Haunted Little Rock

Long before it was a capital, this bend of the Arkansas River was Quapaw country. By tradition, the French explorer Bénard de la Harpe named a rocky outcrop on the south bank "La Petite Roche," the little rock, in 1722; the Quapaw knew it long before. In 1818 the Quapaw Line was surveyed due south from that rock as the boundary between Quapaw lands and land open to settlement, and by 1824 the Quapaw had been forced to give up their lands altogether. A post office named Little Rock opened in 1820, and in 1821 the town became the capital of Arkansas Territory.

The territory hired the architect Gideon Shryock in 1833 to design a capitol, and the building now called the Old State House was far enough along to host the first General Assembly when Arkansas became a state in 1836. On December 4, 1837, during a debate over a bounty on wolf scalps, Representative Joseph J. Anthony offered a sarcastic amendment aimed at Speaker John Wilson, who was also president of the Real Estate Bank. Words led to knives. Representative Grandison Royston threw a chair between them, but Wilson killed Anthony on the House floor. The House expelled Wilson, and in 1838 a Saline County jury found him guilty only of "excusable homicide."

The Civil War came to the same streets. In February 1861 the Federal commander of the Little Rock Arsenal surrendered it to the state, and that May the Secession Convention met in the State House. Union troops took the city in September 1863 and occupied the arsenal for the rest of the war. On January 8, 1864, the Union army hanged David O. Dodd, a seventeen-year-old from Little Rock convicted as a spy, on the grounds of his old school just east of the arsenal. He is buried in Mount Holly Cemetery.

Ten years later the government itself was fought over. The disputed governor's race of 1872 ended in the Brooks-Baxter War: on April 15, 1874, Joseph Brooks and armed supporters forced Governor Elisha Baxter out of the State House, and for weeks the two sides skirmished in Little Rock and across the river in Argenta. President Grant backed Baxter on May 15, and Baxter returned to the State House on May 19. Later estimates put the dead in the confrontations across the state at more than 200, and the war marked the practical end of Reconstruction in Arkansas.

The Old State House later housed the state university's medical school and became a museum in 1951, and it's the building most often named in Little Rock's ghost stories. The Little Rock Convention & Visitors Bureau says some visitors believe a few legislators never left the House chamber. Investigators from Sweet n' Sour Paranormal told KARK they sensed an angry, important presence in the chamber, and recorded what sounded like a voice in the room once used for autopsies. The museum's historian, David Ware, told the station the building was "built on the cheap," which accounts for floors that creak. We tell these stories as accounts, alongside the record of what happened there.

Mount Holly Cemetery was founded in 1843 on land given to the city by Chester Ashley and Roswell Beebe, and it holds at least ten Arkansas governors, three U.S. senators, and twenty Little Rock mayors, as well as David Dodd. The visitors bureau says nighttime visitors have described shadowy figures drifting near the gates and shapes that vanish without a trace. The cemetery is a place of burial and remembrance first, and we talk about it that way.

The arsenal's Tower Building, finished around 1840 on a former racetrack at the edge of town, is the only part of the post still standing. Douglas MacArthur was born there in 1880, and since 2001 it has been the MacArthur Museum of Arkansas Military History. Guests have reported cold spots, disembodied voices, and flickering lights in the tower.

In the Quapaw Quarter, James Hornibrook spent about seven years building a mansion for his family, finished in 1888. He had run a liquor and saloon business for some two decades, and he is said to have hosted card games in the tower. In 1890, at 49, he died of a stroke at his own front gate on the way home from an evening at his saloon, and his wife, Margaret, died in 1893. The house later served a women's college, a rooming house, and a nursing home before Robert and Sharon Blair restored it as a bed and breakfast in 1993. Robert Blair told KATV he saw a man in a black Homburg hat and overcoat on the staircase, that a painter ran from the tower room and never came back, and that guests have reported a woman in a pink dress. The house still welcomes overnight guests, and we view it from the street.

Some of Little Rock's history is not a ghost story at all. The State Capitol, built from 1899 to 1915, stands on the site of the old state penitentiary and was built in part with convict labor. In 1957, nine Black students faced mobs to desegregate Central High School, now a National Historic Site. Those are histories of people who lived them, many of whom are still with us, and we tell them accurately and never as hauntings.

That is why Little Rock is considered haunted: a capital where a lawmaker died on the floor of the House, a teenager was hanged within sight of the arsenal, rival governors fought over the State House, and old buildings have gathered stories ever since. On Ghosts of Old Little Rock, our family-friendly walk, and The Dead Have Their Reasons, our adults-only tour through the city's darker history, our Ambassadors share the documented history and the local legends side by side, and always tell you which is which.