The staff at Two Rivers Mansion in Nashville blame the unscrewed lightbulbs and flicked switches on Mary McGavock, dead since 1965 and never quite gone. Outside, a Lady in Black crosses the golf course at dusk, and one telling says she's Mary too, not knowing she has died.
The lightbulbs come unscrewed at Two Rivers Mansion. Lights flick off in empty rooms; the water turns itself on. The staff who run this mansion in Nashville don't find it frightening — they find it familiar, and they know who to blame. They blame Mary.
Mary McGavock was the last of three generations of her family to live in the house, and she died there in November 1965. By every staff account she never left. An employee described seeing her in the early 1990s, standing in the mansion's pocket doors in a white dress. "She is fond of playing with the electricity and the water, and she loves to turn lightbulbs and flick off lights," the employee said. "It's more like antics, rather than a scary haunting."
Antics is the word they keep using. A ghost who fiddles with the wiring.
The house went up in 1859, built by David McGavock for his wife, Willie Harding, the centerpiece of a plantation set between the Stones and Cumberland rivers — the two rivers it takes its name from. The family held it until Mary's death; Nashville bought it the year after, and today it runs as a wedding venue, the rooms rented out for the happiest day of somebody's life.
That's inside. Outside is where the other one is.
The land around the mansion is a public park and golf course now, and staff and visitors tell of a Lady in Black, a shadow figure said to glide across the mansion floors and, more often, across the fairways at dusk. Most of those sightings come from drivers, slowing on the park roads to watch a dark shape move over grass where no one is walking.
Nobody agrees on who she is. The tour offers three answers and lets you choose. One says she's a curse tied to a burial ground the house was raised over. Another says she's the Civil War dead, from a story that the land took the overflow of soldiers, Union and Confederate both, when the local cemeteries filled. Neither claim has a paper trail; both live on the tour and nowhere in the record.
The third answer is the one that closes the loop. Some say the Lady in Black is Mrs. McGavock herself — not gone, only unaware that she has died.
Which would make the gentle ghost unscrewing bulbs by the pocket doors and the black shape drifting the fairways at dusk the same woman. One of her keeps house. The other doesn't seem to know the house stopped being hers.
