The Allen House

Built in 1906 by architect Sylvester Hotchkiss, this 8,000 sq ft Queen Anne mansion is one of the best-documented residential hauntings in America. Mark Spencer wrote a book about its ghosts.

Joseph Lee Allen, a prominent Monticello businessman who would later open the Allen Hotel in 1912 and found the nearby town of Ladelle, commissioned architect Sylvester Hotchkiss and builder Josiah Barkley White to construct this eight-thousand-square-foot Queen Anne Victorian mansion in 1906. The three-story residence features Gothic and neoclassical elements including massive porch columns, multi-storied turrets, a full attic, and a wrought iron fence. Allen designed it to impress his clients and cement his family's standing on North Main Street. He and his wife Caddye raised three daughters there: Lewie Manker, Lonnie Lee, and Ladell.

Ladell Allen, born in 1894, was the society belle of Monticello. After her divorce in the 1940s, she returned home at age forty-five to care for her widowed mother. There she rekindled a relationship with her high school sweetheart, Prentiss Hemingway Savage, now an executive at Texaco Oil in Minnesota and married. Their clandestine affair, documented in over fifty letters later discovered beneath the floorboards, was intense and desperate. They planned to run away together on Christmas 1948, driving from Arkansas to Minnesota over a two-week road trip. But Savage could not abandon his wife and reputation. On Christmas Day 1948, during her mother's annual holiday party, Ladell retreated to the master suite and consumed mercury cyanide, an over-the-counter syphilis treatment available at the time. She was taken to Mack Wilson Hospital, where she died eight days later on January 2, 1949, at the age of fifty-four.

Her mother Caddye was so devastated that she sealed the master bedroom, locking the door and forbidding anyone from entering. The room remained sealed for nearly forty years. When it was finally opened in 1985, a half-empty bottle of mercury cyanide still sat on the closet shelf, exactly where Ladell had left it. In August 2009, approximately ninety love letters were found beneath the attic floorboards, revealing the full scope of the affair that had driven Ladell to take her life.

Rebecca and Mark Spencer relocated to Monticello from Oklahoma in 2005 when Mark accepted a position at a local college. Rebecca discovered the mansion hiding behind overgrown foliage on North Main Street and spent two years negotiating its purchase, finally acquiring it in 2007. Renovations began immediately, and so did the activity. Their five-year-old son Jacob was seen in multiple locations simultaneously, a doppelganger phenomenon associated with spirits assuming the forms of living residents. Jacob heard an unknown voice call his name from the downstairs bathroom nearly a decade ago and has refused to use it since. Rebecca documented a recurring entity she calls the Shadowman, a dark outline resembling a cowboy whom she has observed five times in twelve years. She watched his boots walk through the master bathroom and saw him exit the front door. The SyFy show Ghost Hunters reportedly captured the Shadowman on camera.

Paranormal investigators identified six distinct entities inhabiting the house: Joe Lee Allen, his wife Caddye, Allen Bonner, Ladell, a baby, and a gruff-voiced man. The Arkansas Paranormal and Anomalous Studies Team conducted a multi-night investigation capturing over forty EVP recordings containing unexplained voices responding to investigator questions. Untouched rocking chairs move without explanation. Footsteps echo from the attic. Faint baby cries drift through the house. Visitors report being physically touched by invisible forces. Staff, tenants, and visitors report seeing Ladell in and around the home, both with the naked eye and in photographs taken in the home's mirrors, where she peers out at the living. One couple encountered an apparition inside their closet; when they tried to shut the door, feminine laughter echoed through the room. Police were called repeatedly for suspected intruders but never found anyone.

The Allen House was featured on Discovery Channel's A Haunting in 2012. Mark Spencer documented the family's experiences and the discovery of the love letters in his book A Haunted Love Story: The Ghosts of the Allen House. Rebecca noted that their most skeptical visitors typically experience the most paranormal events during tours and dinner parties, observing that the only thing that is uneasy is your own mind. The house is now open for historic guided tours by appointment and hosts weddings and special events on North Main Street in Monticello.