Est. 1844 · William Faulkner Literary Legacy · National Register of Historic Places · University of Mississippi Heritage · Greek Revival Architecture
Robert B. Sheegog, an Irish immigrant farmer from Tennessee, built the house on Old Taylor Road in 1844. The construction is Greek Revival in character — a two-story frame structure with four columns supporting the front portico, surrounded by cedar trees and on grounds that extended over several acres.
William Faulkner purchased the property in 1930, when it was in substantial disrepair, for approximately $6,000. He undertook extensive renovation and named the estate Rowan Oak, after the tree of Celtic folklore said to repel supernatural presences — an ironic choice for a writer who spent his career exploring the haunted quality of Southern memory and history.
Faulkner lived at Rowan Oak for the rest of his life, producing most of his major work there including The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and the Snopes trilogy. His study contains a practical artifact of his working method: the full outline for A Fable, his 1954 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, written directly on the plaster wall in pencil. The outline remains visible.
Faulkner died in July 1962. The University of Mississippi purchased Rowan Oak in 1972 for $225,000 and has maintained it as a museum since, preserving 90% of the original furnishings and the house's condition at the time of Faulkner's death. The property is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Sources
- https://www.rowanoak.com/
- https://museum.olemiss.edu/historic-houses/rowan-oak/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rowan_Oak
- https://genteelandbard.com/southern-history-haunts-folklore-journal/2022/8/24/rowan-oak-the-southern-gothic-home-of-william-faulkner
- https://sports.yahoo.com/haunted-history-william-faulkners-rowan-033046125.html
- https://www.djournal.com/news/local/the-history-tales-and-ghosts-of-rowan-oak/article_58848dad-272f-5bff-a677-53d0f71079ab.html
- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12485290-the-ghosts-of-rowan-oak
- https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2023/08/the-ghost-cop-of-rowan-oak.html
- https://faulknersociety.org/rowan-oak/
- https://www.hottytoddy.com/2020/10/29/a-collection-of-ole-miss-and-oxford-ghost-stories/
ApparitionsResidual haunting
William Faulkner was a storyteller by profession. He applied that skill to his own property. The story of Judith Sheegog — that the original owner's eldest daughter, crossed in love, hurled herself from the upper balcony and was buried beneath the magnolia on the grounds — was Faulkner's invention, recounted to his niece Dean Faulkner Wells and others as a piece of house mythology.
The story took on its own life. Within a generation, some visitors and neighboring residents had absorbed it as local history. Dean Faulkner Wells collected the story and others in The Ghosts of Rowan Oak, a book of Faulkner's ghost stories for children that treats the tales as the author's own fiction while acknowledging that the property's reputation had developed an independent existence.
Paranormal investigators who visited Rowan Oak in the years after it became a museum found no documented anomalies in the institutional record. The home's assistant curator has stated directly that Rowan Oak has no ghostly residents on record. Some visitors have reported seeing a figure writing on the wall in Faulkner's study — an account that could be a creative response to the outline that is, in fact, written on the wall — and others describe a wandering presence on the grounds that feels like Faulkner's continued habitation.
The irony of the location is that a writer whose work is saturated with the haunted quality of Southern memory and history — with the dead who do not leave, with the past that is not past — chose to decorate his own property with invented ghosts. Whether he intended to seed a legend or simply to entertain his family is not clear from the record. The legend persists either way.
Notable Entities
William Faulkner (reported)Judith Sheegog (fictional)
