Poplar Grove Plantation

This historic peanut plantation north of Wilmington was home to the Foy family from the early 1800s. The manor house, tenant farmhouses, and grounds preserve the history of both the plantation owners and the enslaved people who worked the land.

Poplar Grove Plantation, located nine miles northeast of Wilmington along the banks of Topsail Sound, has been cultivated since the mid-1700s. The current manor house dates to 1850, built by the Foy family, who grew peanuts using the labor of sixty-four enslaved people. The plantation remained in the Foy family until 1971 and now operates as a living history site and museum. Its paranormal reputation is deeply entwined with the tragedies that unfolded within its walls -- tragedies documented in family records and given supernatural dimension by the Gullah folklore of the enslaved community that lived and worked the land.

The most heartbreaking story belongs to Sarah Eleanora Dozier Foy, known as Nora, born in 1850. Nora endured four pregnancies, and all four infants died within hours of birth. Her Gullah servant Juba, drawing on the spiritual traditions of the African diaspora, employed protective rituals to ward off what she believed was a malevolent spirit. Juba painted doors and windowsills a pale blue -- the color known in Gullah tradition as haint blue, believed to repel spirits -- and placed brooms at doorways to deter the Boo Hag, a feared apparition in Gullah folklore said to crouch on the chests of sleeping victims to steal their skin and life force. According to tradition, the Boo Hag is compulsively drawn to count every straw in a broom, buying the sleeper time until sunrise drives the spirit away. Juba also tucked a carefully folded piece of newspaper into the toe of Nora's shoe as further protection. Despite these measures, Nora's children did not survive. She later adopted her nephew as her heir and served as the local postmaster, reportedly carrying a small pistol in her pocket. She died in 1923, but visitors say Nora never left the children's bedroom upstairs. The rocking chair by the window in that room has been observed rocking slowly back and forth on its own, and staff describe a benevolent but protective maternal presence that lingers in the space where her babies lived and died.

Nora's nephew, David Hiram Foy, born in 1840, contributes his own chapter to the haunting. The eldest son, David rejected his destiny to run the plantation and enlisted in the Confederate cavalry against his father's wishes, seeking what one account calls the great adventure. He contracted typhus only three months after joining and was brought home to die in June of 1862. He was nursed in the back parlor of the manor house, where he passed away at twenty-two. His restless spirit is said to haunt the plantation office where business was handled, producing heavy footsteps -- described as tramp, tramp, tramp -- and electromagnetic disturbances that interfere with recording equipment during investigations.

The tenant houses, where enslaved people lived, carry their own reports of paranormal activity. Visitors describe cold spots, shadow figures, and the feeling of being watched. The grounds as a whole seem to hold onto the energy of people from the Colonial period through the twentieth century who lived, worked, suffered, and died on this land. Poplar Grove offers seasonal paranormal ghost tours that explore the manor house, the tenant quarters, and the grounds, allowing visitors to judge for themselves whether Nora, David, and the many others who called this plantation home have truly moved on.