The Duff Green B&B Investigation

Location: Vicksburg, Mississippi

Date: Sunday, November 10, 2002

Moon Phase: Half

Solar Weather: unknown

Investigators present: Hillary M., Robert H., Paul M.

Equipment: Olympus C-3000 digital camera, RCA digital voice recorder, Sony digital video camera with Nightshot, Pentax PC-550 35mm camera, Extech EMF meter, Olympus 2000 Digital Voice Recorder, Sony Hi-8 Cam, Olympus C-4000 Digital Camera, Trifield EMF meter

History: The mansion was built by Duff Green, who was a successful and wealthy businessman and merchant, a decade before the Civil War. He moved to Vicksburg from Fredericksburg, Virginia in 1847. In 1855 he married a lady from Vicksburg by the name of Mary Blake. Her parents gave them the land as a wedding gift, and a year later, in 1856, he started construction on the home.
 During the Civil War, the house was used as a hospital for both Union and Confederate soldiers. They put the Confederate hospital on the main floor (second) and the Union hospital on the third floor. The reasoning behind this was so if they shelled the house, they would kill their own men first. At that time, the Green family moved out of the house and into caves that were dug out on the property. Most of the citizens of Vicksburg lived in caves during the siege, as the battle dragged on for several months.
 When the war was over, the mansion was used short-term as a soldier's home. Then the Green's moved back into the house and they lived here till Mr. Green died in 1880. Two separate families owned the home between then and 1944, when the Salvation Army purchased the house for around $3,000. The Salvation Army used the home as their local headquarters for 34 years. The Sharp family bought the home in 1985, and within two years, it was restored and turned into a bed & breakfast.

 There are four guest rooms at the Duff Green. They are located on the lower level, or street level. The house is elevated, so the main level, which contains the dining room, kitchen, library, and ballroom, is actually on the second floor. The owner's quarters, where the Green's bedrooms would have been, is actually the third floor. The area that is now the guest rooms used to be the kitchen, pantry, and female slaves quarters. During the war, the Dixie Room (which used to be the kitchen area) was used as an operating room, mostly for amputations. The room directly across the hall, the Confederate Room, was used to store the amputated limbs. It is rumored that at one point during the war, the pile of limbs actually reached the ceiling of that room. The room that is now the Magnolia Room, used to be Duff Green's private office.
 These rooms are now beautifully restored and very comfortable. The deep rich colors of the walls, and the unique style of each room are exceptionally inviting. So inviting, that it seems that even some past residents of the mansion find it very hard to leave. You see, the owner and employees of the Duff Green firmly believe it is haunted.
They have good reason to believe this, because besides their own experiences, they have heard many stories from overnight guests. The Dixie Room seems to be the most active, since the same sighting has been witnessed by over twenty unrelated guests. This sighting involves a man, with amputated legs, warming himself beside the fire in a rocking chair. Other strange things have happened in the room as well. Charles, an employee, has turned the lights off in this room, and come back minutes later to find them on. Dorothy, another employee, recently cleaned up soot and coal from in front of the fireplace in the Dixie Room after a recent Halloween tour. The strange thing about this is that it's a gas fireplace, which hadn't even been used since the winter before!
 At least two other apparitions have been seen in the building. Both of them are believed to have been Mrs. Green, the original "lady of the house." One sighting was witnessed by Mr. Sharp, who watched a woman float across the dining room. The other sighting was witnessed by Dorothy, who spoke to a woman sitting at the dining room table, who seemed to be waiting for breakfast to be served. When Dorothy turned around, there was no trace of the woman.
 Dorothy had another scare early one morning. When she entered the main hallway at around 6 a.m., she heard band music, and a party taking place in the darkened ballroom! When she noticed shadows moving within the room, she scrambled for the lights, but they wouldn't turn on! Suddenly, the music stopped, and the lights turned on. There was no one there.
 Charles, as well as a former cook, has been touched on the shoulder while cooking breakfast. Charles said that he turned around, expecting to see Mr. Sharp, but no one was in the room with him. This happens quite frequently. Dorothy theorizes that it is Mrs. Green checking up on "her employees", making sure that they are working diligently.
Other strange experiences include employees hearing voices when no one else is in the house, guests hearing a baby crying in the Magnolia Room, lights turning on and off by themselves, items being moved around, and both employees and guests seeing movement out of the corners of their eyes.

