Allen House

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.

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.

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.

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.