THE GROVE
Historic House — 405 Moseley St, Jefferson, Texas
Status: Operating · Access: Open to public
Dossier: https://haunthunt.com/place/the-grove-jefferson-texas/

Historic house in Jefferson; research record.

A historic house in Jefferson, Texas, The Grove is filed here for what the record attaches to it. Historic house in Jefferson; research record. The presences in its file go unnamed: the grove ghosts, the record says. The dossier holds 3 reported claims, 2 legends and 1 documented fact, with the verified spine filed separately from the lore. The site is open to visitors.

In 1882, a man named T.C. Burke bought an 1861 cypress house in a Jefferson pecan grove, moved his family in, and moved them back out within a month. The only explanation he left the record was five words: "We can't live there." It is the earliest documented complaint in a file that now runs past 140 years.
The house — formally the Stilley–Young House, on the old Stephen Smith land grant — was built in 1861 by Frank and Minerva Stilley, Louisiana emigrants who wrapped a Greek Revival frame in French Creole detail. It is on the National Register of Historic Places, is a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark, and was named by This Old House to its list of the twelve most haunted houses in America.

THE DOCUMENTED RECORD
Jefferson was a riverport before it was a haunted town, and the Grove's deed history is better kept than most. The land passed through town co-founders Daniel and Lucy Alley and lawyer Amos Morrill before the Stilleys built. In 1885 the house was home to Charlie Young, a formerly enslaved man who owned a barber shop and several Jefferson businesses — an unusual landlord for the era, and one of the few residents whose ghost gets a name.
The house's long twentieth century belongs to Miss Louise Young, who lived there from the early 1900s into the 1980s. She told friends about the "haints" for decades, then took a darker view in old age: she had a security light installed because she saw figures in the garden that vanished when the porch light came on, and she called Jefferson police several times a week to report an intruder the officers never found.
The file also inherits a crime a few blocks away. During Reconstruction, in the episode the Handbook of Texas calls the Stockade Case, a mob pulled carpetbagger George W. Smith and four freedmen from the Lafayette Street jail and shot them — the violent backdrop against which Jefferson's haunting economy later grew.

WHAT WITNESSES FILE
The Grove's spirits are unusually well catalogued. A lady in a white dress walks the same route through the house each time she is seen — current owner Mitchel Whitington believes she is Minerva Stilley. A man in a dark suit strides through the garden's lily beds as if late for an appointment, laughing before he vanishes. A mischievous presence in the den is described as particular fond of the ladies, and a protective figure with a long white beard is said to appear only to strangers, never to owners.
One report survives as an object lesson. Whitington had been given Charlie Young's shaving set — mirror, mug, razor — minus its brush. A brush matching the maker and period later turned up in the house; the owners' reading, quoted with some fondness, is that Charlie had completed the set.

WHAT REMAINS
The Whitingtons bought the house in the early 2000s and have written its dossier themselves — Mitchel's The Grove: An East Texas Haunting is now a primary source for the file. HGTV's If Walls Could Talk, William Shatner's Weird or What? in 2012, and Penn & Teller: Bullshit! have all filmed here; Texas Monthly put it on its eight scariest places list in October 2009.
Asked if the house deserves its title as Texas's most haunted, Whitington offered the file its most even-tempered line: "I don't know — how do you measure something like that? ... The house is full of love." It remains a private residence, open for scheduled tours.

FILED CLAIMS — 3 on record, reported not verified
· [Documented legend] haunting: Texas Highways recounts The Grove's traditions of apparitions and unexplained footprints — the haunting claims attached to one of Jefferson's most storied houses. The Grove sits in a town that sells its ghosts openly; even so, the house's reports predate the tourism. The file stays open on it. The reports keep the address on the map.
  source: 5 of the Most Haunted Locations in Texas (https://texashighways.com/travel-news/5-of-the-most-haunted-locations-in-texas/)
· [Investigation claim] apparition: Reported figures move through The Grove — apparitions in the rooms of a house that has stood in Jefferson since the steamboat era made the town rich. The claims are lore, but the setting is documented: a house that watched Jefferson rise and empty keeps its own witnesses. The reports keep the address on the map.
  source: The Grove (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grove_(Jefferson,_Texas))
· [Documented legend] named ghost legend: The Grove's ghosts are reportedly active — apparitions, cold spots, and the unexplained footprints Texas Highways documented in its retelling. Jefferson calls itself one of Texas's most haunted towns, and The Grove is the address the claim is usually illustrated with. The lore keeps its witness. The claim holds its place in the ledger.
  source: The Grove (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grove_(Jefferson,_Texas))

HISTORY — 1 documented facts
· [1861] Built 1861; the ghost-tour reputation is documented. The Grove's documented history is the record the rest of the file stands on. It's verified history: the dossier's load-bearing detail. Sources including 'The Grove' carry the record. The date is part of the site's documented spine. The report keeps its place in the record.

SOURCES — 2 cited
· 5 of the Most Haunted Locations in Texas — Texas Highways / Texas Department of Transportation
  https://texashighways.com/travel-news/5-of-the-most-haunted-locations-in-texas/
· The Grove — Wikipedia
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grove_(Jefferson,_Texas)

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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.
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