Longwood (Nutt’s Folly)

Longwood is the largest octagonal house in the United States and one of the most unusual mansions of the antebellum South. Cotton planter Haller Nutt commissioned the Philadelphia architect Samuel Sloan in 1859 to design a six-storey Oriental Revival palace topped with an onion-shaped dome and a total of thirty-two rooms. Nutt, who was born in 1816, owned several plantations and, by the 1860 listing, about 800 enslaved people; the house was built in part with their labour. Construction began in spring 1860 with craftsmen brought from the North.

When war came in 1861, the Pennsylvania artisans put down their tools and left for the Union lines. Only the basement was finished, with its nine rooms completed by enslaved workers, and the upper floors stayed bare. Nutt was a Unionist at heart, but the war still cost him his cotton crops and plantations. He died of pneumonia on 15 June 1864 at age 48, and his wife Julia and their children went on living in the basement rooms. On 4 July 1867 the grounds hosted a Freedmen’s picnic attended by thousands of formerly enslaved people. In 1968 Nutt’s grandchildren sold the house, and it was donated to the Pilgrimage Garden Club of Natchez on condition that it never be finished. It is a National Historic Landmark and a museum.

The ghost stories belong to the ‘Echoes of Longwood: Ghosts in the Octagon’ lantern tours run by Natchez Pilgrimage Tours each autumn. According to the tour’s description, which says it mixes verified history with ghost stories passed down through generations, Haller Nutt’s presence is felt on the upper floors he never saw finished, Julia Nutt has been sighted on the grand staircase, and the faint laughter of the Nutt children is heard, with the children said to play with their toys after dark.

As with most such tours, the stories are not backed by dated reports or named witnesses, and the tour itself is billed as entertainment. The unfinished upper floors, with their open framing, plaster-less walls and tools left in place when the craftsmen departed, make a powerful setting. Longwood’s real history, of an ambitious house, a family ruined by war and an enslaved workforce, is the stronger story.

Tour guides and visitors describe Haller Nutt’s presence on the upper floors, Julia Nutt seen on the grand staircase, and the faint laughter of children with toys that move after dark.

The grand staircase, the unfinished upper floors and the furnished basement, where the family lived after 1861.

Longwood has appeared in architecture surveys, a Bob Vila television series and, as an exterior, in HBO’s True Blood. It is part of the Natchez Pilgrimage, the city’s long-running spring and autumn house tours.