Orna Villa

At Orna Villa in Oxford, Georgia, the back porch keeps a sound. Footsteps pace back and forth across it, and they stop the moment anyone goes to look. The strange part is that the lore can't agree whose feet they are.

The house belonged to Alexander Means — founder and president of Emory College, a physician, a minister, the first state chemist in the country, a man who experimented with electricity and is credited with anticipating the electric light decades before Edison. But the pacing is pinned to his sons, and the versions don't line up.

One version says it's Tobe Means, the youngest, "rebellious, headstrong." After an argument with his father over money, the story goes, Tobe stormed off and was never seen again. When the family later heard footsteps crossing the back porch, they thought it was Tobe finally coming home.

Another version says it's Olin, a doctor who late in life felt a calling to preach. He's said to have paced that same porch for days, torn between the two callings, then fell ill and died before he ever decided. And a third version drops the sons entirely: the feet belong to Dr. Means himself, "pacing the halls and porches, awaiting his prodigal son's return."

Same porch. Same pacing. Three men, and nobody agrees.

The footsteps aren't the only thing. The first owners to report extensively bought the house around 1945, and the accounts since then carry more than feet: "the incessant squeak of a rocking chair" in rooms with no one in them, and faint green lights drifting through the hallways with no source anyone could find.

Means built the house around 1825 and named it Orna Villa — "Bird House," after his love of ornithology. It's the oldest house in Oxford, a private home today, recently restored. No investigation team has ever worked it. The whole record is what one set of owners told the next, passed down a porch at a time — footsteps that keep coming home for a man nobody can name.