1897 Queen Anne Victorian designed by George Franklin Barber and shipped in by rail from Knoxville, now a Monterey Place B&B with smoke-pipe and small-girl apparition reports.
1552 Monterey Place, Mobile, AL 36604
Age
All Ages
Cost
$$
Boutique B&B rates typically run $150-$250 per night with breakfast included.
Access
Limited Access
Three-story Queen Anne Victorian with original stairs and varied historic flooring
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1897 · Queen Anne Victorian mail-order catalog home (George Franklin Barber design) · Built for Charles Martin Shepard, Mobile & Ohio Railroad passenger agent · National Register of Historic Places (1984) · Former Kate and Isabel Shepard girls' school (from 1910)
The Kate Shepard House was constructed in 1897 for Charles Martin Shepard, the general passenger agent for the Mobile and Ohio Railroad. Shepard ordered the design from a catalog of Queen Anne Victorian homes produced by George Franklin Barber, a Knoxville-based architect whose mail-order house plans were popular among prosperous late-nineteenth-century professionals across the South. The home's components — milled lumber, ornamental trim, stained glass, and prefabricated structural elements — required thirteen railroad cars to ship from Knoxville to Mobile.
The Queen Anne Victorian features eleven fireplaces, multiple stained-glass windows, original carved mantles, built-in bookcases, and the chandeliers and gas-converted-to-electric fixtures common to high-end 1890s Southern residential construction. The home retains the majority of these features today.
In 1910, Shepard's daughters Kate and Isabel Shepard began using the property as a boarding and day school for girls. The school operated for several decades. The home was placed on the National Register of Historic Places on January 5, 1984 as the centerpiece of the Monterey Place historic listing.
The property opened as a bed and breakfast around 2002 and has operated continuously as a small boutique inn since. WKRG reported in October 2024 that the home was listed for sale at $995,000 with the ghost stories specifically marketed alongside the architecture. The property is included on Mobile-area Queen Anne Victorian architecture tours and on regional haunted-history coverage.
Sources
The Kate Shepard House's haunted reputation is characterized as 'quirky rather than scary' by the property's own marketing and by the WKRG October-2024 feature. The most-reported phenomenon is the smell of pipe tobacco in interior rooms where no one is smoking — a recurring detail that innkeepers have described to guests across multiple ownership tenures and that WKRG's interviews with the current owner-couple corroborate.
A second recurring report is electrical: lamps, televisions, and small electronics turning on and off without anyone touching them. A television cameraman covering the home for a regional feature reported that his lights repeatedly failed during the on-property segment, a story that the Bienville Bites Food Tour blog has retold in its 12 Haunted Places coverage. WKRG's own segments at the property have produced similar accounts of equipment malfunction.
The most-cited single incident is an antique plate that was reported to have flown from a fireplace mantle and shattered against the floor — described by the innkeepers and repeated across published lore. Guests have also reported objects rearranged on dressers and the sound of light footfalls in upstairs corridors when no other guests are present.
A quieter strand of the lore involves a small girl seen briefly in the bedrooms, despite no child being resident on the property. The published accounts describe the figure as fleeting and benign rather than distressed. Innkeeper commentary has tied the reports loosely to the home's 1910-era function as a girls' boarding school under Kate and Isabel Shepard, though no specific historical figure is identified.
A secondary ghost reported by innkeepers is an elderly woman seen on the upper floor — again described as benign and occasional. Overall coverage is consistent across sources, and the property handles its lore with restraint.
Notable Entities
Media Appearances
Overnight stay in the 1897 Queen Anne Victorian B&B, with breakfast included. The home retains its eleven fireplaces, original mantles, stained glass, bookcases, and chandeliers.
Every HauntBound history is researched from documented sources. We clearly separate verified historical fact from paranormal folklore.
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