Spotts-Coffman House
A historic house in Staunton, Virginia, Spotts-Coffman House is filed here for what the record attaches to it. Staunton landmark with a published haunting reputation. HauntHunt files it with haunting reports. 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.
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Is Spotts-Coffman House haunted?
The record holds 1 claim, 1 legend — filed as reported, not verified. The heaviest filing is classed documented legend. The archive documents the claim; it takes no position on the ghost.
The record — long form
The house at 22 South Coalter Street began as 'Little Kalorama,' built around 1860 on what had been the grounds of the Kalorama estate — Staunton's hilltop manor property, named in Greek for its fine view, whose manor had become the Virginia Female Institute. The builder was Margaret, a widowed daughter of congressman Daniel Sheffey's family, who raised the house for herself and her disabled daughter; her unmarried sister Ann Louisa joined them. In 1873 the sisters sold it to Henry P. Dickerson.
Grocery merchant John M. Spotts bought the house around 1900 and hired Staunton's prolific T.J. Collins firm to transform it — raised roofline, twin bay windows, carved foyer ceiling, a wrap porch, and a lit stained-glass window displaying the old house number. His daughter, born in 1897, grew up to be Mrs. Charlotte Coffman — the name the house now carries and the personality Staunton's ghost tours credit with staying on. Today the Society for Victorian Arts and Culture operates it as a period house museum.
Staunton's most haunted address
Tourism coverage calls the Spotts-Coffman House the most haunted house in Staunton, and the Victorian Ghostly Encounters tours build their Gospel Hill walks around it, pairing the house's mourning-era artifacts — post-mortem photography, spirit mirrors — with accounts tied to Charlotte Coffman and other former occupants. The specific claims stay in the register of reported experience: presences felt, encounters described by guides and guests, no documented tragedy to anchor them.
The file's value is the layering the tours exploit: a house that has been a widow's refuge, a merchant's showpiece, and now a museum of Victorian life — the kind of address where the architecture alone supplies the atmosphere.
The record of claims
Tourism describes ghostly encounters linked to former occupants. The house's rooms are where the accounts concentrate — old houses keep their stories in the walls they were built around. It's a documented legend: the telling is real, the contents remain folklore. The reports keep the place on every haunted list it qualifies for.
Tourism describes ghostly encounters linked to former occupants. The house's rooms are where the accounts concentrate — old houses keep their stories in the walls they were built around. It's a documented legend: the telling is real, the contents remain folklore. The account appears in 'Staunton Haunted Locations'. The retelling is the record now — the legend metabolized the facts long ago.
Sources on file
- 01Staunton Haunted LocationsVisit Staunton · tourism · A3
Field notes & open questions
Discovery or enrichment; earliest report and independent corroboration remain under research. Confidence measures source provenance, not supernatural reality.