King's Tavern, on Jefferson Street in Natchez, Mississippi, has stood since the 1760s and is counted the oldest building in town. It went up as a block house for the British at nearby Fort Panmure, and with no sawmill on that frontier its builders made do with sun-dried bricks, beams from scrapped sailing ships, and barge boards from the flatboats that floated cargo down the Ohio and Mississippi. Boatmen could not take a flatboat back upriver against the current, so the last thing they sold at Natchez was the boat itself. Then they walked home, at least as far as Nashville, up the Old Natchez Trace.
In 1789 a New Yorker named Richard King bought the block house and opened a tavern and inn at the Natchez end of the Trace. It was a stage stop and the town's mail station too. The boatmen drank and slept there before the long walk north, and the bandits who preyed on them came back to spend what they had stolen. The worst were the Harpe brothers, who killed for bloodlust rather than money. A posse ran down Micajah "Big" Harpe in Kentucky in 1799 and set his head on a pole at a crossroads. His brother Wiley joined the Sam Mason gang, then killed Mason for a $2,000 reward in 1803, carried the head in to claim it, and was recognised in the crowd and hanged. With steamboats running upriver, the Trace traffic faded, and around 1817 King sold up. The tavern became a private home for about 150 years.
The ghost is Madeline. The story goes that she was a young serving girl at the tavern who became Richard King's mistress, and that his wife, learning of the affair, stabbed her to death or had her killed. According to Natchez locals, the skeletons of three people, two men and a woman, turned up in the wall behind the fireplace during renovations in the 1930s, along with a jewelled Spanish dagger. No one has named the men; the town decided long ago that the woman was Madeline. Staff and guests have since reported faces in the mirrors, warm spots on an empty bed upstairs, a baby crying in an empty room, unseen hands pushing them or pulling their hair, and a tall figure in a top hat by the fireplace.
In the 1970s the Natchez Pilgrimage Garden Club bought and restored the building, and it became a restaurant. In 2013 the chef Regina Charboneau and her husband Doug took it over, added a wood-burning oven and poured small-batch liquor and craft cocktails. As of 2022 the tavern was closed and up for sale.
Other places on the map within a couple of hours.
