Poplar Grove Plantation

Nora Foy lost four infants in the upstairs bedroom. A rocking chair still rocks there. Her nephew David died in the back parlor of typhus in 1862.

Nora Foy lost four children before any of them reached their first day. Four pregnancies, four infants dead within hours of birth, all of them in the same upstairs room of the plantation house her family had owned since before the Revolution. By the early 1870s, her Gullah servant Juba had seen enough and started painting.

Juba painted the bedroom's windowsills and doorframes haint blue, the specific shade of pale blue that Gullah tradition held was poison to malevolent spirits. She laid brooms across doorways because a Boo Hag, in Gullah folklore, is compelled to count every straw in a broom before it can enter a room, and the counting would keep it busy until sunrise. She folded a strip of newspaper into the toe of Nora's shoe as a third layer of protection.

None of it worked. Nora never did have a child of her own that lived. She later adopted her nephew as her heir, took the job of local postmaster, and kept a small pistol in her pocket for the rest of her life. She died in 1923. Visitors to Poplar Grove Plantation today have a lot to say about the upstairs bedroom where her four babies died.

Poplar Grove sits nine miles northeast of Wilmington on land that has been farmed since the mid-1700s. The current 12-room Greek Revival manor was built around 1850 by Joseph Mumford Foy after an earlier house burned. The plantation grew peanuts on the labor of sixty-four enslaved people. The Foy family held the property until 1971, when it became a museum. The paper trail of tragedies here is long and unusually specific, which is why the ghost stories land with weight the average plantation tour can't match.

The most frequently reported detail at Poplar Grove is the rocking chair by the window in Nora's children's room. Staff and guests describe it rocking by itself, slowly, with no draft and no one near it. The presence in that room comes across as maternal and watchful, not hostile. It is, by the standards of haunted plantations, a remarkably tender ghost.

Nora's nephew David Hiram Foy contributes a second story. The eldest son of the family, born 1840, David refused to take over the plantation and enlisted in the Confederate cavalry in 1862 against his father's direct order, chasing what one family account calls the great adventure. Three months into his service he contracted typhus. His parents brought him home to die. He passed away in the back parlor in June of 1862, twenty-two years old. The footsteps in the plantation's old business office, the heavy tramp tramp tramp that paranormal teams keep capturing on audio, are attributed to David. Investigators also report electromagnetic disturbances in that room that scramble their recording equipment.

The tenant houses where the enslaved families lived carry their own phenomena. Visitors describe the temperature dropping noticeably, dark shapes at the edge of their vision, and the distinct feeling of being watched from the windows. Nobody at Poplar Grove tries to pretty this part of the site up. The grief in those buildings is older than the manor.

Poplar Grove runs seasonal paranormal tours of the manor, the tenant quarters, and the grounds. The museum reopens for the season in May 2026. If you visit, the upstairs bedroom is the one worth asking about. The rocking chair is right by the window.