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Richardson-Owens-Thomas House
One of the finest house museums in the South is the Richardson-Owens-Thomas house
which stands on Oglethorpe Square at Abercorn and President Streets. It has
been a house museum since 1950. Three generations of the same family lived here
and everything on display is original to the house.
You will be surprised at just how modern this house is. It was built in 1818
for Richard Richardson by William Jay, a twenty-year-old architect from Bath, England.
This Regency style structure features iron supports, a slate roof and twenty-three
inch thick walls.
This house has featured in five different books about hauntings. All the hauntings
seem to indicate that its old inhabitants are still there. The last owner
of the house was Margaret Thomas who died in 1949 and left the house to the Telfair
Museum of Art.
Margaret's bedroom faces the iron veranda located on the President Street side of
the home. She was born in that bedroom in 1860 and died eighty-nine years
later in the same bed. That bed is still in the room and Margaret still abides
there. Her spirit is still in the house, along with a few of her ancestors.
Margaret is seen quite often. She is seen in the front parlor and people who
live in the townhouses on State Street or stay in the President's Quarters nearby
see a lady walking around the garden at night. It's not unusual to see a lady
walking in her garden after dark, but this is a museum: no one lives there.
Margaret Thomas spent half of her life in this house as an old maid. She rented
out the entire upper floor, the carriage house, and the slave quarters as apartments,
and well into the 1980's the Telfair did the same thing for income.
There are many ghost and apparition stories about his home. One includes Jim
Williams, the central figure of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. He
had a friend who occupied the entire upper floor of this home in the early Sixties.
Jim and his business partner were visiting and sitting in the front room on the
top floor overlooking the square. There were three men in the room when suddenly
a man materialized in the back of the room. He just came out of nowhere.
Jim said the fourth man was an equestrian of the nineteenth century, wearing tall
black riding boots, jodhpurs, a swallow-tail jacket and carrying a riding crop in
his hand. Jim watched the apparition move back and forth across the room when
abruptly the ghost stopped, turned and walked right through the couch their host
was sitting on. The ghost then came and hovered over Jim like he was
interested in him. Then he slowly vanished.
Many other tales of seeing, hearing and 'feeling' ghosts have been told about this
home. |
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