Haunted Knoxville

Knoxville Before the War

James White, a Revolutionary War veteran, built a fort above the Tennessee River in 1786. In 1791 territorial governor William Blount made the settlement capital of the Territory South of the River Ohio and renamed it for Secretary of War Henry Knox, and White laid out the town's first sixty-four lots. Blount's house, built in 1792, served as the territorial capitol, and Knoxville was an early capital of the state of Tennessee until the government moved west for good after 1818. White and Blount are both buried in the First Presbyterian Church graveyard downtown, on land White gave the congregation. Visit Knoxville notes that Blount Mansion has no well-known haunting, and that's worth saying plainly: not every old house has a ghost, and we won't give one to a house that doesn't.

A Divided Town

In June 1861 most Knoxville voters chose secession, while much of East Tennessee around them stayed loyal to the Union. Confederate troops held the city first. Ambrose Burnside's Union Army of the Ohio took it in September 1863, and by November 17 Burnside was dug in behind a ring of earthworks with James Longstreet's Confederates outside. The siege lasted until December 4. It was short, but it put the war on people's doorsteps, and several of Knoxville's best-known stories come out of those two and a half weeks.

The Lamar House and the Bijou Theatre

Thomas Humes started building a hotel at Gay Street and Cumberland Avenue in 1815. He died in 1816, and the Lamar House was finished the next year. Andrew Jackson attended an event in its ballroom in 1819, and Rutherford B. Hayes spoke from its balcony in 1877. During the war it housed Confederate officers and then the Union Army, which ran it as the Lamar Hospital. On November 18, 1863, Brigadier General William P. Sanders was shot while his cavalry slowed Longstreet's advance on Kingston Pike, by tradition by a sharpshooter in the tower of Bleak House. He died in the hotel's bridal suite the next day.

In 1909 a theater opened behind the hotel, and the old building is now the Bijou's lobby, offices, and bistro, one of the oldest surviving buildings downtown. Visit Knoxville counts the Bijou among the city's haunted places, and the story told most often is that Sanders never left; WBIR has covered it as the tale of the Civil War general who haunts the theater. The death in the bridal suite is documented. The ghost is a story people tell about it. The Bijou is a working theater, so the way in is with a ticket to a show.

Bleak House

Robert Houston Armstrong built Bleak House on Kingston Pike in 1858 and named it after the Charles Dickens novel. During the siege it was headquarters for Longstreet and Lafayette McLaws, and Confederate sharpshooters fired from its tower. Union artillery answered. The tower still has cannonball damage, and on one wall there's a sketch of three Confederate sharpshooters. Local accounts say men died up there, but we haven't found a record that settles who they were or how many. It's the kind of place where you'd expect a ghost story, and we haven't found one solid enough to repeat, so we'll leave it at the drawing on the wall.

The house is owned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy and run as Confederate Memorial Hall. It charges admission, and its hours change with the seasons, so check before you go.

Fort Sanders

The Confederates' best chance came on the morning of November 29, 1863, at the fort named for the general who had just died at the Lamar House. Fort Sanders sat at the northwest corner of the Union defenses. The attackers were slowed by telegraph wire strung outside the works, then reached a ditch eight feet deep beneath steep walls, with no ladders to climb them. Confederate casualties came to nearly 800; the Union lost about 100. Longstreet gave up the siege on December 4. Almost nothing of the fort survives. Its ground is now the Fort Sanders neighborhood beside the University of Tennessee, and what people remember there is what happened in the ditch, not anything seen since.

The Baker Peters House

Dr. James Harvey Baker built his house on Kingston Pike around 1840. In June 1863, during a Union cavalry raid on Knoxville led by Col. William P. Sanders, soldiers came to the house and shot Baker through the door he had barricaded. Joan Markel of the McClung Museum has called him likely one of the first people killed by Union forces in Knox County. The marker out front says he died in 1864 while treating wounded Confederates, which the record doesn't support.

His son Abner was away with the Confederate army. In 1865 Abner came home and shot William Hall, a Union veteran who worked for the court clerk, in downtown Knoxville. Newspapers at the time disagreed about why, and a later book claims Abner blamed Hall for his father's death. That night a Unionist mob took Abner from the jail and hanged him from a tree. Visit Knoxville passes along the story that Dr. Baker's spirit may remain in the house, and WBIR has reported on a restaurant there embracing the haunted history. The building has housed restaurants in recent years, so check what's operating before you go.

