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WEB EXTRA: An inside perspective

By Sheryl Smith-Rodgers

Lights flicker on and off by themselves. Cigarette smoke scents an empty room. Shadowy figures move down hallways. We’re not scared. Even though it’s October—think goblins, ghosts, and ghouls—we’re game to explore Jefferson, which has a reputation as one of the most haunted places in Texas.

The reported apparitions—bearded men in black coats and mournful women in flowing skirts—likely hark to Jefferson’s heyday as a 19th-Century river port.

In those days, steamboats from the Mississippi—loaded with cargo and passengers—would stop in New Orleans and Shreveport, then churn north to the Jefferson’s wharf. Commerce thrived, and many residents grew rich. They built magnificent homes and a fashionable downtown district resembling that of New Orleans.

Jefferson’s prosperity didn’t last, though. Steamboating nationwide eventually began to give way to the rise of railroads. By 1885, more than half of the town’s population had moved away.

But what lingers in Jefferson are ghostly encounters, like at the Jefferson General Store, built in the 1860s as a hardware store. Here, ghost encounters happen so frequently that the clerks have gotten used to it.

Mysterious things also occur at the Claiborne House Bed and Breakfast, which was built in the mid-1860s. 

At the Urquhart House of Eleven Gables, an 1890s Queen Anne-style home that’s now a bed and breakfast, we join a crowd waiting to tour the mansion with Jodi Breckenridge, Jefferson’s “Ghost Lady,” who leads after-dark excursions to haunted spots around town.

We’re amply fortified to experience “Terror on the Bayou,” an after-dark Halloween event held along the Big Cypress Bayou. At the concession, we get tickets for both haunted attractions: the Runaway Fright Train, a spooky ride through the Piney Woods, complete with costumed characters, and the Creepy Screamin’ Corn Maze, where masked monsters jump out at us while we search for the exit.

On our last night, we sleep fitfully in our upstairs room at the Jefferson Hotel, which was built in 1851 as a cotton warehouse.  Back home, my husband James finally broaches the subject a week later. Uh … did I see anything that night in Room 19? 

See the full article in the October 2008 issue.

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