The Grieved Slave at Grice-Neely House

Ghosts seem to follow Cathi Bunn around in Olde Towne. When she and her family lived at the house at 418 Crawford Street, for instance, the sound of violin music often was heard wafting from the attic, although the mystery musician was never found. Cathi, a vivacious young woman who directed the annual Ghost Walks for a number of years, says a visiting aunt was awakened in the house one night and witnessed an "animated, but silent, conversation between two seafarers". There also was the recurring phenomenon of the chandelier. Its lights would frequently turn on and burn brightly by themselves, after having been turned off. Electricians could offer no plausible explanation.

Then, in 1987, the Bunns moved to the Grice-Neely house at 202 North Street. The first portion of this English basement home is said to have been built sometime between 1750 and 1760, and it still contains some original wooden-pegged rafters. Curiously, a well-worn tombstone serves as a step in front of the house. It once marked the grave of an infant who was buried somewhere in the yard, although Cathi has never found the exact location. Grice-Neely has been restored to its previous splendor and evokes the atmosphere of New Orleans through the exquisite grill work of its wrought iron balcony and its graceful staircase.

Interestingly, there is a place on the rear facade of the building where a rather large window has been bricked over. Cathi says that in the 1850s a medium held a reading in the house and told the owners that when the next person living there died, they should be lowered out of this window and then it should be taken out and paved over with brick. By doing this, the family would forever ward off evil spirits. And apparently the family carried out the medium's direction to the letter.

Cathi became personally acquainted with the resident ghost of the house in a somewhat frightening manner. "I was all alone one night," she recalls, "and I decided to take a nice hot bath. I left the door slightly ajar, and I was enjoying myself, soaking, when I heard footsteps in the hallway outside. I said, 'Oh, no, there goes my peace and quiet. My husband and the kids are back.' But it wasn't them.

"The footsteps were distinct. It sounded like someone with no shoes on. It came right up to the bathroom door and then stopped. It threw a shadow across the doorway. Oh, man, I can tell you, I was scared. Then the steps continued, which was quite strange, because there was a solid wall where it kept walking! It took me a long time before I felt comfortable in the house alone again."

Her teenage daughter, Jennifer, also has experienced the "presence". One night she was doing her homework on her bed when it started to shake violently. She thought her younger brother was playing a trick on her, but she looked under the bed and around the room and there was no one there. "I got out of the room and didn't go back that night," she says.

Cathi adds that earlier tenants of the house also met the ghost—one of them face to face. "A college student was staying in what is now Jennifer's room," she says. "One night he woke up to find a black man standing at the foot of the bed with what the student called 'a puzzled look' on his face. Then he just dissolved, like a mist." A woman tenant once saw the same apparition standing on the circular staircase in the house. Then she realized she could see right through him!

There have been numerous other sightings. One resident was shaving, when he saw a black man standing behind him in the mirror's reflection. Again, the vision disappeared without a trace. Once a workman in the house saw a man peering into a living room window one cold February day. He didn't think much about it until later when he remembered the man wasn't wearing a shirt. Cathi says one of her tenants was so frightened by the sounds of someone running across the attic floor above his room he wanted to keep a gun by his bed. "What's up there you can't shoot," she told him, "because I think it's already dead!"

In her efforts to track down the origins of the spirit, and why it is there, Cathi learned of a legend that clearly fits the description of what has been seen and heard in the house. It is, she believes, the ghost of a slave named Jemmy, who was stabbed to death in the early 1800s by his master, who was having an affair with Jemmy's wife.

He periodically reappears, Cathi believes, in search of his long lost love.