Sam Davis Home

Volunteers at Sam Davis Home knock before opening the dining room door. Miss Jane, they say, prefers to be asked.

Erica Dahlgren, the volunteer coordinator at the Sam Davis Home, has a routine for the dining room door when it sticks. She knocks, says "Miss Jane, it's me and my hands are clean, can I come in?" and the door opens. Miss Jane is Jane Simmons Davis, the mother of the boy buried in the family cemetery out back. The boy is Sam Davis himself, hanged by the Union Army at Pulaski on November 27, 1863, at age 21, after refusing to give up the name of the Confederate scout who'd given him the courier documents found in his boots. He's been called the Boy Hero of the Confederacy ever since. The hanging happened in Pulaski. The haunting happens at the family farm in Smyrna, where his body was returned and buried.

The house was built around 1810 and now operates as a museum. Sam grew up here. His parents stayed on after the war and died here. The cemetery sits a short walk from the back porch. Almost every named ghost on the property is a Davis family member who died at home, with one exception: nobody knows who the woman in the green dress is, and she's been the most-described apparition in the formal parlor for at least three decades.

Lee Lankford has volunteered at the home for over 30 years. He's seen a woman twice. The first sighting was a daytime lock-up, where he caught her standing in a doorway across an empty room. The most recent was outside the house, looking up to find her watching him from Grandma Elizabeth's second-floor bedroom window. The building was locked. He was the only person on the property.

Summer Stevens, a site interpreter, has heard footsteps overhead while alone downstairs and is firm that the Davis ghosts are friendly. Her uncle Perry Anthony has heard the same footsteps. A music box in the executive director's office has played by itself, the staff say, after years of sitting closed and unwound. A rocking chair in the parlor started rocking when a guide mispronounced Grandma Elizabeth's name and stopped when she got it right.

The most disturbing accounts are tied to the parlor. Sam's body was laid out there before burial after his coffin was brought back from Pulaski. Visitors have heard a woman crying from the empty room on the anniversary of the wake. A young boy, sometimes identified as Sam's brother Oscar, has been seen running from the side porch directly through a closed door. A few witnesses have described a tall, slender, bearded man at upstairs windows, watching them cross the yard.

The premonition story is the strangest one. Several visitors over the years have reported seeing a woman walk from the back of the house toward the cemetery, vanishing somewhere along the path. Tour guides identify her as Miss Jane retracing the route she took when Sam's body came home. Whether the figure is Jane or someone else, the path is correct. The Davis family burial plot sits exactly where the figure ends.

The Sam Davis Home is one of the few middle-Tennessee plantation museums where the haunting stories come almost entirely from staff who have worked the site for years rather than from visiting paranormal teams. Erica Dahlgren and Lee Lankford and Summer Stevens are the source. They've each seen or heard things they can't explain, and they're the ones who knock on the dining room door before going in.