Bulloch Hall

Docents and visitors at Bulloch Hall describe lights flickering inside the house after it has closed, figures in Civil War-era clothing at the upstairs windows, a woman in white glimpsed on the staircase, unexplained piano notes drifting from empty rooms and footsteps in the upper halls after closing, along with odd photographs taken at a window. The best-known legend is of a young enslaved girl who lit the candles in the house after dark and is said to have been found dead in the well behind the mansion; her spirit is said to communicate by flickering the lights or putting out candles. Guides also link some sightings to Mittie Bulloch herself. Bulloch Hall went up in 1839, a white-columned Greek Revival house built for Major James Stephens Bulloch, one of Roswell's founding families. Like most Southern plantation houses of its era, it depended on the labor of the enslaved people who built it, worked its grounds, and ran its household, a history the estate has only recently begun to reckon with openly. In 1853, the Bullochs' daughter Martha "Mittie" married Theodore Roosevelt Sr. in the home, making it the maternal ancestral seat of a future U.S. president, and the house survived the Civil War as a Union barracks while Sherman's troops occupied Roswell in 1864.