“Sometimes it sounds exactly like dishes are being washed. One night ten of us were all in the dining room having our regular board meeting of the Carnton Society. The lady sitting beside me turned to me and said, ‘I think I hear someone in the kitchen.’ I just answered, ‘No.’ She turned to me again in a few minutes and said, ‘I know someone is in there,’ and this time I said, ‘There is no one in the kitchen.’ But she got up and went back there.
“When she returned and sat down, she had the strangest expression on her face. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘No one is there.’ I told the other members of the board about hearing the cook and her antics, and they believed me. Even many visitors who come here ask me if we have spirits in the house. It amazes me that strangers seem to feel it, although when there are lots of workmen around, we don’t hear the spirits as much.
“A workman told me he saw a beautiful girl with dark hair in the upstairs hall. His eyes were huge, and his face was white; he won’t work up there now unless someone is with him. Whether he saw one of the two surviving Carnton children who had grown into womanhood, or not, I don’t know. The Carntons lost three children out of five in infancy. That seems shocking to us, but many people didn’t even live to middle age a hundred or so years ago.”
Paul had begun to doubt that he would hear any story relating to his own experience, when finally Mrs. Seiberling changed the subject.
“I hope you won’t think I am silly when I tell you something else that has been reported to us here. Visitors say they have seen a Confederate soldier who walks the perimeter of this property. I don’t laugh at them anymore, for there have been times in the late afternoon, especially in fall, when I have heard my own ghost soldier or, should I say, the sound of heavy footsteps. When I hear those striding feet, I hurry to look out, but the back veranda is always empty.
“This house was used as a hospital after the Battle of Franklin, and the bodies of four Confederate generals were placed on that back porch. The most loved general was the Irishman Pat Cleburne, and all the next day, men who had survived the battle filed past, paying their last respects to him. It is said that when Cleburne died, the South lost a general second only to Stonewall Jackson. Before he was buried, Mrs. Carrie McGavock, mistress of the plantation, took the general’s cap, later presenting it to the State of Tennessee Museum.”
“What did the cap look like?” Paul asked.
“It was a round, black cap with little buttons on each side. I don’t know how many. And there were strips of gold braid that came up to the front and ran into a four-leaf clover. Poor General Cleburne. They say he was a very brave man.”
Black with gold braid, a four-leaf clover—Paul remembered that cap, and as Mrs. Seiberling went on talking, he missed part of what she was saying about the names of former residents of Carnton.
“People who have lived here and others in the area have reported hearing a Confederate soldier pace to and fro on the front porch. They come back and ask if I have heard him. I tell them, yes, I have heard him many times.”
Struck by the similarity of the cap on the officer he had seen and the one belonging to the general, Paul had heard what he had come to find out. He believed that the stranger he had seen the evening before was none other than the spirit of General Pat Cleburne. But how could he tell Mrs. Seiberling such a story? He simply let her talk on.
“I warn you, this house has a pull about it, and if you ever visit it, you’ll come back,” said Bernice Seiberling. “People return again and again.”
“Return again and again” echoed in Paul’s mind. It may be that spirits do, too, he thought.
Carnton is a timeless place. It is a place where “the dead once stood . . . so close they could not fall,” where bullets came thick as rain, and where soldiers pulled their caps down over their faces in a desperate, futile attempt to protect themselves. It is a place to shudder at men’s ferocity toward other men. It is probably Tennessee’s most haunted house.
Carnton Plantation is in Franklin, Tennessee, not far from Nashville. The house is open seven days a week, Monday through Saturday 9 am to 5 pm, and Sunday from 11 am to 5 pm. Classic tours are offered throughout the day. The plantation’s twenty-two rooms contain much of the original furnishings, which are from the period 1820 to 1860. All the woodwork is wood-grained to resemble mahogany or rosewood. The house was decorated not long after the excavation of Pompeii, when mustard yellow, soldier blue, and Pompeii red were in vogue. Visit boft.org/carnton or call (615) 794-0903.
THE FREE SPIRIT
ASHTON VILLA, GALVESTON, TEXAS
Miss Bettie was a free spirit—so free that there are some who believe that even after death she was able to return to beautiful Ashton Villa.
James Brown of Galveston was a proud man. He was proud of the fortune he had made in the hardware business, of building the first brick house in the state, of being a Texan, and of his daughter Bettie.
But as time went on, it appeared that Bettie had a tragic flaw.
Her home was the palatial Ashton Villa—fortunately completed in 1859, for, due to the Civil War, nothing was built from
