Maxfield House

A ghost of a young girl connected to the Maxfield family, which ran a general store in this Batesville building starting around 1875, roams the aisles of the antique shop now occupying 187 East Main Street. Staff across different owners have seen her moving through the displays for years, undistressed, like she still knows where everything belongs.

The little girl shows up between the aisles of the antique shop.

Not on any schedule. Not with any warning. Staff at Back in Time Antiques on Main Street in Batesville have seen her often enough that they stopped being startled years ago. She is small, she moves through the displays like she knows where everything goes, and she is connected to the Maxfield family, which ran a general store in this same building starting around 1875.

The Maxfields came to Batesville in June 1842 by steamboat from Cincinnati. Uriah and Leah Maxfield brought two young sons, George and Will, and Uriah built a prosperous boot and shoe manufacturing business and a mercantile store. Their son Charles Wesley was born in 1856 and became one of the first eight graduates of Arkansas College in 1876. The building at 187 East Main Street went up around 1900 to house the Maxfield General Store, and the original facade was more elaborate than what stands today: a stepped parapet, second-story windows with transoms and hood molding. By the 1930s it became the Sterling Store 5 and 10, and a 1940s remodel replaced the original brick with the current buff facade.

Nobody knows who the girl is. The Maxfield family records do not clearly identify a child who died in or near the building, though infant and childhood mortality in late 19th-century rural Arkansas was common enough that the absence of a record does not mean the absence of a death. The reports repeat across different owners and staff over the years: a young girl, moving through the store, sometimes caught in peripheral vision, sometimes seen more directly. She does not seem distressed. She does not interact.

Visitors to Back in Time Antiques have described temperature shifts in specific areas, cool patches that do not correspond to vents or drafts. Some feel watched in the back of the store where the older stock tends to be displayed. Arkansas.com published a feature on Batesville that included the Maxfield House as one of the town's paranormal stops, and the building comes up in Arkansas ghost directories with enough regularity to suggest the story has legs beyond a single source.

The Maxfield House does not make the top-ten lists for Arkansas haunted sites. It does not host ghost tours or investigations. It is a quiet building on a Main Street in a river town on the White River, Independence County, where an antique dealer sometimes shares a workspace with a child who has been dead for more than a century. The antique shop setting adds its own logic. If you were going to run into a ghost from the 1880s, a store full of objects from that era feels about right.