Rippavilla Plantation

1852 Spring Hill mansion where Hood held the dinner that cost the Confederacy the Army of Tennessee. EVPs, a girl named Annabel, a nursery lamp that self-switches.

A lamp in the nursery at Rippavilla Plantation has a turn-key switch. Antique, brass, the kind that requires you to physically twist a knob to complete the circuit. It turns itself on. It does this often enough that investigators stopped being surprised by it. The ceiling light in the same room has also been observed switching on without a human hand nearby. The nursery is on the second floor of an 1852 Greek Revival mansion that sat at the crossroads of one of the worst Civil War operational disasters in American history, so Rippavilla has earned its strange lamps.

The house was built for Nathaniel F. Cheairs IV and his wife Susan starting in 1852, completed in 1855. By 1860, Nat owned just over 1,000 acres near Spring Hill, Tennessee and 75 enslaved people housed in 15 outbuildings. On the night of November 29, 1864, Confederate General John Bell Hood held a dinner at Rippavilla for his corps commanders while the Army of Tennessee was camped in the fields around the house. Hood failed to order an attack on the retreating Union column passing within earshot. They escaped. The next afternoon, Hood ordered a frontal charge at Franklin that killed six Confederate generals in five hours and effectively destroyed the Army of Tennessee. The dinner at Rippavilla is the reason historians argue about the war.

After the battle, Rippavilla served as a field hospital. Amputations happened in the north bedroom. Staff still show visitors the bloodstains. Surgical waste got thrown out the windows. Soldiers were buried in the yard.

Given all that, the ghost stories are almost restrained. Dudley Pitts of Innovative Paranormal Research ran a formal investigation in July 2013 with author Lewis Powell IV and volunteers Laura Bentley and Lisa Webber. The surgery bedroom was the hotspot. One volunteer couldn't physically enter it. Investigators picked up the smell of pipe tobacco and astringent, possibly witch hazel, in the same room. A small male voice responded "All of you?" when the team promised to leave if a ball moved. The ball moved.

Other reported entities include a little girl named Annabel. On one visit, when researchers asked the name of the child they'd been picking up, a recorder captured a voice drawing out "Annnnnnaaaabel." Susan Cheairs has been sighted watching from an upstairs window. Nat Cheairs, her husband, gets credited with the pipe-tobacco smell. Antique dresses on display have been moved from the beds they were laid on overnight, with no staff admitting to touching them.

The grounds have their own activity. Cannon-fire has been reported on the battlefield acres, described as bursts of light followed by the sound of women talking in the courtyard. A photographer captured what she described as two translucent figures on the lawn behind the meeting building. EVPs have been collected at every major Rippavilla investigation since the early 2000s, enough that the Battle of Franklin Trust now runs official ghost-tour evenings alongside the daytime historical programming.

Rippavilla doesn't offer a simple haunting. The place has too many overlapping stories. Cheairs family spirits in the bedrooms, Confederate soldier echoes in the yard, a little girl named Annabel somewhere upstairs, and a nursery lamp that refuses to stay off. The Battle of Franklin Trust's on-site docents are careful about the word "haunted," preferring "the history is heavy here." Given how much of the actual bloodshed happened inside these walls, that's a reasonable compromise.

On October evenings Rippavilla runs candlelight tours through the rooms where the surgeries were. People come out saying the nursery felt colder than the surgery bedroom, which is the opposite of what they expected.