Peel Mansion

At the Peel Mansion in Bentonville, Arkansas, visitors say there's a piano playing in a room nobody's in. You hear the music from somewhere in the house, walk toward it, and it stops the moment you reach the doorway. Tour guides report the same thing. The room is empty every time.

Locally they tie the music to a Peel daughter who was musical and played the piano in the house. Some sites give her a name and a sad early death, but the dates that go with that name don't fit the story, so the safest thing to say is what people actually report: a piano in an empty room, and the playing that ends when you arrive.

Colonel Samuel West Peel built the place in 1875 — a fourteen-room Italianate house with a three-story tower at the center of its front, brick made on the property, eight fireplaces, ceilings over twelve feet. He'd promised his wife, Mary, a mansion that would remind her of her childhood in Alabama. She died in it in 1902. He moved out the next year, and the house passed through five more families over the decades that followed.

One of those families was the Englishes, who owned it in the 1920s. Their daughter Margery was playing tennis when she collapsed with sudden pain in her abdomen. A doctor could find no cause, and she appeared to have died. Following the custom of the time, they covered her with a sheet while they arranged the funeral. Hours later the sheet moved. Margery sat up, and went on to recover completely.

The room where that happened was kept locked for years afterward. Owners said they could hear a girl crying inside it.

In December 1991, the property was sold to Walmart Inc., which donated the house to a foundation the following February. The chain of custody for one of Arkansas's most reported haunted houses runs straight through Walmart — the same town, the same name on the headquarters down the road.