PEEL MANSION House — Bentonville, Arkansas Status: Operating · Access: Open to public Dossier: https://haunthunt.com/place/peel-mansion-bentonville-arkansas/ Colonel Peel’s 1875 Italianate—Bentonville’s grand survivor. A house in Bentonville, Arkansas, Peel Mansion is filed here for what the record attaches to it. Colonel Peel’s 1875 Italianate—Bentonville’s grand survivor. The file’s recurring figure goes by a name, not a description: the peels. The dossier holds 2 reported claims, 1 legend and 1 documented fact, with the verified spine filed separately from the lore. The site is open to visitors. Samuel Peel built his wife a mansion because he'd promised he would. The Confederate colonel came out of the Civil War penniless, set up a law practice in northwest Arkansas, and told Mary Emaline he'd build her a house like the ones she'd grown up in back in Alabama. It took him a decade to make good — the Italianate villa at 400 South Walton Boulevard went up in 1875, a fourteen-room brick house with a three-story tower, sitting in sixty acres of apple orchards on the edge of a town that barely existed yet. Peel made it to Congress — the first native-born Arkansan to represent the state — and the mansion was the seat of the family's ascent: nine children, the orchards, the law practice, the political career. Mary died in 1902 and Samuel moved out the next year; the house passed through owners for eighty years, including a stint as an interiors showroom, until Walmart bought it in 1991 and donated it to the foundation that runs it now. The museum sits across from the Walmart Supercenter — the mansion of the congressman from the frontier facing the flagship of the empire that replaced the orchards. It's the most Bentonville juxtaposition possible: the house built on a promise, preserved by the company that built its headquarters in the fields around it. WHY THIS FILE MATTERS Peel Mansion is the archive's promise file — a house built because a Confederate veteran told his wife he'd give her Alabama back, preserved by the retail empire that grew up in its orchards. A mansion that outlasted the frontier keeps its tower — the file's suggestion being that Peel Mansion is Bentonville's origin story in miniature: the house was the ambition, and the town that grew around it was the result. FILED CLAIMS — 2 on record, reported not verified · [Documented legend] named ghost legend: The family is reportedly seen in the mansion. The Peels is the name the reports keep returning to. A house with Bentonville's history behind it gives the reports a setting that needs no exaggeration. It's a documented legend: the telling is real, the contents remain folklore. 'Peel Mansion' carries the account. A ghost with a name outlasts a ghost without one; the reports keep it employed. source: Peel Mansion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peel_Mansion) · [Anecdotal] apparition: Reported figures in the tower rooms. Peel Mansion wears the claim the way old houses do: visibly, and without comment. It's anecdotal evidence in the strictest sense — stories, repeated, unresolved. The figure remains the site's most-repeated sighting. The telling survives; the proof stays folklore. source: Peel Mansion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peel_Mansion) HISTORY — 1 documented facts · [1875] Built 1875; restored in the 1990s. The house's past is on record — this entry belongs to the verified layer of the site's file. The record holds it as fact — documented, not retold. The detail is preserved in 'Peel Mansion'. It's the sort of fact that gives the haunting reports their context. It remains the site's standing claim. SOURCES — 1 cited · Peel Mansion — Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peel_Mansion — 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/