Hunt-Phelan Home

One of the oldest remaining antebellum homes in Memphis, built in 1828. The house served as Grant's headquarters during the Civil War and witnessed the planning of the Vicksburg Campaign.

The Hunt-Phelan Home on Beale Street in Memphis has served as headquarters for both sides of the Civil War, as a soldiers' hospital, as a school for freed slaves, and -- according to guests and staff -- as the eternal haunt of a servant who died before he could reveal where he buried the family treasure.

The Greek Revival mansion was completed in 1832 by George Wyatt, later enhanced with a kitchen ell, landscaped grounds, and a two-story portico of Ionic columns. An escape tunnel was built beneath the property, a feature that would prove valuable during the war. In 1861, Confederate General Leonidas Polk made the house his headquarters while organizing the Provisional Army of Tennessee and planning the Battle of Corinth. After Memphis fell to Union forces, General Ulysses S. Grant occupied the mansion from June 27 to July 12, 1862, planning the pivotal Vicksburg campaign in the library. Union forces used the tunnel beneath the house to relay messages, and gun emplacements surrounded the property. Between 1863 and 1865, the Western Sanitary Commission converted the mansion into a soldiers' home, and during Reconstruction, Freedmen's Bureau teachers were housed here while a school for formerly enslaved people operated on the grounds.

The house's haunting centers on a story of buried gold and a servant who took its secret to his grave. Before the Hunt family fled Memphis to escape a devastating yellow fever epidemic in 1873, they entrusted a chest of gold to Nathan Wilson, a trusted servant, to manage the estate's finances and safeguard the family's fortune from military confiscation. Wilson buried the valuables somewhere on the property for safekeeping -- but before the family could return, he contracted yellow fever and died, taking the treasure's location with him.

According to legend, Wilson's spirit cannot rest. The most commonly reported apparition at the Hunt-Phelan Home is a male figure dressed in a nineteenth-century servant's uniform, seen by both guests and staff throughout the property. He appears in hallways, on the grounds, and near the gardens, always seeming to move with purpose, as though trying to lead the living somewhere. Some witnesses believe he is attempting to guide treasure hunters to the long-lost fortune buried beneath the estate. The apparition is most frequently reported at midnight during a full moon.

Beyond Wilson's restless spirit, the property generates other paranormal reports consistent with its violent and turbulent history. Doors open and close on their own, footsteps are heard on the grand staircase when no one is there, and the sound of hushed conversations carries through empty rooms -- perhaps echoes of the military strategy sessions that Grant and Polk once conducted within these walls. A woman in a white dress has been seen in the gardens, her identity unknown, drifting between the same pathways that Union and Confederate officers once paced. Staff report an oppressive feeling in certain rooms, as though the weight of the decisions made here -- decisions that sent thousands of men to their deaths at Vicksburg and Corinth -- has seeped into the structure itself.

The mansion fell into neglect in the twentieth century under later owners, becoming heavily coated in gray paint and isolated behind barbed wire, padlocks, and weeds. A major restoration in the 1990s reopened the house for tours and as an inn, but no one has yet found Nathan Wilson's buried gold -- and his ghost, it seems, continues to search for someone willing to follow him to it.