Description:

<p><span style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Falcon Rest Mansion and Gardens in McMinnville, Tennessee, looks like a gracious Victorian showplace by day, but its long, twisting past has left a lingering reputation as one of the state’s friendlier haunted homes. The house’s story weaves together Gilded Age ambition, decades as a rural hospital and nursing home, years of abandonment, and a modern revival that seems only to have stirred its resident spirits into making themselves known.</span></p><h2><span style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Gilded Age dream house</span></h2><p><span style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In 1896, local industrialist Clay Faulkner, owner of the Mountain City Woolen Mills and a champion of modern comforts, built Falcon Rest on a rise above his factory at Faulkner Springs. The 10,000‑square‑foot mansion was considered one of the region’s finest Queen Anne–style homes, with solid brick walls, central heat, electric lights, and indoor plumbing at a time when many rural Tennesseans still relied on oil lamps and outhouses.</span></p><ol><li><span></span><span style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Faulkner lived here with his wife Mary and their five children, entertaining guests in a home that mixed ornate woodwork, stained glass, and up‑to‑date technology.</span></li><li><span></span><span style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Family lore says he wanted a showplace that proved a factory owner in a little Tennessee town could live as stylishly as any city magnate.</span></li></ol><p><span style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Local tradition holds that Mary’s mother moved into the home around 1900 and died there two years later, planting one of the earliest seeds of later ghost stories about a “little old lady” on the second floor. Clay himself died in 1916 after two decades in the house, a date many enthusiasts point to when they speculate about whose footsteps and cigar smoke people still encounter.</span></p><h2><span style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">From grand home to hospital</span></h2><p><span style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In 1929, more than a decade after Clay’s death, a physician bought the mansion and turned it into a combined residence and medical practice, a transition that fundamentally reshaped the building’s atmosphere. He practiced there until his own death in 1941, treating country patients in rooms that had once hosted family gatherings and formal Gilded Age dinners.</span></p><ol><li><span></span><span style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In the mid‑1940s, the property became Faulkner Springs Hospital and Sanitarium, later expanding into a hospital and nursing home that served the McMinnville area until 1968.</span></li><li><span></span><span style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Generations remember being born there or visiting elderly relatives in the very rooms now shown on tours.</span></li></ol><p><span style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Those hospital and nursing‑home years did more than any ghost story to cement Falcon Rest’s eerie reputation. Births, deaths, illnesses, and long twilight declines all unfolded inside a house built for comfort and display, and local residents later looked back on those decades as the time when Falcon Rest shifted from simply “the Faulkner mansion” to a place where strong emotions might cling.</span></p><p><span style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">When a more modern medical facility opened in McMinnville, the doctor closed the hospital in 1968, stripped out much of the interior woodwork in a failed attempt to demolish the stubborn brick structure, and then left it to sit empty for roughly fifteen years. By the early 1980s, Falcon Rest was literally a decaying “ghost of its former glory,” a hulking presence above the road with shattered windows and peeling paint that fueled rumors of hauntings among local teenagers.</span></p><h2><span style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Abandonment, restoration, and rising ghost lore</span></h2><p><span style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Restoration began after 1983, and in 1989 George and Charlien McGlothin bought the battered house at auction, committing themselves to a four‑year, largely do‑it‑yourself revival of the mansion. Their work eventually won national recognition for historic restoration and transformed Falcon Rest into a bed‑and‑breakfast, event venue, and tour destination.</span></p><ol><li><span></span><span style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Even before they arrived, locals whispered about a mysterious elderly woman sometimes glimpsed in upstairs windows or appearing in photographs, usually near the second‑floor rooms associated with Clay’s family.</span></li><li><span></span><span style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The McGlothins initially treated these tales as small‑town legend, more colorful than credible, until their own relatives and staff began reporting strange, consistent experiences inside the house.</span></li></ol><p><span style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Today, Falcon Rest leans into its combination of restored Victorian splendor and light‑hearted spookiness. Guests come for architecture, antiques, and gardens, but many also arrive hoping for a brush with the paranormal, encouraged by themed shows such as “Ghost at the Mansion” that retell the most famous stories in theatrical form.</span></p><h2><span style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The mansion’s most famous ghosts</span></h2><p><span style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The most commonly cited spirit is that of Clay Faulkner himself, whose former bedroom sits at the foot of the main staircase and remains a focus of ghost reports. Visitors and staff tell of footsteps on the stairs that stop right at the doorway, whistling with no visible source, the faint smell of cigar smoke drifting through otherwise empty halls, and objects that appear to move or fall in ways no one can quite explain.