Duff Green Mansion

Businessman Duff Green built his Vicksburg mansion in 1856 as a wedding gift for his wife, Mary Lake Green. When Union artillery began to bombard the city in the 1863 siege, the house was struck by cannonballs. The family offered it as a hospital for wounded Confederate and Union soldiers, and the Greens themselves moved into a cave in the side yard, where Mary gave birth to a son.

After the war the state leased the house as a recovery home, and the Greens moved back in 1866. Duff Green died in 1880 and his widow sold it to the Peatross family, who kept it until 1910. It later passed to Fannie Vick Willis Johnston, who in 1913 gave it for use as a boys’ orphanage; it became a retirement home and, from 1931 until 1985, the Salvation Army’s headquarters. Harry Carter Sharp and his wife bought it in 1985 and restored it over about two and a half years, and it is now a bed and breakfast on the National Register of Historic Places.

The ghost stories come mainly from Sharp, who lived in the house for decades. His accounts, as reported by Vicksburg newspapers, include the spirit of Mary Green, her daughter Annie, said to have died of yellow fever at the age of five, and a one-legged Confederate soldier linked to the house’s hospital days; some retellings count more than ten spirits. Sharp’s granddaughter, Lydia Nettles, has said she met little Annie in the house. A guide to the house also mentions bloodstained floors, a reminder of the wartime surgery.

The story drew national attention in 2019. Sharp contacted the television series Ghost Hunters, hoping the team would persuade the house’s new operator, Harley Caldwell, who did not believe in ghosts and wanted the mansion remembered for its history rather than its hauntings. Grant Wilson and the A&E crew spent about a week there in August 2019 and the episode, “You’ve Been Warned”, was broadcast on 23 October 2019. The programme’s summary has the previous owner warning the new operator about what he saw over decades, and the findings were given to both owners before the broadcast; the sources consulted do not report a conclusive result.

A one-legged Confederate soldier, the apparitions of Mary Green and her young daughter Annie, and a child seen by a former owner’s granddaughter, in the antebellum house.

The mansion’s main floors and upstairs rooms, which served as the wartime hospital.

The mansion’s ghost story reached a national audience through Ghost Hunters (season 12, 2019). Vicksburg’s numerous antebellum inns, including McRaven, Cedar Grove and Anchuca, are the focus of regional ghost lore, and the Duff Green house also offers history tours.