Haunted Places in Natchez, MS

The history

Natchez's haunted ground is a river city in layers, and the three places are three different layers of it. The oldest is King's Tavern, on Jefferson Street downtown. The building's own account, carried on its Regina's Kitchen site, says it was built in 1769, making it the oldest structure in the old river port city of Natchez, originally built as a block house for the nearby British Fort Panmure, with beams taken from scrapped New Orleans sailing ships brought up by mule and from flat river boats dismantled and sold for their wood, and sun-dried bricks besides — because there was no saw mill near the frontier town. The Mississippi Department of Archives and History account collected in search keeps a more cautious documentary line alongside that tradition: King's Tavern has long been regarded as the oldest building in town, and documentary evidence indicates the building was standing at least as early as 1805, in the Natchez tax rolls.

The second layer is the great unfinished house south of downtown. Longwood, at 140 Lower Woodville Road on the Visit Natchez account, was designed in 1859 by Philadelphia architect Samuel Sloan for cotton planter Haller Nutt — Sloan completed the plans in April 1860 and construction began shortly thereafter, on the Mississippi Encyclopedia account. The design was extraordinary on that account: thirty-two rooms, eight verandas, 115 doors, twenty-six fireplaces and a rotunda opening to a Moorish cupola, in a 30,000-square-foot structure measuring 104 feet across — the largest octagonal house in America. The exterior and nine rooms on the basement level were completed in 1861; then, on the same account, construction halted in April when the Civil War broke out, and the first through third floors remain a vast, empty, unfinished shell. The Smithsonian Gardens account tells the family's part the same way: Haller Nutt died in the home in 1864 — the Encyclopedia gives pneumonia, on 15 June 1864 — his wife Julia remained in residence in the finished basement until her death in 1897, and the property stayed in the Nutt family until 1968, when it was purchased by Mr. and Mrs. Kelly McAdams, who in turn sold it to the Pilgrimage Garden Club of Natchez. Longwood was added to the National Register of Historic Places as a National Historic Landmark in 1969, on the Smithsonian account, and the Pilgrimage Garden Club still owns it and operates it as a historic house museum.

The third layer is the modern one: a small downtown walking-tour trade that retells the first two after dark.

The legend

This section is folklore — reported by the ghost-tour review account and the secondary accounts listed below, and never asserted as fact here.

The review account of the Natchez Ghost Tour sets out the downtown repertoire stop by stop. At the Eola Hotel, a Woman in White is said to walk the halls of the fifth floor, and a phantom doctor on the seventh floor is said to cure back pain. At the Prentiss Club, a colourful local resident named Buzz, who passed in 2011 on the review account, is said to still walk the sidewalks outside — one of the few modern ghosts on a tour of this kind, as the reviewer notes. At the Old Adams County Jail, the prisoners who were hanged there are said to haunt the building; the review group was allowed inside the old jail at the end of the night, where unexplained EMF spikes were reported — the reviewer's account, carried as such, with jail access noted as a possible bonus and not guaranteed.

King's Tavern carries the city's best-known single legend, and it belongs here rather than in The history. On the review account, a renovation in the 1930s revealed skeletons in the wall, one of which is said to belong to Madeline, the allegedly murdered mistress of the tavern owner, who is said to still haunt the upper level. The haunted-history blog account collected in search retells Madeline as the tavern's main ghost, blamed for most of its reported activity: a fireplace that seems warmer than the rest of the room, objects around the bar moved, a woman in old-fashioned clothes spotted through the building, and, as her reported calling card, a line of bare footprints appearing across a freshly mopped floor when no living person could have passed.

What Visit Natchez publishes is atmosphere and a title: its Echoes of Longwood event is a lantern-lit ghost tour of "the South's most mysterious mansion" and "one of America's most hauntingly beautiful homes," in its own event copy. A house left unfinished since 1861 does not need an invented resident, and none is supplied here.

Haunted today

Hountix lists 5 places in Natchez, MS. Seasonal attractions keep their own open dates, so check each business's own site before you go.

• Dunleith Historic Inn — haunted place, 84 Homochitto St, Natchez, MS 39120
• King's Tavern — haunted place, 613 Jefferson Street, Natchez, MS 39120
• Longwood — haunted place, 140 Lower Woodville Road, Natchez, MS 39120
• Natchez City Cemetery — haunted place, 2 Cemetery Rd, Natchez, MS 39120
• Stanton Hall — haunted place, 401 High Street, Natchez, MS 39120

Attraction stories

King's Tavern

King's Tavern publishes no lore about a real haunting on the pages collected, and its story here respects that: what its own site publishes today is food, and the haunting attached to it lives entirely in the ghost-tour and secondary accounts, labelled as such. The documented building, from its own account carried in search and set out in The history above: said to have been built in 1769 as a block house for Fort Panmure, from ship and flatboat timbers and sun-dried brick, long regarded as the oldest building in Natchez, with documentary evidence of its standing by at least 1805 on the Archives and History account. The National Trust account collected in search places it at 613 Jefferson Street, Natchez, MS 39120, and notes its present life of flatbreads and hand-crafted cocktails and regular mixology classes. Its current own homepage is fuller on that present life: Regina's Kitchen at King's Tavern, cooking classes with Chef Regina Charboneau — biscuit technique, Southern brunch, French and Italian classes among them — and Regina's Table dinners on Tuesday and Thursday nights, a set menu around seasonal ingredients, "like coming to Regina's home for a dinner party," at 613 Jefferson Street with phone 601-392-1756, all in its own collected text. Against that record, the secondary accounts report the Madeline legend set out in full in The legend above — the 1930s renovation, the skeletons said to have been found in a wall, the warmer fireplace, the moved objects and the bare footprints on a mopped floor — and one National Trust visitor review, quoted there, of a bottle cap that flew across a table. None of those reports appears on the tavern's own collected pages. Mississippi's oldest tavern building, cooking and dining in the present tense, with its ghost told by everyone except itself: that is King's Tavern's record, presented as such.

*Website: https://www.reginaskitchen.com/*

Longwood

The house, at 140 Lower Woodville Road on the Visit Natchez listing, is the largest octagonal house in the United States, designed in 1859 by Samuel Sloan for Haller Nutt, with 32 planned rooms of which only the nine basement rooms were finished, work halted in 1861 at the start of the Civil War and never resumed — "Nutt's Folly," in the name the Visit Natchez ghost-tour listing and the wider accounts use for it. Natchez Pilgrimage Tours, its operator, describes it in its year-round tours list as a museum home, c. 1860–1861, with the original furnishings and tools still intact, construction halted by the Civil War and never fully completed. The Smithsonian account adds what a visitor actually sees: from the first floor up through the third, the house remains an incomplete, empty shell just as the workmen left it in 1861, which provides an opportunity to see a mid-19th-century house under construction, and the Pilgrimage Garden Club's restorations began from gardens in which no visible surface signs of the original plan remained. The Nutt family's own tenure — Haller dying in the basement home in 1864, Julia living there until 1897, the family holding it until 1968 — is set out in The history above. Its after-dark life is the one formal ghost product: Echoes of Longwood: Ghosts in the Octagon, a lantern-lit ghost tour on Friday and Saturday evenings at 7:00 p.m. from March 13 to April 11, 2026, tickets $25, "step into the shadows of the South's most mysterious mansion" in Visit Natchez's own event copy, with comfortable shoes, curiosity and courage as its listed what-to-bring. No named spirit is published for Longwood in any source collected here, and this story invents none: an octagonal mansion frozen mid-build since 1861, toured by lantern light, is its whole record.

*Website: http://www.natchezpilgrimage.com/*