouri, and the cannonball hole they walked past every day is still scorched into the second-floor plank.