Investigation: Robert, Paul and I arrived at the Duff Green at around 5:30 p.m. Robert checked into the Dixie Room, and Paul and I chose the Magnolia Room, since these rooms tend to have the most activity. Soon after, we went into town to have dinner. When we returned around 6:30, we were shown a video of a news segment recently done on the mansion, and taken on a detailed historical tour. We did get several stationary orb pictures during the tour, but did not record any strange EMF readings. During the tour, we did notice a strange noise in the hallway downstairs, but were unable to identify it.
 At 7:30, I set up my infrared video camera in the ballroom upstairs, I set up my recorder in the Magnolia Room, and we all went into the Dixie Room to begin a recording session. Robert pulled both the blinds down to block out any light from outside. Again, we obtained some stationary orb pictures, but nothing extraordinary. When we left the Dixie Room, I commented on how warm it was. Robert stated that he had turned the air conditioner on, and we felt cool air coming out of the vent, but the room didn't seem to get any cooler.
 We moved into the Camellia Room at 8:05, but did not get any results. At 8:20 p.m., we moved into the Magnolia Room and began recording. As we were moving to that room, we suddenly heard the strange, unidentified noise in the hallway again. Frankly, it caused all of us to almost jump right out of our boots! But at least we were now able to identify the noise as coming from the heating system.
 Once in the Magnolia Room, we sat down for a few minutes and discussed the decorating of the charming mansion, and admitted to each other that we didn't really "feel" any paranormal activity. The place simply seemed very comfortable, and did not possess the usual heavy atmosphere of places that are actively haunted. About a minute after we started our recorders, I asked if Duff Green was with us. I snapped a picture, and got two big, bright orbs in the middle of the room, and one small one against the wall. I actually tracked these orbs in three consecutive pictures, at two different times in the recording. About five minutes into the recording, we began to hear strange noises in the bathroom. We turned on the lights to investigate, and found the noises to simply be the plumbing.
At 8:48 p.m., I left a recorder running in the Magnolia Room, and we went into the Confederate Room, leaving the doorway to the hallway open. Almost immediately, we began to hear noises at the end of the hall, around the desk area. A few minutes later, Robert asked whoever was with us to please touch one of us. I then felt a slight, pinpoint of pressure on my right hand. We did get several stationary orbs in this room. We continued to hear noises out in the hallway, so we went outside to investigate. We found no one, and were under the impression that all employees had left for the evening, and we were all alone. During this time, we did get one EVP of a man's voice in the Magnolia Room.
 At 9:00 p.m., Paul went into the Magnolia Room to take a nap, and Robert and I returned to the Confederate Room. Two minutes into the session, we began hearing lots of noise out in the hallway again, so we went out, once again, to check it out. Once again, we found no sign of anyone else being there.
 We decided to take a walk around out back, and eventually ended up in the library and dining room upstairs. We tried an EVP session, but got no results. Five minutes later, we moved into the ballroom. We did not get any orbs, but did get one EVP in this room. I also got an extremely strong impression that someone was standing in the dining room doorway, across the hall, watching us intently. When I mentioned this to Robert, he stated that he had also felt, for quite awhile, that whatever ghostly entities were in the house, were keeping an eye on us, but from a distance.
Robert and I decided to try the Dixie Room one more time, but got nothing. We did notice, however, that the shade on the left hand window was raised a little more than half way, even though no one had touched the shades since Robert pulled them down earlier that night.
 By then we were getting quite frustrated, feeling that we were being avoided, and decided to wake Paul up and go out for a bite to eat. We hoped this would help refresh us, and give the spirits a breather as well.
Before we left, I placed my video camera in the ballroom, pointed toward the stairway to the third floor. Fifty-two minutes into the tape, what looks more like a fast-moving rod that an orb, enters from the right, turns around mid-screen, and shoots back out to the right. That was the only anomaly caught on video.
 We returned to the mansion around midnight. At that time, I placed a recorder in the Magnolia Room, and we gathered in the downstairs hallway for an EVP session. Eleven minutes into the session, I got an orb on the wall over Paul's head. A minute and a half later, Robert, who was at the opposite end of the hallway, smelled something sweet, like cinnamon. At 12:22 a.m., the toilet in the Confederate Room began to run for no reason. We then decided to leave a recorder running, and go out on the front porch. While we were outside, we obtained an EVP in this hallway.
 At 12:45 a.m., we came back in from the front porch and sat down for a while in the main hallway. Having obtained nothing more than a few pictures of stationary orbs, we decided to call it a night, and went back downstairs.

Conclusion: We spent several hours investigating this charming mansion, but felt very strongly that whatever was there was doing its best to stay out of sight. We found this extremely frustrating, because we had the rare opportunity of having the whole place to ourselves, and wanted to take advantage of it. When we woke the next morning, we assumed that we had not gotten any real results. Upon returning home from the trip, and reviewing our pictures and recordings, we learned that we were very wrong. We had, in fact, obtained three pictures of moving orbs and three EVPs, as well as the anomaly on video.
 Robert also experienced some strange happenings in the Dixie Room. The Dixie room remained warm at 79 degrees during our entire stay, despite the air conditioner being set to 70 degrees and the door to the hallway being left open for hours. The air coming out of the vent was cool and the room even remained warm when we turned off the air conditioner for our first session. A thunderstorm rolled through during the evening and dropped the temperatures outside, so there was no explanation as to why the room was so much warmer than the rest of the mansion. The fireplace did not feel hot, however we noticed that there appeared to be soot around the smoke detector in the ceiling, unusual given that the fireplace uses gas. In the morning, as we headed upstairs
for breakfast, Robert turned the light off in the bedroom and locked the door. When we returned from breakfast, the light was on again. During breakfast, we discovered that other guests and staff have reported similar experiences in the Dixie room.
 The truth is, even if we weren't always in search of ghosts, the Duff Green is a bed & breakfast we would like to return to someday. We toured a number of historic sites in Louisiana and Mississippi while on our trip, and many of them were depressingly run-down. We found the Duff Green to be refreshingly different. It is not only beautifully renovated, but is also extremely clean, and quite comfortable. Each room has a personality of it's own, while still fitting in with the rest. The staff is also very friendly, and really did do their best to accommodate us. We truly enjoyed out stay there.
 Although we cannot say that the Duff Green is one of the most active hauntings we have come across, we do believe that there are at least two entities there. We also gained enough evidence to support that conclusion. If you ever find yourself in Vicksburg, Mississippi, do yourself a favor and stop by the Duff Green. Maybe you'll have a ghostly experience, or maybe just a comfortable night's sleep. However, if you don't at least stop by for a tour, you'll surely miss the best part of Vicksburg.

We wish to thank the owner of the Duff Green, Harry Sharp, for allowing us to investigate this site. We would also like to thank Dorothy Phillips for her honesty, and Charles Tucker for his incredible hospitality and a great breakfast.

Submitted by Hillary Murdoch