Mabry-Hazen House

Evelyn Hazen chatted with her dead friend Jack for weeks, then got bored. The Mabry men died in the 1882 Gay Street gunfight Mark Twain wrote about.

Evelyn Hazen sat in her bedroom at the Mabry-Hazen House in the 1970s having long conversations with her dead friend Jack McKnight. Jack had been a man she'd spent weeks with in New York City decades earlier, and now he was visible to her in the chair across the room. The conversations went on for several weeks. Evelyn eventually got bored of them, moved to a different room, and never saw him again. She was the last family member to live in the house, and she ran the estate the way she ran her social life: on her own terms, ghost included.

The house at 1711 Dandridge Avenue was built in 1858 for Joseph Alexander Mabry II, originally as a modest cottage called Pine Hill. Mabry expanded it into the Italianate mansion that crowns the hill today. He pledged a hundred thousand dollars at the start of the Civil War to outfit a Confederate regiment, which got him an honorary general's title. Both armies eventually used the property as a headquarters because of its sight line over Knoxville. Confederate General Felix Zollicoffer set up there in 1861.

The Mabry name carries the bloodier story. On October 19, 1882, Joseph Mabry II walked onto Gay Street downtown to confront the wealthy banker Thomas O'Connor over a long-simmering dispute. O'Connor shot Mabry dead. Mabry's son, Joseph Mabry III, was nearby and ran in with his pistol drawn. He shot O'Connor. O'Connor shot back. Both men died on the sidewalk. Three of the wealthiest businessmen in Knoxville were dead within roughly two minutes of each other, and several bystanders went home with buckshot wounds. The fight was infamous enough that Mark Twain wrote about it in chapter 40 of "Life on the Mississippi" the following year, citing it in a footnote about Southern civility.

Local lore has young Joseph Mabry III running down Gay Street toward the gunfight he was about to lose. Tour guides at the house describe footsteps you can sometimes catch in the entry hall, racing for the door. The Mabry men didn't die in the house, but they're attached to it.

The family had a long relationship with the spirit world before any of them became ghosts. In 1868 Joseph Mabry II attended séances run by a Spiritualist medium named Madame Mansfield. The Mabry-Hazen House still has artifacts in the collection from that era of the family's interest in mediumship. Evelyn Hazen herself practiced Spiritualist-related beliefs into the twentieth century. The "Victorian Séance Experience" the museum runs every October, with a costumed medium and tarot tent on the lawn, isn't a marketing invention, it's a continuation of something the family was actually doing in this house in the 1860s and the 1970s.

Bethel Cemetery, half a mile down the hill, holds the remains of more than 1,600 Confederate soldiers. The Mabry-Hazen lot sits between the cemetery and downtown Knoxville. Whatever burden Joseph Mabry II carried from outfitting a regiment of those men, his sons inherited it.

Evelyn Hazen left the house in trust with one condition: it would either become a museum or be torn down. The Knox County Historical Society chose to keep it. It opened to the public in 1992 as a house museum filled with the original furniture, the original family photos, the original Mabry pistol, and a great deal of Evelyn's personal correspondence, including the letters from a famous breach-of-promise lawsuit she pursued against an ex-fiancé into the 1930s, which became national news.

The Mabry-Hazen House isn't loud. It doesn't bleed Civil War the way the Lotz House does. What it has instead is one family's century and a half of high-stakes drama, all of it tied to the same Italianate mansion on a hill: a Confederate financier shot dead on the main street, a son who ran into the same fight and died on top of his father, a daughter who held séances with a New York lover she hadn't seen in years, and a museum that hosts mediums in October every fall because that's what the family always did.