In Brief
The Price-Gause House in Wilmington, North Carolina stands on Gallows Hill, the city's old public-execution ground. The architects who work there now call their ghost George. One upstairs pane is said to frost over on hot summer nights with a single word in the ice.
The Full Story
The Price-Gause House at 514 Market Street in Wilmington, North Carolina is a law-abiding architecture office now, and the people inside have a name for their ghost. They call him George. The thing they can't explain is the upstairs window: the upper-left pane, the story goes, frosts over on hot summer nights, and the word HELP shows in the ice.
To understand the window, you have to know what was here before the house.
The corner of Fifth and Market was called Gallows Hill. Through the early 1800s it was Wilmington's public-execution ground, where sailors and drifters off foreign ships were hanged in front of crowds. "It was a real social event, public executions back then," one local account puts it. The men who had no one to claim them were buried in trenches around the gallows, right where they dropped.
A Confederate physician, Dr. William Price, built his home directly on that ground around 1860. The family ran to the war: his son, Captain Joseph H. Price, was a Confederate naval officer who helped capture a U.S. gunboat off the coast, commanded the ironclad CSS Neuse, and later served as Wilmington's harbor master until he died in 1895. But it was the house itself that the family couldn't keep quiet.
By their accounts the disturbances started almost at once: footsteps climbing the empty stairs, the smell of pipe tobacco in still air, doors opening and closing with no one near them. One researcher who has studied the house likens the footsteps to the condemned being walked up to the scaffold.
Then, decades later, a renovation crew put a shovel into the property and turned up human remains. The owner had the body reburied on the grounds.
The phenomena have stacked up since. A group called J & J Ghost Seekers logged strong EMF readings and came away with photographs of orbs and a shadowy figure at a window, pulling back a curtain. People who stand in the side yard, near where the unmarked graves are supposed to be, describe a heavy pressure pushing down on them.
The house is now a regular stop on the Ghost Walk of Old Wilmington, which has been running tours since 1999. A Ghost Walk source once told a TV crew, "We have no doubt in our opinion, this is the most actively haunted home."
The architects keep working under the window that writes HELP in the frost. They named the ghost George. Nobody has ever named the man who needs the help.