Gay Street, 1882, and the Mabry-Hazen House

Joseph Alexander Mabry Jr. built his house on a hill east of downtown around 1858. He was a railroad president, one of Knoxville's most influential men, and one of its largest slaveholders. He backed the Confederacy early, soldiers from both armies occupied his house during the war, and in late 1863 Union troops dug earthworks across the grounds, which became known as Mabry's Hill.

Mabry and the banker Thomas O'Conner were already at odds over land when Mabry's son Will was killed in a barroom fight in December 1881, and Mabry blamed O'Conner. On October 19, 1882, on Gay Street, O'Conner killed Mabry with a shotgun. Mabry's son Joseph III shot O'Conner, and O'Conner, dying, fired once more and killed him. Seven bystanders were wounded. Mark Twain retold the fight in Life on the Mississippi.

Mabry's granddaughter Evelyn Hazen was the last of the family to live in the house. In 1932 she sued her former fiancé for breach of promise and won, and the details of the case cost her socially; she resigned from teaching and lived in the house as a recluse until her death at 88. Her will endowed its preservation, and it opened as a museum in 1992. The site includes Bethel Cemetery, a four-acre Civil War cemetery. Visit Knoxville relates a story that Evelyn herself saw the apparition of an old friend, Jack McKnight, in her bedroom for several weeks, until she moved to another room and never saw him again. We've only found that story in one telling, so take it as exactly that.

Old Gray Cemetery and the Lady in White

Old Gray was laid out on pastureland north of downtown in 1850, dedicated in 1852, and named for the poet Thomas Gray. Many of its first burials were victims of the 1854 cholera epidemic. Later came Civil War soldiers, dozens of people killed in the 1904 New Market train wreck, twenty-six Knoxville mayors, and William G. "Parson" Brownlow, the Unionist newspaperman who became Tennessee's governor after the war.

Danette Welch, a reference librarian at the Knox County Public Library's McClung Historical Collection, traced the Lady in White back to two deaths. On August 25, 1879, Annie Lowe shot Martin Woody, a builder and brick maker, who died within the hour; she shot herself and died about twenty hours later. Martin's wife, Mary Crush Woody, was found dead in 1899 and buried beside him at Old Gray. Teenage boys were telling the story of a pale, silent woman in white in the 1880s, and by 1889 the sightings had spread from Old Gray to the pine woods near Central Avenue. Over time the figure was identified with both Mary and Annie. Old Gray's other ghost, "Black Aggie," is much younger: the library traces it to high school boys in the mid-twentieth century.

Old Gray welcomes visitors, and guided cemetery tours are offered locally. Go in daylight and treat it as what it still is, a burial ground.

Lakeshore Park

In 1886 the state opened a hospital for the mentally ill on the Tennessee River west of town, on land the Williams family had given the state in 1874. The first patients got off the train at Bearden Station and walked more than a mile to reach it. Known in its early years as Lyons View, it went through several names before closing as Lakeshore Mental Health Institute in 2013. The grounds are now Lakeshore Park, a city park with walking trails, and the redbrick administration building on the hill, once the center of a much larger hospital, is nearly all that's left of it. Visit Knoxville says visitors and paranormal groups have reported shadows, lights, and voices there. Thousands of East Tennesseans spent part of their lives in that hospital, and that history is the reason to walk the place with some care.

History We Don't Tell as a Ghost Story

On August 30, 1919, after Bertie Lindsey, a white woman, was shot to death in her home, police arrested Maurice Mays, a biracial café owner. A mob of thousands dynamited its way into the Knox County jail looking for him; he had already been moved to Chattanooga. That night shooting broke out at Vine and Central, where Black residents had armed themselves to defend their neighborhood, and National Guardsmen fired machine guns toward Central. Estimates of the dead range from two to more than thirty. Mays was convicted twice and executed on March 15, 1922, maintaining his innocence to the end. It's an important part of Knoxville's history, and it belongs to real people and their descendants. We don't tell it as a ghost story, and we never will.

Exploring Knoxville With Us

We're preparing our Knoxville tours now. When they launch, our Ambassadors will tell these stories on foot, in the places where they happened, with the record and the legends side by side. Until then, the Knoxville ghost tours page is where they'll appear first.