MORDINGTON
Historic House — South Frederica Canterbury Road, Frederica, Delaware
Status: Status unknown · Access: Access unknown
Dossier: https://haunthunt.com/place/mordington-frederica-delaware/

Historic property associated with an enslaved-girl apparition story.

A historic house in Frederica, Delaware, Mordington is filed here for what the record attaches to it. Historic property associated with an enslaved-girl apparition story. HauntHunt files it with haunting reports. Ask the file who haunts it and it answers: Tom's Daughter. The dossier holds 1 reported claim and 1 legend, every one filed as account rather than fact. Visitor status is unverified; confirm before making the trip.

Mordington is the mill seat's mansion — the Georgian brick house James Douglass's family built about 1790 on the dam of McColley's Pond, overlooking the Murderkill River headwaters. Its double-pile plan was unusual for Delaware; the Flemish-bond facade has barely changed since the eighteenth century. The name is family legend — said to come from a Scottish ancestor made Baron Mordington by Charles I.
The house was a slave plantation. James Douglass's runaway ads in the Delaware Gazette record two escapes — Ben in 1796, and nineteen-year-old Will in 1799, who took a bateau and rowed himself free. The National Register nomination records a darker family story: an enslaved woman who jumped from the third-story attic window after being punished. The mills ground grain and smelted bog iron; the pond, the millstones, and the house are what remain.
The file keeps Mordington: the Douglass mansion, the millpond industry, the runaway ads, and the attic window — a Georgian house that the Historic American Buildings Survey documented in 1934 and that the National Register listed among Delaware's first.
Mordington is the archive's mill-seat file — the Georgian mansion, the bog-iron mills, and the escapes the ads recorded.

WHY THIS FILE MATTERS
Mordington is the archive's mill-seat file — the 1790 Georgian house, the Douglass mills, and the enslaved people whose escapes the newspapers document.
A mansion built on enslaved labor keeps its attic — the file's suggestion being that Mordington's hold is the evidence: the ads, the window, and the house that preserves both the wealth and its cost.

FILED CLAIMS — 1 on record, reported not verified
· [Local folklore] apparition: Archives retells a pond and dining-room apparition called Tom's Daughter. Mordington in Frederica, Delaware is the kind of old house where every sound eventually gets a name. It circulates as local folklore — the kind communities keep rather than verify. The account appears in 'Mordington — Haunted Delaware exhibit'. The apparition is the file's anchor — every other report orbits it.
  source: Mordington — Haunted Delaware exhibit (https://www.flickr.com/photos/delawarepublicarchives/52375845222/in/album-72177720302319003)

SOURCES — 1 cited
· Mordington — Haunted Delaware exhibit — Delaware Public Archives
  https://www.flickr.com/photos/delawarepublicarchives/52375845222/in/album-72177720302319003

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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/