Est. 1937 · Newnan-Coweta Historical Society Headquarters · Queen Anne–Neoclassical Architecture (1937) · Annual Community Heritage Event Venue
The house at 74 Jackson Street in Newnan was built in 1937 in a style that blends Queen Anne detailing with Neoclassical symmetry — an approach common to prosperous Southern homes of the 1930s that looked backward architecturally while the Depression reshaped the economy around them. The structure became home to the Newnan-Coweta Historical Society, which operates it today as the McRitchie-Hollis Museum.
As a house museum, the building serves the dual function of displaying period furnishings and social history while housing the historical society's archival collection. The society's holdings include documents, photographs, and objects related to Coweta County's long history — Revolutionary War settlement, antebellum life, the Civil War, and the community's twentieth-century development.
The building is perhaps best known publicly through the annual Haunted Mansion event, which the historical society runs each October in conjunction with the Oak Hill Cemetery guided tours. The two events are sold as a package and together constitute one of the Newnan area's most consistently popular fall heritage programs. The mansion event incorporates archival items not on regular public display and uses live performers to dramatize documented episodes from local history — including Coweta County's most famous court case, the 1948 murder trial of John Wallace, and the oracle testimony of Mayhayley Lancaster.
Sources
- https://explorenewnancoweta.com/things-to-do/events/oak-hill-cemetery-tours/2025-10-17/
- https://www.coweta.ga.us/Home/Components/Calendar/Event/35075/2633
Unlike sites where paranormal folklore developed organically over decades, the McRitchie-Hollis Museum's dark reputation is explicitly theatrical: the annual Haunted Mansion event is a designed experience, not an accumulation of reported encounters. The Newnan-Coweta Historical Society has built the event around real history rather than invented ghost stories, which gives it a different quality than a standard commercial haunted house.
The centerpiece story is Mayhayley Lancaster — a Heard County woman who charged a dollar and ten cents for psychic consultations throughout the early twentieth century and became regionally famous as the Oracle of the Ages. Lancaster's connection to Coweta County came through the 1948 murder trial of John Wallace, a sharecropper boss who had consulted her and, in doing so, revealed knowledge of where he had disposed of the body of Wilson Turner, a man he had killed. Lancaster testified for the prosecution at the Coweta County Courthouse in Newnan, and her testimony was credited with helping secure Wallace's conviction and death sentence. That trial — and Lancaster's strange, documented role in it — has become one of Coweta County's defining historical episodes.
The mansion provides an intimate setting for these dramatizations: performers move through period rooms, archival photographs and documents emerge from storage, and visitors encounter the county's history at close range rather than through exhibit cases.
Notable Entities
Mayhayley Lancaster (Oracle of the Ages, prosecution witness in 1948 Wallace trial)
