In Brief
In 1948 Ladell Allen drank poisoned punch at her mother's Christmas party in Monticello, Arkansas, for reasons no one knew. Sixty years later the owners found 90 love letters under an attic floorboard — and the Allen House's ghost story finally made sense.
The Full Story
The Allen House in Monticello, Arkansas kept its secret under an attic floorboard for sixty years.
The house went up in 1906 for a businessman named Joe Lee Allen, who named a nearby town, Ladelle, after his middle daughter. Her name was Ladell, and she is the reason anyone tells stories about this house.
On the night of December 25, 1948, during her mother's annual Christmas party, Ladell drank a glass of punch laced with mercury cyanide. She was 54. They rushed her to a hospital two doors down, where she lingered eight days before she died on January 2. For a long time that was all of it: a woman who poisoned herself at her mother's party, for reasons no one downstairs could name. Her mother sealed off the upstairs bedroom afterward and is said to have kept it locked for nearly thirty-seven years.
The reason surfaced in 2009. Mark and Rebecca Spencer had bought the house two years earlier — Rebecca had told her husband she'd only move to Monticello if he bought her this exact house — and that summer Mark pried up a loose board in the attic and found a bundle of letters underneath. About ninety of them, all from 1948, all addressed to "dear Dell." They were from Prentiss Hemingway Savage, her high-school sweetheart from 1913, by then a Texaco vice president living in Minnesota with a wife. The two had met again at the Hot Springs races that March, spent three weeks together that July, and he had promised to leave his wife. In October, citing money, he took it back. Two months later she drank the punch.
The hauntings are almost an afterthought to that. Rebecca Spencer says she's seen a dark, cowboy-shaped figure five times over the years — once just a pair of boots crossing the bathroom floor. When Ghost Hunters filmed here in 2013, their recorder caught a voice saying "please stop." The Spencers don't seem rattled. "If you want to have a fear in something," Rebecca has said, "it should be the living."
Mark Spencer wrote a book about the letters and the ghosts, and the house takes tours by appointment now. People come for the most haunted house in Drew County. What they find is a love affair that took sixty years and a crowbar to finish telling.
