Andrew Jackson’s Phantom Ride at the Hermitage

Andrew Jackson bought the farm called the Hermitage outside Nashville in 1804 and lived there for the rest of his life. He began the brick mansion in 1819, and the family moved in about 1821. Rachel Jackson died in the house in December 1828, shortly before he took office as president, and he was buried beside her in the garden after his own death in 1845. Debts run up by his adopted son’s farming ventures forced the sale of the property to the State of Tennessee in 1856, but the Jackson family returned in 1860 to live there as tenants of the state. The last of them, Andrew Jackson III, his wife and their two sons, left in 1893 and took the furniture, mirrors and keepsakes with them.

That left a famous house standing empty. A group of Nashville women, organised as the Ladies’ Hermitage Association and chartered in 1889 to preserve the mansion as a public shrine, now had to look after it. Mary C. Dorris, who served the association and later wrote its history, described what happened in a chapter titled “The Ghost at the Hermitage” in Preservation of the Hermitage, 1889–1915, published in 1915. She wrote that in July, soon after the family moved out, two officers of the association, the regent and the secretary, camped in the bare front parlor on a mattress until a permanent caretaker could be found. She did not name them in that chapter.

According to her account, both women were asleep when a tremendous racket broke out. Pans and dishes seemed to be thrown across the pantry floor, chains clanked along the porches, and there was a noise like a horseman at the head of an army riding down the hall. The older woman told the younger to light the lamp, and the sounds stopped at once. They found nothing, blamed rats or an intruder, and slept again. The next morning the younger woman searched the whole house, including the cellar and chimneys, and found no cause. On the second night, Dorris wrote, the same sounds returned at about the same hour, and the two eventually concluded they had had a genuine experience with ghosts.

The story has been passed down by Hermitage staff ever since. Modern retellings attach the noises to Jackson himself, as if the general were mounting his horse and leading a charge through the hall, although the 1915 chapter only says the clatter sounded as if he were doing so. Staff members have dated the incident differently over the years: the book places it in July 1893, soon after the Jackson family left, while a staff interview in 2020 gave 1889, the year the association was founded. The Hermitage’s interpreters now tell the tale on lantern-lit evening tours, and one lead interpreter has said he began as a non-believer but has had unexplained experiences of his own, including footsteps heard while locking up.

A crash of pans and dishes, clanking chains, and a thundering horse-and-rider sound passing through the main hall; later staff add footsteps behind them in the locked-up house.

The front parlor and central hallway of the mansion on the ground floor, at night; the first account says the noise came at about the same hour, around midnight, on two successive nights in July.

The Hermitage runs seasonal lantern-lit ghost tours that include this story. The episode was featured in local television reports on the tours, and the 1915 chapter is an unusual case of a ghost story written down by a preservation society within a generation of the event.