In Brief
The Zevely House in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, is now Bernardin's Restaurant, and the local ghost walk tells of an age-old curse that hovers over it. They keep the curse's details for the walk itself. The love story behind the house is the part that's written down.
The Full Story
The Zevely House in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, is now a fine-dining restaurant called Bernardin's, and the lantern-lit ghost walk that passes through the West End tells of an age-old curse that hovers over it. What the curse is, the tour won't say. The guides keep the details for the walk itself.
Some accounts also name a resident ghost. The story, told on ghost tours and a local blog, is that a former resident called Mary still lingers in the house. Visitors say they hear her footsteps on the stairs and feel her in the rooms. No local-history record names her, and no source ties her to anyone who actually lived here.
What the record does hold is a love story heavy enough to anchor a haunting. The house was built around 1815 by Van Neman Zevely, a Moravian master cabinetmaker, and it is regarded as the oldest surviving house from the former town of Winston. In 1809, the Moravian Elders Conference refused Van permission to marry Johanna Sophia Shober. The couple married anyway. "It will be understood that they have left our fellowship," the church warned, and dropped them from its rolls. Johanna's father gave them 160 acres north of Salem to start their life on.
She did not get a long one. On November 19, 1821, Johanna died bearing their fifth child. She was 35. Van outlived her by more than forty years, raising the children they had been told not to have. One of them, Augustus, went off to study medicine in Philadelphia and came back to run a hotel in Salem.
The house outlasted everyone who grieved in it. Its brick ground-floor walls run roughly 18 inches thick, and they held while the neighborhood around them did not. By 1974 the area had declined, so in September of that year a group of buyers jacked the whole house off its foundation at 734 Oak Street and rolled it across the city to its present corner at Fourth and Summit, in the West End Historic District. They restored it, and it reopened as a restaurant in 1975.
Years later, a bar opened across the street and took her name: Johanna Schober's. The marriage the church tried to forbid is two centuries gone, the house has been moved a full mile from where the loss happened, and the curse still rides along with it. Only the tour guides know what it is.
