Longwood is the largest octagonal house in the United States and the only unfinished antebellum mansion still standing in the country — two distinctions that Dr. Haller Nutt, who commissioned it, would have found deeply unsatisfying. He hired Philadelphia architect Samuel Sloan in 1860 to build a thirty-two-room, five-floor Moorish Revival mansion on his Natchez plantation using one million bricks. The northern craftsmen Sloan sent to build it left in April 1861 when the Civil War broke out, setting their tools and paint buckets down mid-task. They never came back. The tools are still on the unfinished upper floors, exactly where they were left 160 years ago.
Nutt died on June 15, 1864, at forty-seven, in the only finished part of the house — the nine-room basement where he and his family had been living since construction stopped. He had lost his Louisiana plantation to Confederate fire, his cotton to wartime seizure, and his Congressional claims for compensation to bureaucratic inaction. Historians and contemporaries said he died of a broken heart. His wife Julia lived in the basement with their children until her own death in 1897.
The building is open daily at 140 Lower Woodville Road in Natchez, managed by the Preservation of the Longwood. Staff and paranormal investigators have consistently reported footsteps descending the stairs when the upper floors are empty, equipment failures during overnight investigations, and what one architectural historian described as a gradual conversion from skepticism to belief after years of unexplained experiences in the building. The ghost, if it is one, walks through the finished basement — the only part of Longwood that Nutt ever saw completed — and stops where the house stops. Which is not where he intended it to stop.
Story Source: www.natchezbelle.org
Address: 140 Lower Woodville Road, Natchez, Mississippi 39120
Accessibility Rating: Guided Tours Only — Access permitted only as part of an organized tour. Independent exploration not allowed.
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What Others Have Experienced
Louise Burns, Longwood’s resident director for more than 20 years, said she once woke in the dead of night to find her head lifted off her pillow by unseen hands, with no one in the room, and rather than let it frighten her off she decided then and there to let Dr. Nutt know who was in charge of the house.
— from Ghosts! Personal Accounts of Modern Mississippi Hauntings (Louise Burns, Sylvia Booth Hubbard, 1992)
A former Longwood tour guide named Sandra Frank said she always knew when she had gotten a fact wrong while describing the mansion’s history, because the lights in whatever room she was standing in would blink, though they stayed steady whenever she deliberately tested it by saying something untrue.
— from Ghosts! Personal Accounts of Modern Mississippi Hauntings (Sandra Frank, Sylvia Booth Hubbard, 1992)
A grandson of a former Longwood resident director said he once saw a woman standing on the staircase and assumed she was just an employee dressed in period costume for the tour, until he realized her face matched the portrait of Julia Nutt hanging in the house, and staff confirmed afterward that no one had been wearing a costume that day.
— from Ghosts! Personal Accounts of Modern Mississippi Hauntings (Sylvia Booth Hubbard, 1992)
A Longwood groundskeeper said he once spied Dr. Nutt himself standing under a tree on the grounds, dressed in period clothing, and the figure simply stood there watching before he looked away and the man was gone.
— from Ghosts! Personal Accounts of Modern Mississippi Hauntings (Sylvia Booth Hubbard, 1992)
James Wade, an architectural historian who spends a great deal of time at Longwood, said he started out a skeptic but changed his mind after paranormal investigators’ recording equipment in the old children’s playroom went completely dead overnight despite being fully charged, and he has personally heard footsteps coming down the stairs with no one there.
— from WLOX News (James Wade, 2016)
