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Historic haunted places in Franklin, TN. Each page gives the ghost story, whether visitors can go, and a link to the site the story came from. The stories are folklore, not documented fact.
4 listings shown.
TENNESSEE / HAUNTED PLACE
Haunted place
Carnton served as a field hospital after the 1864 Battle of Franklin, and its upstairs rooms still have bloodstained floorboards where visitors say the air feels colder. People rep…
This story is folklore told about a real place. It is not presented as documented fact.
TENNESSEE / HAUNTED PLACE
Haunted place
Confederate captain Tod Carter was carried into his family's home after the battle and died there, and visitors describe a calm man in period dress in the upstairs hall and by the …
This story is folklore told about a real place. It is not presented as documented fact.
TENNESSEE / HAUNTED PLACE
Haunted place
Local lore tells of two teenagers, called Kathleen and Danny, who came to this 1937 theater on a first date in 1952 and were never seen again. Visitors and staff have described two…
This story is folklore told about a real place. It is not presented as documented fact.
TENNESSEE / HAUNTED PLACE
Haunted place
This house stood where the Confederate assault hit hardest on November 30, 1864, and the reports here are dramatic: sudden yells outside, loud bangs with no cause and see-through f…
This story is folklore told about a real place. It is not presented as documented fact.
Explore verified haunted attractions and ghost tours in nearby cities.
Franklin's haunted ground is a battlefield that runs through a town. On November 30, 1864, the Second Battle of Franklin was fought over about five hours, much of it after dark, across the southern edge of this Williamson County town — and the houses at its centre never stopped bearing the marks.
At the centre of the Union position stood the Carter House, at 1140 Columbia Avenue. Fountain Branch Carter had completed the brick farmhouse in 1830, with a farm office, smokehouse and kitchen beside it, and in the 1850s he built a cotton gin that became a landmark of the fight. Before the battle the house was taken over as the headquarters of the Twenty-Third Army Corps under Brigadier General Jacob D. Cox, Federal breastworks were dug just south of it, and the Carter family took refuge in its basement while the battle raged overhead. The house and its outbuildings still show over a thousand bullet holes.
Across Columbia Avenue stands the Lotz House, built in 1858 by Johann Albert Lotz, a German immigrant master carpenter and piano maker who bought his five acres from Fountain Branch Carter and built the house as a showpiece of his craft. The Lotz family sheltered in the Carter basement that night too, while a cannonball crashed through their roof and a second-storey bedroom and rolled onto the first floor, leaving a charred indentation that is still visible. Both houses were used as field hospitals after the fighting.
Southeast of the line, less than a mile from the Union eastern flank, stood Carnton. Randal McGavock, a former mayor of Nashville, built the house in 1826 — built, its Wikipedia article records plainly, using enslaved labour — and his son John McGavock and John's wife Carrie lived there in 1864. On the night of the battle Carnton became the principal temporary field hospital at Franklin: the McGavocks tended as many as 300 wounded inside the house, at least 150 of whom died the first night, and the bodies of four Confederate generals — Patrick Cleburne, John Adams, Otho F. Strahl and Hiram B. Granbury — were laid out on its back porch. More than 1,750 Confederate soldiers lost their lives at Franklin. In the spring of 1866, 1,481 of the Confederate dead were reburied on two acres the McGavocks donated beside the house, in what its article calls the largest privately owned military cemetery in the United States.
This section is folklore — reported by tour operators and ghost writers, and never asserted as fact here.
Wikipedia's "List of reportedly haunted locations in the United States" carries a Tennessee entry for this ground in one sentence: the Carnton Mansion in Franklin was used as a hospital for Confederate soldiers during the Civil War, and some of their ghosts are alleged to haunt the site. Ghost-tour writing fills in the alleged figures. At the Carter House, the reported pair are two Carter children: Tod Carter, a Confederate soldier mortally wounded in the battle within sight of his own home, who died in a bedroom of the house, and his sister Annie — visitors report the two running through the house, tugging at clothes and speaking in unexplained voices, in the telling of FranklinIs's haunted-history account and of Ghost City Tours. At Carnton, Carrie McGavock herself is the reported figure, said to be seen on the porch looking over the cemetery she tended for 41 years. At the Lotz House, the reported happenings in FranklinIs's account of its ghost tours are a woman crying out for a loved one, a little girl staring out of a window, and ordinary objects that will not stay put.
Franklin on Foot, the town's original walking-tour company, has been collecting the downtown version of this folklore since 2003 — departed socialites, a Civil War spy, Confederate soldiers and at least one ghostly dog, in Visit Franklin's summary of its Haunted Franklin tour. Those are the town's stories, told as stories. The documented record underneath them — the bullet holes, the blood-stained floors, the cemetery — needs no embellishment, and this page adds none.
