Peel Mansion Museum & Heritage Gardens

The most consistent report at Peel Mansion is piano music. Minnie Belle Peel, Samuel and Mary Emaline's daughter, was musical by family accounts, and staff and tour guides today describe hearing piano notes coming from an unoccupied parlor -- music that stops the moment someone walks in to look. A 2025 regional newspaper feature on the mansion's reported hauntings picked up the story, and it circulates widely enough locally that it has become the house's signature ghost.

A second, more specific account involves a different family entirely. In the 1920s, when W.L. English owned the house, his daughter Margery suffered a ruptured appendix while playing tennis; her appendix sat on the unusual side of her body, and emergency surgery was performed on kitchen tables set up in an upstairs bedroom. Margery recounted, decades later, that she was briefly declared dead and experienced what she described as an out-of-body episode before recovering. When she returned to the mansion as an adult with her husband, William Toalson, the room's later owner, Lee Allen, kept it closed off -- he told her it was haunted by a little girl who had died there. Margery tried to explain that she was that girl, and that she had lived. According to her account, he did not believe her.

Local write-ups have folded both stories into a wider set of reported phenomena -- cold spots, a woman in white on the stairs -- but the piano and the locked bedroom are the two accounts with named people behind them.