The Allen House

In 2009, Mark Spencer pried up an Allen House attic floorboard in Monticello, AR and found ninety love letters that finally explained the cyanide.

In August 2009, Mark Spencer pried up a floorboard in the attic of his Monticello, Arkansas house and pulled out a bundle of around ninety love letters. They were addressed "dear Dell." They were dated March through December of 1948. They had been hidden up there for sixty years, and they were the reason Ladell Allen Bonner walked into her mother's Christmas party on the night of December 25, 1948, picked up a cup of punch laced with mercury cyanide, and drank it.

The letters are the spine of the Allen House story. Everything else, the shadows on the stairs, the cold corners of the master bedroom, the EVPs, all of it is the second act.

Here's what the letters laid out. Ladell had grown up in Monticello and dated a boy named Prentiss Hemingway Savage when they were teenagers, around 1913. He moved away. They each married other people. By 1948 Ladell had been divorced from Boyd Randolph Bonner for two decades, her only son Elliott had died in 1944, and she was 54 years old and living back in her childhood home with her mother Caddye. Prentiss had risen to vice president of Texaco Oil. He lived in Minnesota. He had a wife. In March of 1948 they ran into each other at the horse races in Hot Springs, and what started there ran for nine months on paper. They spent three weeks together in Minnesota that July. Prentiss promised to leave his wife. In October he changed his mind and cited the money. Eight weeks later Ladell drank the punch.

She did not die fast. She was carried two doors down to Mack Wilson Hospital, treated by Dr. Johnnie Price, and held on for eight days before dying on January 2, 1949.

The house she did this in was already the most prominent address in town. Joe Lee Allen, Ladell's father, was a Monticello businessman who built the Allen Hotel downtown in 1912 and named the nearby village of Ladelle, Arkansas after this same daughter when she was eighteen. He hired Sylvester Hotchkiss, a Civil War vet who had moved to Monticello in late 1896 and designed at least thirteen buildings in town, to draw up something Joe Lee could put his family in. Hotchkiss gave him a three-story Queen Anne Victorian with Gothic and Neoclassical touches and a full attic, around 8,000 square feet, finished in 1906. Joe Lee Allen died in 1917 of a heart attack while demonstrating a motor vehicle to a potential buyer. He was 54. His wife Caddye and three daughters stayed in the house. The middle daughter was Ladell.

After Ladell died, Caddye sealed the upstairs master bedroom. Multiple secondary sources put the room closed for about 37 years, until roughly 1985, with a half-empty bottle of mercury cyanide still on a closet shelf when it was finally opened. I haven't found a primary record for that bottle, but Rebecca Spencer, the current owner, has told reporters what she was told locally: "Right after Ladell's death, her mother sealed up Ladell's room because she told different people in town that it was to keep Ladell in her room because she was causing disturbances in the house."

Mark and Rebecca Spencer bought the house in 2007 when Mark took a faculty job at the University of Arkansas at Monticello, where he's now dean of the School of Arts and Humanities. Rebecca had seen the place two years earlier. "I couldn't move to Monticello and not live in that house," she told KATV. The letters turned up two years after they moved in. Mark wrote a book about all of it in 2012 called A Haunted Love Story: The Ghosts of the Allen House, published by Llewellyn.

Separate the hauntings from the love story and you get a catalog you'd expect from a 120-year-old house that's been an apartment building (carved into rentals from around 1956 through the mid-1980s) and the site of a quiet 1948 suicide. Rebecca Spencer reports seeing a dark cowboy-shaped figure she calls the Shadowman five times in twelve years, including one sighting that was just a pair of boots crossing the master bathroom floor. Paranormal investigators told the Spencers they'd identified six distinct entities in the house, including Joe Lee, Caddye, Ladell, and a gruff-voiced man no one can place. SyFy's Ghost Hunters came down for Season 9 Episode 13, "Undying Love," which aired October 9, 2013. Jason Hawes' team captured a two-word EVP in the house: "please stop."

What I'd be careful about, if you're reading other writeups of this place, is the compression that happens when the story gets retold. The popular version says Ladell walked upstairs to her bedroom and swallowed the cyanide there. The detailed accounts say she drank cyanide-laced punch downstairs during the party, and the upstairs is where she died eight days later. Sources split on whether to call the upstairs room "the South bedroom" or the master suite. Letter counts split too: 80, 82, or over 90 depending on who's counting. The most thorough account, The Smart Set's 2019 longform, lands on over 90. And the house itself is part of the Monticello North Main Street Historic District, NRHP listed in 1979, not individually listed on the National Register, despite a lot of guides claiming otherwise.

The Allen House is open by appointment, used for weddings and events, and bookable at (870) 224-2271. Rebecca Spencer, asked by a reporter whether she's afraid of the ghosts, said this: "If you want to have a fear in something it should be the living." The floorboard the letters came out of is still in the attic.