Oaklands Mansion

An antebellum Murfreesboro mansion with a Civil War hospital past and multiple Maney children buried from it. The director denies ghosts. The stories keep running.

The director of Oaklands Mansion thinks it isn't haunted. James Manning calls it "the anti-haunted house" and runs Victorian mourning-custom events instead of ghost tours. That puts Oaklands in an odd spot in middle Tennessee: a mansion with a Civil War field-hospital past, multiple children who died in its rooms, and a management team actively pushing back on its ghost reputation. That tension is exactly what keeps the ghost stories alive.

The house was built in four phases by the Maney family between roughly 1818 and 1860, using enslaved labor. The oldest section is a two-story brick home; later owners kept adding on until it became the showpiece antebellum estate visible from North Maney Avenue today. In 1862, the Battle of Murfreesboro rolled right across the front lawn. Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest surprised and defeated Union forces camped there, and Colonel William Ward Duffield of the 9th Michigan Infantry was badly wounded and carried inside. The Maney women nursed him. He survived. His wife moved in to stay with him during his recovery, and the Duffields became lifelong friends of the family.

Jefferson Davis slept there too, December 12 to 15, 1862, with Robert E. Lee's son G.W.C. Lee as his aide. By this point the house had been hosting Confederate and Union soldiers in alternating waves, and parts of it had been pressed into use as a makeshift hospital. The ghost stories are anchored to that backdrop, but the better source of them is domestic.

Several Maney children died in the house. Ghost tours keep returning to that detail, and it's the one that gives Oaklands its specific flavor of haunting: not a Civil War soldier, but kids. Visitors on evening tours describe hearing children running overhead when the upper floors are empty. Staff talk about a grieving woman pacing the halls, usually pegged as a Maney matriarch who buried more than one child in the house. Footsteps without people. Doors that move. The usual inventory, but anchored to a family tree full of small graves.

In the 1950s, before preservation, Oaklands sat empty and peeling. Locals called it Murfreesboro's creepiest house. The chronology matters here, because it tells you the building had a ghost reputation before anyone was charging money for tours. The stories pre-date the gift shop.

Today the property offers October hayride-and-candlelight tours framed around Victorian mourning rituals, how a family in 1860s Tennessee washed a body, dressed it, sat with it, mourned it. Manning's point is that mourning history is a different product than a ghost tour. The house isn't selling jump scares. It's selling the actual texture of how people died here, and letting visitors draw their own conclusions about what might have lingered.

Which is probably why the ghost stories have outlasted management's attempts to rein them in. A mansion that held children through measles and typhoid, that functioned as a field hospital during one of the bloodiest battles in the region, that stood vacant for years before anyone started preserving it, is going to accumulate stories whether the director wants it to or not. Oaklands is arguing with its own history, and the history keeps winning.

If you walk through on a daytime tour, you'll hear about Jefferson Davis's bedroom and the Maney family's china. If you come on an October night, you'll hear about the children running upstairs.