Mordecai House

The Mordecai House is the oldest residence in Raleigh still standing on its original foundation. Its oldest section was built around 1785 by Joel Lane, who is remembered as the “Father of Raleigh”, for his son Henry, on a plantation that once covered some 5,000 acres. Lane sold a thousand of those acres as the site of the state capital. The house takes its name from Moses Mordecai, who married Margaret Lane and later lived there, and in 1824 he hired architect William Nichols to enlarge it; the additions of 1826 gave it a Greek Revival look. The Mordecai family lived here for five generations, until 1967.

The house also stood at the center of a plantation where more than a hundred people were enslaved, a history that the park now interprets alongside the family’s story. When the house came onto the market, preservationists protested and the City of Raleigh bought it; it is now the centerpiece of Mordecai Historic Park, which also includes the birthplace of President Andrew Johnson, a law office and the Allen Kitchen.

Ghost stories began to circulate in the late twentieth century and are mentioned in the park’s visitor material as local folklore. Most tellings identify the apparition as Mary Willis Mordecai Turk (1858–1937), the family matriarch, a woman in a gray nineteenth-century dress who is said to stand on the high balcony when the moon is high, to drift down the stairwell and to play the parlor piano. Drivers on Mimosa Street after midnight say they have glimpsed a figure on the balcony; staff and visitors working alone report creaking footsteps upstairs, thumps and a voice. A Ghost Guild investigator, Nelson Nauss, says he heard thumps and a voice and recorded them during a solo investigation, and another investigator described an overwhelming sense of grief on the stairs before knowing the staircase’s history.

Raleigh has leaned into the stories carefully. The TV series Ghost Hunters investigated the house in 2005. The National Society of Paranormal Investigation and Research held a city contract as the park’s paranormal team from 2008 to 2016, and since 2017 a non-profit, the Ghost Guild, has investigated the property and presents its findings at the park’s October festival. Its executive director describes the group as skeptical and says it aims to debunk reports rather than confirm them.

Reports include a woman in a long gray dress on the balcony or the stairs, a piano playing by itself with a mist over the keys, footsteps and thumps upstairs when someone is alone, a voice, a child-like humming on a recording and a framed photo said to fall when a visitor is rude.

The second-floor balcony and interior stairwell, the parlor with its piano, and the upstairs rooms, mostly at night and after midnight.

The house appeared in the 2005 Ghost Hunters season two episode and in Hawes, Wilson and Friedman’s 2007 book Ghost Hunting. It is the focus of Raleigh’s October festival, where the Ghost Guild presents its findings, and of local news stories every Halloween.