McRaven House

This house was built in three pieces across fifty years, and you can walk from one century into the next.

Andrew Glass built the first part around 1797 in a town then called Walnut Hills, now Vicksburg, Mississippi. It was a way station for pioneers heading for Nashville along the Natchez Trace to the Mississippi River, and it consisted of a kitchen with a single room above it. That survives as the Pioneer Section.

In 1836 Sheriff Stephen Howard bought the place and added the middle dining room and the bedroom above it, in Empire style. His wife Mary Elizabeth Howard died in childbirth in that middle bedroom in late August 1836. John H. Bobb bought the house in 1849 and built the rest of it in Greek Revival, and the National Register lists it as the Bobb House.

During the Siege of Vicksburg in 1863 McRaven was used as a Confederate field hospital.

The present name comes from the street. It was McRaven Street when the house took the name; it is Harrison Street now. The house has been on the Mississippi Department of Archives and History's Historic Preservation list since 8 January 1978.

It is widely called the most haunted house in Mississippi, and that reputation is what draws most visitors: CNN Travel sent a self-described skeptic to spend the night ghost hunting there for its America's Spookiest Places feature.

The architecture is the better reason. Three builders, three styles, three periods, one continuous structure, plus a war that came through the garden. Very few houses let you read that much history by walking from room to room.