Gaineswood Plantation in Demopolis, Alabama is one of the most intact examples of antebellum Greek Revival architecture in the American South — and one of the few haunted plantation houses where the haunting appears to have predated the legend. The activity documented by the Whitfield family and their overnight guests began while Evelyn Carter’s body was still stored in the cellar, waiting for the frozen Alabama ground to thaw enough for burial. The piano playing, the footsteps building toward the basement door and stopping, the guests leaving at dawn — these accounts were established before anyone had reason to manufacture them. That’s an unusual level of contemporaneous documentation for a haunted-house story.
Evelyn Carter came to Gaineswood in the 1840s as the sister of the household’s nanny, a young woman from Virginia whose father was working in Europe and who needed somewhere to spend the winter. She fell in love with a Frenchman, threw her engagement ring across the garden in a moment of anger, and died of pneumonia before the argument could be resolved. The ring has never been found. The body was eventually returned to Virginia. The ghost stayed.
Gaineswood is now a museum operated by the Alabama Historical Commission at 805 South Cedar Avenue in Demopolis, open to the public and offering tours of the restored interior. Staff and visitors continue to report piano music from the empty parlor, movement in the upstairs hallways, and footsteps from the cellar. Adventure travelers who make it to Demopolis — a small city in Black Belt Alabama that doesn’t appear on many travel itineraries — consistently say the house is worth the detour. The story is specific and traceable and the house itself is extraordinary. Go in the late afternoon when the light goes flat and the rooms get quiet.
Story Source: www.onlyinyourstate.com
Address: 805 South Cedar Avenue, Demopolis, Alabama 36732
Accessibility Rating: Guided Tours Only — Access permitted only as part of an organized tour. Independent exploration not allowed.
Google Map
What Others Have Experienced
A visitor who identified herself as a descendant of the Whitfield family said she has spent summers at Gaineswood since childhood, and that the cellar, where Evelyn Carter’s body was kept until the ground thawed enough for burial, still carries a certain feeling she can’t fully explain.
— from HauntedPlaces.org visitor comment
A visitor recalled that the kitchen still displays the biscuits enslaved workers had been preparing the day they learned the war had ended and they were free, left untouched ever since, and said standing in that room left her feeling like the spirits of those who once worked there were still present.
— from HauntedPlaces.org visitor comment
