Reynolds Mansion

Annie Lee Reynolds died in the Maggie room of this 1847 mansion. Guests report being watched, doors opening, and cold patches that move.

The Reynolds Mansion has one degree of separation from the Hope Diamond. Colonel Daniel Reynolds, who built the house in 1847, had a grandson named Robert Rice Reynolds who went on to become a U.S. Senator. Robert's wife, Evelyn Washington McLean, was the last private owner of the Hope Diamond before it ended up at the Smithsonian. The cursed stone passed through this family. The family's mansion, it turns out, has its own things to pass along.

The house went up on Reynolds Mountain in 1847, a few miles north of Asheville in what's now Woodfin. It was built by fifteen enslaved workers on 1,500 acres given to Daniel and his wife Susan Adelia Baird by her father Israel. Ten children grew up inside it. The mansion is one of fewer than ten pre-Civil War brick buildings still standing in western North Carolina, which is part of why it survived the stretches that should have killed it. Around 1920, a woman named Elizabeth Smith ran the place as an osteopathic sanitarium for about five years, treating patients inside these rooms. After the sanitarium closed the house passed to Annie Lee Reynolds, a spinster daughter of the family who operated it briefly as a rooming house.

Annie Lee died in the house. Accounts differ on whether it was tuberculosis or a long depression. What everyone agrees on is which room she was in, and that room is now the most haunted bedroom in the building.

It's called Maggie. The current owners will tell you straight out it's the active one. Guests staying in Maggie describe the specific, unwelcome sensation of being watched from across a dark room. Doors to the en-suite open and close without help. The temperature drops in localized patches, not as an even chill but as isolated cold spots that move. A few guests have asked to switch rooms. Some have finished the night.

Annie Lee is not the only ghost on the property. Current owners and guests also report a lighter, smaller presence, believed to be one of Annie Lee's younger relatives, a Reynolds daughter who died of typhoid fever at six. Her signature is a fleeting impression, a feeling more than a figure, most often on the upper floors. Colonel Daniel himself gets blamed, occasionally, for deeper sounds, though most of what is reported at the Reynolds Mansion is female, quiet, and watchful.

The mansion fell into real disrepair in the 1960s. Fred and Helen Faber bought it in 1970, spent two years putting it back together, and opened it as a bed and breakfast in 1972. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places on September 13, 1984. There are ten guest rooms now, each named for a member of the Reynolds family, each furnished with antiques, each with mountain views. Guests send the owners photographs they've taken in the hallways showing orbs or what they read as translucent figures. The owners are matter-of-fact about the whole thing. They acknowledge the reports. They don't dress them up.

Ask about Maggie at check-in and watch the desk clerk's face.