Allen House

The architect Sylvester Hotchkiss built this Queen Anne house on North Main Street in 1906 for Joe Lee Allen and his family. In December 1948 their middle daughter, Ladell, recently divorced and back home caring for her widowed mother, took mercury cyanide in an upstairs bedroom; she died a week later, as 1949 began. Decades afterwards an owner lifting a floorboard in the attic found a hidden stack of more than eighty love letters, written to and from a married man she had known since school, which is where the story of a forbidden romance comes from. The house is a private home today, and its owners open it for guided historic tours by appointment and for events, including a tour each October built around its ghost stories. A dozen investigation teams have worked the house, and several television programmes have filmed there. If you or someone you know is struggling, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.