The Grove, an 1861 cottage in Jefferson, Texas, keeps a lady in white who takes the same path through the house every time she appears. The Young daughter who lived there into the 1980s called police several times a week about people the officers never found.
The Grove, a low frame cottage at 405 Moseley Street in Jefferson, Texas, keeps a lady in a white dress. The owners say she takes the same path through the house every time she appears. One account, drawn from owner Mitchel Whitington's own book, has her walking beside the house and then stepping up through a wall, at a spot that was once the doorway into the children's room. Out in the garden there is a man in formal dress, seen striding through the lily beds like he is late for an appointment.
The house has been collecting this sort of thing for a long time. It went up in 1861 for a cotton broker named Frank Stilley and his wife Minerva. By 1882 a man named T.C. Burke had bought it, moved his family in, and moved them straight back out roughly six months later. The only explanation he is said to have given was that they couldn't live there.
Then came the Youngs. Charlie Young was born on a plantation near Clarksville in 1858, came to Jefferson with his mother after emancipation, and was shining shoes in a barbershop at 8. At 14 he had his own chair. He became the town's leading barber, charging a dollar a head when a haircut and a shave went for 25 cents, his walls lined with clients' shaving mugs lettered in gold. He bought this house in 1885. His wife Daphne laid the garden out in brick paths and beds, and two beds of day lilies and one of tiger lilies still trace back to her planting. When she died in 1955, they held her funeral on the porch so she would be close to it.
Their daughter Louise stayed on in the house into the 1980s, and she told friends about the haints living there with her. Late in her life the stories went bad. She had a security light installed in the garden because she kept seeing people outside who were gone the moment she flipped on the porch light. She called the police several times a week to report someone in the house with her, and the officers never found anyone. She finally withdrew into a few rooms and let the rest of the place fall apart around her.
Guests on the tour say Charlie comes back. Whitington, who guides them, says he has never seen the barber himself and doesn't find any of it frightening, just a man returning to a house he loved. The Texas Observer noticed something else about that story. In a town whose ghost tours mostly leave out the people who died in its racial violence, Charlie Young is the only Black person at The Grove anyone tells a ghost story about.
