Auburn

Duncan — planter, investor, eventually one of the wealthiest slaveholders in the South — added the symmetrical Greek Revival wings in the late 1830s, plus a temple-form billiard hall, a dairy, and the two-story brick kitchen and quarters at the rear. The National Register file preserves the uncomfortable ledger line intact: a fortune “in land and slaves,” alongside Duncan’s work for the American Colonization Society and the Unionist sympathies that sent him back to Pennsylvania when secession came.

The house itself became the template — its two-story portico predates the ones at the University of Virginia, the White House and Arlington, and Natchez’s mansion era copied it wholesale. Duncan’s descendants deeded the house and grounds to the city in 1911; the site became Duncan Park, the house a National Historic Landmark in 1974. The freestanding spiral staircase — one of a handful surviving in the country — still carries visitors between floors on nothing but its own geometry.

The 1812 letter survives because Weeks was proud of the arithmetic — the site, he wrote, combined “all the delight of romance, the pleasure of rurality, and the approach of sublimity,” a sales pitch the National Register nomination preserved whole.

The lore is proportional to the interior: apparitions reported on the upper floors and around the stair hall, a presence the tellings attach to the family that built the place. The file is candid about the mechanism — a house that kept nearly everything, including most of its original furnishings, invites the report that no one entirely left.

Natchez keeps dozens of haunted-house claims, and Auburn’s is the standard issue: figures, footsteps, the upper floors after the tour groups leave. What distinguishes the file is not the apparition but the staircase beneath it — the reports orbit the one architectural feature that made the house famous while its occupants were still alive to climb it.

Garden clubs and ghost tours both work the staircase; the reports are visitor-filed rather than keeper-filed, which is the standard provenance for antebellum hauntings.

Auburn stands in Duncan Park, open for tours, a municipal golf course where the plantation ran. The detached kitchen and quarters — the building’s other ledger — are restored and open too, which is more than the tour brochures of fifty years ago admitted.

The verdict is archival: the “most magnificent building in the Territory” documented its own ambition in Weeks’s letter and its own cost in Duncan’s slave schedules. Whatever walks the stair walks a house that kept its receipts.

Natchez puts Auburn on the spring Pilgrimage circuit alongside the town’s other pre-war houses — the city sells its antebellum inventory by the week, and Auburn anchors the architectural argument the brochures make.