The Grove

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.

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.

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.