Mordecai House

The parlor piano at Mordecai House plays by itself. Visitors describe a soft melody and a gray mist hovering over the keys.

The piano in the parlor plays when nobody is sitting at it. Visitors describe a soft, somber melody drifting from the front room, and a few have reported a thin gray mist hovering above the keys. The ghost everyone blames is Mary Willis Mordecai Turk, who lived in this house longer than anyone and ran it as matriarch until her death in 1937.

Mordecai House is the oldest residence in Raleigh still on its original foundation, sitting on what's left of the Mordecai Plantation in what's now a city park. The Lane family built the core of it around 1785. Moses Mordecai married into the family in the early 1800s and gave the house its current name. Mary Willis was born there in 1858, lived through the Civil War in the place, and never really left, not even after she died.

She's not a dramatic ghost. She doesn't throw things or yell. People see her on the upstairs balcony on bright-moon nights, wearing the gray 1800s dress she's buried in. They see her drifting down the interior staircase. And they hear the piano.

Paranormal investigator Nelson Nauss, who's spent nights in the house with the Ghost Guild and other local teams, has a theory about Mary that sounds less like a pitch and more like a guess: "Mary Turk lived in the home the longest. She was the matriarch. She was responsible for the home. Maybe she's just continuing that duty even in death." Nauss also offers the skeptic's case on the piano, which is a level of honesty most haunted-site tour guides avoid. "You always hear people talking about hearing the twinkling of the piano keys," he told WRAL. "A train goes by regularly and sometimes the vibration makes the keys vibrate and twinkle by themselves."

That is probably true some of the time. Mordecai House sits close enough to the old rail corridor that passing trains can shake the floor. What it doesn't explain is the melody people describe, which isn't random notes but something tuneful, soft, held together. It also doesn't explain the mist.

The Sci-Fi Channel's Ghost Hunters filmed here, and local groups investigate the place regularly. EVP sessions have pulled a few clipped responses. Nothing definitive. The most persuasive evidence is just the consistency of the accounts, which is a weak standard of proof and a pretty good sign something is going on. People who visit the house without knowing the ghost story come out describing the same woman in the same dress on the same balcony.

Andrew Johnson was born in a small building that now sits on the Mordecai grounds, moved from its original location downtown. So was the chapel Andrew Jackson's parents are said to have married in. The site has a lot of relocated history crammed onto it, most of it with its own small set of accounts about footsteps or voices or cold patches. Mary Turk and her piano are the signature, though. If you take the tour and the guide pauses in the front room, wait a second. Sometimes the piano is quiet. Sometimes it isn't.