Ghosts along the Mississippi River by Alan Brown

Author:Alan Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Published: 2011-09-22T16:00:00+00:00

LONGWOOD

In 1860, millionaire businessman and planter Haller Nutt began building what he hoped would be the most impressive octagonal Oriental Revival–style house in the United States. Nutt hired a Philadelphia architect, Samuel Sloan, to design the house that he had named “Longwood.”

Early in 1861, the six-story, 30,000-square-foot house was almost finished when the Civil War broke out. Before the workers walked off the job, they had completed the exterior and nine of the mansion’s thirty-two rooms. During the war, Dr. Nutt and his family lived on the first floor of the house. Even though Dr. Nutt had publicly declared himself a Federalist and even had papers verifying his claim, Union troops destroyed his steamboats and plantations in Louisiana. He died in 1864, a broken man. Following the war, Dr. Nutt’s wife, Julia, won her lawsuit against the federal government, but her settlement was not nearly enough to cover the cost of finishing the mansion, which by that time was known locally as “Nutt’s Folly.” After years of neglect, Longwood has been restored. It is a national historic landmark and is registered on the National Register of Historic Places. The property is run by the Pilgrimage Garden Club, which gives tours of the strangely shaped mansion with the byzantine-styled dome. According to some of the tour guides, Dr. Nutt’s frustrated spirit still roams the halls of his splendid home.

Longtime tour guides have been regaling tourists with weird tales about Nutt’s Folly for many years. In the late 1970s, one of them told Richard Winer, author of Haunted Houses, that occasionally the air inside the house was permeated with the unmistakable odor of jasmine perfume, a popular scent around the turn of the century. On another occasion, a film company that was making a documentary of the city’s historic homes hired a local volunteer fireman to spend the night inside Longwood and keep an eye on the photographic equipment that was stored there. Around midnight, the fireman became so frightened that the caretaker who lived on the premises had to spend the night with the terrified man.

Louise Burns, the resident manager of Longwood, told author Jim Longo that she had had a number of personal experiences during her stay at the old house. She said that one night several years after she had first moved into Longwood, she was asleep when she felt someone pulling on her hair and lifting her head above the pillow. She said that it seemed as if her head were being cradled in someone’s hands. Her eyes were closed the entire time. When her fear finally subsided, Louise opened her eyes and found that her head was lying on the pillow.

Louise also said that a man she had hired to mow the grass was making erratic passes across the lawn. When he was finished, the man asked her if the house was haunted. When Louise asked him what he meant, he replied that he saw the apparition of a man who resembled Dr. Nutt standing by a tree with one hand on his hip.

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