Hountix lists 4 places in Franklin, TN. Seasonal attractions keep their own open dates, so check each business's own site before you go.
Carnton is Franklin's largest surviving witness, and its operator presents it as a memorial, not a haunt. The Battle of Franklin Trust, which manages the house, offers a full slate of daytime tours from its own tours page: a 60-minute Classic House Tour ($22 for adults, $14 for children 6–15, offered through the day with the last tour at 4 PM), 90-minute Extended, Behind the Scenes, Slavery & the Enslaved and battlefield tours, and a combination ticket covering Carnton and the Carter House. Nowhere in the Trust's collected tours material is a ghost offered for sale.
The documented house is story enough. Completed in 1826 by Randal McGavock, enlarged with a Greek Revival portico by his son John in 1847, Carnton became on November 30, 1864 the largest temporary field hospital at Franklin. Its Wikipedia article records what visitors still see: floors stained where blood soaked through the carpets, heaviest in a south-facing bedroom used as an operating room. Carrie McGavock, who with her husband tended the wounded and donated food, clothing and supplies that night, spent the rest of her life keeping the Confederate cemetery the family donated in 1866 — 1,481 soldiers reburied by state sections — and her care of it made her the subject of Robert Hicks's 2005 novel The Widow of the South.
The haunting claim comes from outside the museum, and it is recorded here as a claim: Wikipedia's list of reportedly haunted locations in the United States says ghosts of the soldiers treated at Carnton are alleged to haunt the site, and ghost-tour companies describe Carrie McGavock on the back porch and soldiers in the fields. What is documented is a house that held 300 wounded men in one night, in a family that buried 1,481 of their army within sight of its porch — and kept the record book.
*Website: https://boft.org/carnton*
The Carter House is the house the battle happened in. Built in 1830 by Fountain Branch Carter at 1140 Columbia Avenue, it was seized before the fighting as headquarters of the Union Twenty-Third Corps, with breastworks dug across its farmyard, while the Carter family and their neighbours — the Lotzes among them — sheltered in the basement for the five hours of the battle. Its Wikipedia article notes the farm office, smokehouse and kitchen that still stand beside it; FranklinIs's haunted-history account, citing preservationists, calls the farm office and smokehouse the two most heavily damaged buildings still standing from the Civil War, with over a thousand bullet holes between the house and its outbuildings. After the battle the house, too, was turned into a makeshift field hospital.
One death in the house is documented family history rather than folklore. The Carters' son Tod — Fountain Branch Carter's son, a Confederate soldier who had been away at the war for three years — was mortally wounded in the battle at his own childhood home and died in a bedroom of the house, in the accounts carried by both FranklinIs and Ghost City Tours.
The haunting is the reported sequel, labelled as such: those same accounts report Tod and his sister Annie still in the house — children heard and seen running, clothes tugged, voices unexplained — and Ghost City Tours adds a phantom horse. None of that is asserted here. What a visitor can verify is the Trust's daily guided tour of a house that was a headquarters, a shelter and a hospital in a single night, and whose walls still carry the count of the shooting in holes.
The Lotz House is the civilian's version of the same night, told by a craftsman's house. Johann Albert Lotz, a German immigrant who arrived before 1855, bought five acres from Fountain Branch Carter and spent three years building the house himself, finishing it in 1858 as a working showroom: mantels in different styles, a black walnut handrail two storeys tall, and a stair newel post that is, its Heritage Foundation account notes, actually a piano leg. On the eve of the battle he took his family across Columbia Avenue to the brick Carter basement. His own museum's telling picks up the rest: the house suffered structural damage from cannonball fire, then served as a hospital for both sides, and visitors today can still see the evidence inside — the charred floor imprint where a cannonball landed in what is now the gift shop, the repaired second-storey flooring, and blood stains where the wounded were propped against the walls.
The house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1976 and has been open to the public as a museum since 2008. Its regular tours run through the day — tours begin on the hour, in its visitors' accounts — and ghost tours stand in its own published list of specialty tours, next to the battlefield walking tour and the cellar tour. FranklinIs's report of the museum's Halloween ghost tours repeats the billing that the house was dubbed the "second-most terrifying place in America" by the Travel Channel in connection with its Haunted Live feature — a piece of television billing, reported here as billing, not as a measurement.
The reported activity is likewise reported, not endorsed: a woman crying out for a loved one, a little girl at a window, objects that move, in FranklinIs's summary of the ghost-tour accounts. The museum's own pages stick to the documented house — its cannonball, its stains, its maker's furniture and his daughter Matilda Lotz's paintings — and so, apart from the labelled sentences above, does this page.
*Website: http://www.lotzhouse.com/*