Thomas Wolfe Memorial

Ben Wolfe died of influenza in an upstairs bedroom in 1918. Julia Wolfe still knocks over photos at the Thomas Wolfe Memorial when visitors misbehave.

In October 1918, in an upstairs bedroom with lace curtains at the Old Kentucky Home boardinghouse on Market Street, Asheville, Ben Wolfe died of influenza while the family kept vigil around him. His younger brother Thomas, then eighteen, would later rebuild that room and that death into one of the most wrenching scenes in Look Homeward, Angel. The photographs taken inside the Thomas Wolfe Memorial today include several in which the lace curtains of that bedroom appear to have been pulled back from the window by no one.

The house at 52 North Market was built in 1883 and bought in 1906 by Julia Wolfe, Thomas's mother, who converted it into a boardinghouse and called it the Old Kentucky Home. Julia ran it the way she ran everything, which was with a kind of implacable practicality that exhausted her children. Every bed had to be full. Every meal had to feed every boarder. Thomas grew up sharing his own home with a rotating cast of traveling salesmen, tourists, and mountain visitors, and the experience shaped a writer who could never quite stop writing about the place. The house was named a National Historic Landmark in 1971.

Thomas didn't outlive it. He died in 1938 at thirty-seven from miliary tuberculosis without ever returning to Asheville in a meaningful way. Julia outlived both her famous son and most of her boarders, running the house until her death in 1945 at eighty-five. Staff and visitors say she also never quite left.

Julia is the more active ghost. Visitors catch glimpses of a woman in a long dark early-1900s dress at the dining room table who disappears the moment anyone looks directly at her, and who appears most often during the lunch hour, which is the hour she would have been running service. A framed photograph of Julia inside the house has been found knocked over repeatedly, always after visitors say something she presumably wouldn't have liked, a correction that fits her personality in life exactly. Staff describe it without much drama. Julia's being Julia. Thomas shows up less often, usually in one of the upstairs rooms, sometimes in a rocking chair, always quiet. A few photographs seem to catch him peering around a doorframe, tall and thin the way contemporary descriptions of him run. Ben's room produces the curtain phenomena and very little else.

The Thomas Wolfe Memorial is operated by the North Carolina Division of State Historic Sites and runs guided tours through a house that has been maintained almost exactly as it looked during Julia's reign over it. The furniture is mostly original. The boarders' register is on display. Visitors walk the halls Thomas walked as a teenager and stand in the bedroom where he watched his older brother die. The ghost stories are the smaller part. The bigger part is the house itself, kept at the pitch of a working boardinghouse in 1918, with the register open on display and Ben's bedroom set for a lodger who is not going to come down for dinner.