</span></p><ol><li><span></span><span style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Charlien’s elderly mother, a retired nurse and Sunday school teacher known in the family for her down‑to‑earth nature, reported hearing firm, measured steps climbing the staircase toward the room where she slept, only to have them halt at the threshold as if a courteous Victorian gentleman refused to intrude on a lady.</span></li><li><span></span><span style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">A young employee, the son of a preacher and an avowed skeptic, once came into the visitor center white‑faced after hanging Christmas decorations on the second floor, shaken by something he could not quite articulate beyond the feeling that he was not alone.</span></li></ol><p><span style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Another enduring episode centers on a large mirror in the dining room. For years it hung securely on a solid brick wall above a buffet, in the only spot in the mansion where two mirrors directly faced one another. One day, after a tour guide had joked that Falcon Rest had “inhabitants” rather than costumed reenactors, a loud crash sent staff hurrying back to the room, where they discovered that the mirror had somehow slid straight down, landing upright and unbroken on the floor as if lifted off its screws and set gently aside.</span></p><p><span style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Paranormal enthusiasts often point out a folk belief that facing mirrors can create a vortex of “negative energy,” and some say that a resident spirit may have intervened to break the alignment. The mirror was never re‑hung; it still rests in the dining room, an informal shrine to what staff describe as one of the mansion’s strangest but least threatening moments.</span></p><h2><span style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Doors, electronics, and “friendly” spirits</span></h2><p><span style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Many of Falcon Rest’s ghost stories share a theme: something or someone seems intent on making a presence known without causing harm. The dining room again plays a starring role in numerous accounts of mysteriously unlocked doors, puzzling both the McGlothins and their employees.</span></p><ol><li><span></span><span style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The house has multiple doors leading from the dining room to hallways and verandas, but the owners customarily keep them locked, in some cases rarely using them at all. More than once, the main veranda door has been found standing open despite having been locked the night before.</span></li><li><span></span><span style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">On another occasion, staff found an obscure back‑veranda door unlocked and open even though they did not realize anyone still had a key for that lock, prompting Charlien to quip that “nobody got in or out but the ghost.”</span></li></ol><p><span style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Electronic oddities add to the lore: lights that flicker or refuse to switch on until a frustrated worker gives up, then behave perfectly when another person tries; small objects that vanish from one spot and turn up in another; and unexplained glitches in modern equipment in certain rooms. Some tour participants report catching fleeting figures in photos—especially of an older woman on the second floor—only to find that no such person was present when the shot was taken.</span></p><p><span style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Despite the eerie incidents, those who live and work at Falcon Rest consistently describe its spirits as protective rather than malicious. Sensitive visitors have said that whatever lingers there feels curious and benevolent, as though Clay, his family, and perhaps a few long‑term patients still keep a watchful eye on the property’s comings and goings.</span></p><h2><span style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Falcon Rest today: tours, shows, and legends</span></h2><p><span style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Today, Falcon Rest operates as a historic mansion, gardens, and event venue where guests can tour the restored rooms, stay overnight, and attend interactive mystery and ghost‑themed shows. The owners offer regular historic tours that focus on architecture and social history, as well as programs like “Ghost at the Mansion” that recount the best‑known supernatural stories in a playful, scripted format designed for groups and school field trips.</span></p><ol><li><span></span><span style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The property’s materials often frame the question of hauntings with a wink: visitors are invited to hear the stories and “decide for yourself” whether Falcon Rest is truly haunted.</span></li><li><span></span><span style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">At the same time, local skeptics argue that the house’s past as a hospital simply makes people imagine spirits where there are none, a reminder that doubt is very much alive alongside belief.</span></li></ol><p><span style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Whether one treats the tales as literal truth, lingering energy from a century of intense human experiences, or simply good storytelling, Falcon Rest has embraced its dual identity as both meticulously restored Victorian landmark and gently haunted house. Visitors walk through rooms that once saw Gilded Age gatherings, surgeries and sickbeds, lonely patients, vandals and raccoons, and finally new life as a destination where history and haunting blur just enough to raise the hair on the back of the neck.</span></p><p><br></p>