Woodruff-Fontaine House

This magnificent French Victorian mansion in Victorian Village was built in 1870 and is now a house museum. The elegant home witnessed both grandeur and tragedy during Memphis's gilded age.

The Woodruff-Fontaine House was built in 1870-71 on Adams Avenue, then known as 'Millionaire's Row,' where Memphis's wealthiest families constructed grand mansions after the Civil War. Amos Woodruff, an energetic entrepreneur who came to Memphis in 1845 to establish a carriage-making business, expanded his interests into cotton, lumber, banking, railroads, and hotels before building this French Victorian showpiece for his family.

The house's haunting centers on Woodruff's daughter Mollie, whose short life was defined by devastating loss. A few years after her wedding -- held inside the house on Millionaire's Row -- Mollie gave birth to her first child. Three days later, the infant died of yellow fever. Three months after that, her husband fell from a boat during a fishing trip and died a few hours later at home. Mollie eventually had a second child, who also died in infancy. When Mollie herself died, she was buried in an unmarked grave in 1917, her tragedies largely forgotten.

But according to decades of witnesses, Mollie never truly left the house where she was happiest. Her ghost is most often seen on the second floor in the Rose Room -- her former bedroom -- sitting on the bed before abruptly vanishing. When she disappears, an imprint of her shape remains on the comforter, and the scent of her perfume lingers in the air. Susan Morgan, the events coordinator for the house museum, has had direct experiences with Mollie's spirit: a string of pearls was ripped from her neck by an unseen force, and she has felt her hair stand on end in the presence of the entity. Morgan has also had to smooth out the bedclothes in Mollie's bedroom each morning, finding them disturbed as though someone had been sitting or lying there during the night.

A paranormal researcher who investigated the house in the 1980s documented two distinct entities: a female presence on the second floor, consistent with Mollie's reported appearances, and a male entity on the first and third floors described as 'surly, bitter with a bad attitude.' The male ghost is accompanied by an overpowering aroma of cigar smoke that fills rooms with no apparent source, suggesting he may be one of the wealthy Victorian gentlemen who once gathered in the mansion's parlors.

Throughout the house, slamming doors are heard when all doors are confirmed shut, mysterious footsteps echo through empty hallways, and disembodied voices carry through rooms where no one is present. A strong, oppressive sense of death has been reported in certain areas of the house, concentrated around Mollie's former quarters where she endured the loss of her children and husband.

The Woodruff-Fontaine House now operates as a house museum and remains a popular wedding venue in Memphis's Victorian Village historic district. The museum offers ghost after-hours tours with a paranormal investigator as guide, allowing visitors to spend two and a half hours exploring the home and hearing the stories of the families who lived and died within its walls.