ALLEN HOUSE Historic House — 705 N Main Street, Monticello, Drew County County, Arkansas Status: Status unknown · Access: Access unknown Dossier: https://haunthunt.com/place/allen-house-monticello-arkansas/ Historic house in Monticello; research record. A historic house in Monticello, Arkansas, Allen House is filed here for what the record attaches to it. Historic house in Monticello; research record. HauntHunt files it with haunted places. Ask the file who haunts it and it answers: Ladell Allen Bonner; Allen “Duke” Bonner. The dossier holds 2 reported claims and 2 legends, every one filed as account rather than fact. Visitor status is unverified; confirm before making the trip. On Christmas night 1948, while her mother's annual holiday party filled the downstairs of the house on North Main Street in Monticello, Arkansas, Ladell Allen was upstairs in the master bedroom, dying of poison. She had taken mercury cyanide — by local account purchased at the Hyatt Drug Store — and she died a week later in a hospital two doors down. She was the middle daughter of the man who built the house. What the family did next is the detail the legend is built on: Ladell's mother had her room sealed. The explanation she gave around town, preserved by later owners, was that the room needed keeping her daughter in — Ladell was causing disturbances in the house, and the door stayed shut for years. The haunting, in other words, is documented not as an event but as a renovation. THE DOCUMENTED RECORD Joe Lee Allen, a Monticello businessman, built the Queen Anne house about 1906 for his wife Catty and their daughters — Lonnie Leigh, Ladell, and Loui; the house itself was at some point moved across Main Street to its present lot, ivy and magnolias and all. Ladell's 1948 suicide is the record's fixed point. Half a century later the house passed to the family of author Mark Spencer, who in 2007 moved in aware of its reputation, then found, wedged under the attic floorboards, a cache of Ladell's love letters — a secret romance that supplied the motive the town had been missing for sixty years. Spencer published the account as A Haunted Love Story in 2012, and the house now has the unusual distinction of a haunting with a published bibliography. WHAT THE LEGEND SAYS The story the town tells assigns the haunting a cast larger than the death register. Ladell is the center — footsteps on the stairs, doors that will not stay shut, apparitions in the rooms her mother sealed — and the retellings add her son, remembered as Allen 'Duke' Bonner, whose own sad ending the lore attaches to the same address. The Encyclopedia of Arkansas, which keeps the state's ghost file soberly, records the footsteps and manifestations as allegation: reported, persistent, unverified. WHAT WITNESSES FILED Spencer's account — he arrived a skeptic, by his telling — runs to faceless phantoms, a doppelganger spirit, disembodied writing, and eventually a claimed census of six resident spirits, Ladell chief among them. Monticello residents had been filing lesser versions for decades: unexplained doors, sounds, a woman in the windows of a house that sat empty through long stretches. The University of Arkansas's folklore collection records the same set — doors, writing, apparitions — attributed to Ladell and her son. Investigations and tours have kept the reports coming; the house now opens for them by appointment. WHAT REMAINS The Allen House keeps the rarest thing in the archive: a haunting with a paper trail of its own. The letters are real — Ladell's handwriting under the floor, the affair the town never knew — and the sealed room is attested by the people who opened it decades later. The house still stands on Main Street, turreted and gingerbreaded, looking exactly like the kind of place a small town would assign a ghost. What walked those rooms after Christmas 1948 is a matter the file leaves where the Encyclopedia of Arkansas leaves it: filed, footnoted, visited, and unproven. FILED CLAIMS — 2 on record, reported not verified · [Documented legend] haunting: The Encyclopedia of Arkansas records alleged footsteps and manifestations associated with Ladelle Allen. Allen House wears the claim the way old houses do: visibly, and without comment. 'Ghost Legends' preserves the telling; the record keeps it filed where it belongs, as lore. The haunting claim is now part of the site's identity, filed alongside the documented history. source: Ghost Legends (https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/ghost-legends-2651/) · [Documented legend] objects moving: The university collection recounts unexplained doors, writing and apparitions attributed to Ladell and her son. The figure answers to Ladell Allen Bonner; Allen “Duke” Bonner in the retellings. Allen House wears the claim the way old houses do: visibly, and without comment. 'Arkansas Legends and Lore Appendix' preserves the telling; the record keeps it filed where it belongs, as lore. The anomalies are minor and stubborn — which is exactly why they're still in the record. source: Arkansas Legends and Lore Appendix (https://uark.pressbooks.pub/afta/back-matter/legendappendix/) SOURCES — 2 cited · Ghost Legends — Central Arkansas Library System https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/ghost-legends-2651/ · Arkansas Legends and Lore Appendix — University of Arkansas Libraries https://uark.pressbooks.pub/afta/back-matter/legendappendix/ — HauntHunt is a research archive. Claims are filed as reported — documented where sources exist, marked as folklore or unverified where they do not. Methodology: https://haunthunt.com/methodology/ · Corrections: https://haunthunt.com/report/