Teackle Mansion

Teackle Mansion in Princess Anne was built by a wealthy merchant whose business collapsed, forcing his wife Elizabeth out of her dream home. She died four years later, and tenants, neighbors, and police have been seeing a woman in white drifting from window to window on the second floor ever since.

Police in Princess Anne keep getting called to Teackle Mansion. The alarms trip, officers drive out, and they find nothing. But sometimes, before they even go inside, they see it: a figure on the second floor, moving from one window to the next, left to right, through a building that should be empty.

Littleton Dennis Teackle started building this place in 1802 on nine acres bordering the Manokin River. He'd visited Scotland and came back inspired. The finished product, completed around 1817, was a 10,000-square-foot Neo-classical estate that looked more like a Scottish manor house than anything else on Maryland's Eastern Shore. A private lane stretched an entire city block to an iron gate staffed by a servant. Teackle was a big deal: he established trade agreements with England and the Caribbean, founded the first Bank of Somerset in 1813, and financed Somerset County's first steam grist and saw mill in 1815.

His wife Elizabeth Upshur Teackle poured herself into the house. Letters to her sister describe it as her dream home. She designed the interiors, managed the gardens and outbuildings, and built a life inside those walls. Large bedchambers with dressing rooms and bathing facilities (unusual for the era). Everything she wanted.

Then it all collapsed. Teackle's business failed in 1828, and the family lost the mansion. Elizabeth had to move in with her daughter. She died four years later. Littleton held on longer but fared worse. In November 1848, he died at the Exchange Hotel in Baltimore with a net worth of $21. Five of those dollars went toward shipping his body back to Princess Anne.

The mansion was subdivided into apartments after the Teackles lost it, and that's when the stories started. One tenant woke up in the middle of the night to see a woman in a long white dress walk through his door and over to the window. He gathered his things, left, and never came back. Neighbors have spotted what looks like a candle flame drifting past a second-floor window. Mindie Burgoyne, who founded the local ghost walks, describes the figure: "Sometimes she appears to be holding a candle or a flashlight because she's illuminated a little bit."

Most people who know the story think it's Elizabeth. She was the one who cared about the house. She was the one who lost it. The ghost always goes to the window, which tracks with someone who spent her happiest years looking out over the Manokin River from those rooms. There's something almost domestic about the haunting. No screaming, no violence. Just a woman checking on her house.

The mansion is now a museum run by the Somerset County Historical Society. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1971. George Alfred Townsend used it as the setting for his 1884 novel "The Entailed Hat," which tells the story of the Patty Cannon era on the Eastern Shore. The building survived financial ruin, subdivision, and over 200 years of weather. But the alarms still trip for no reason, and the figure still walks the second floor at night, window to window, like someone making sure everything is where she left it.