Est. 1861 · Antebellum Architecture · Enslaved Labor History · Civil War · Preservation NC
Dr. John Dillard Bellamy, a physician turned merchant and planter who by 1860 held about 115 people in slavery across three counties, commissioned the 22-room house at 503 Market Street in Wilmington. Architect James F. Post designed it with draftsman Rufus Bunnell, whose diary documents the work from late 1859 to early 1861. The mansion mixes Greek Revival and Italianate elements behind 25-foot Corinthian columns. It was built chiefly by enslaved craftsmen and free Black artisans, and the museum names them: Elvin Artis, a free Black carpentry foreman; David Sadgwar, an enslaved carpenter; Henry Taylor, a carpenter-builder whose son Robert R. Taylor became the first Black graduate of MIT; and William B. Gould, the master plasterer who escaped by boat in 1862, served in the Union Navy, and kept a diary later published by his great-grandson. Nine enslaved people worked in the house, among them Sarah the cook, Rosella Bellamy Simmons the laundress, Joan the nurse, and Mary Ann and Guy Nixon. Their two-story brick quarters still stand on the lot.
The family of ten moved in early in 1861. They left during the 1862 yellow fever epidemic and again as the war closed; Union troops occupied Wilmington in February 1865, and General Joseph R. Hawley made the house his headquarters. Bellamy recovered it after a presidential pardon that August. Eliza Bellamy laid out the formal garden after the war. Two daughters, Eliza and Ellen, never married and stayed on; Ellen died there in 1946, weeks short of 94.
Descendants formed Bellamy Mansion, Inc. in February 1972. On March 13, 1972, arsonists poured gasoline through the first floor and set it alight, gutting the library and hall. No one was charged. After fifteen years of stabilization the house went to Preservation North Carolina in 1989, and the Bellamy Mansion Museum of History and Design Arts opened in April 1994. The slave quarters were fully restored in 2014.
Sources
- https://www.bellamymansion.org/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellamy_Mansion
- https://www.bellamymansion.org/the-place.html
- https://www.bellamymansion.org/the-people.html
- https://www.bellamymansion.org/the-museum.html
- https://www.bellamymansion.org/museum-blog/bellamy-mansion-suffers-fire-of-incendiary-origin
- https://www.presnc.org/experience/bellamy-mansion/
- http://bellamymansion.weebly.com/blog/ghosts-at-the-bellamy-mansion
ApparitionsPhantom footstepsDoors opening/closingCold spotsUnexplained alarmsRecurring wall marksPiano sounds
The haunted reputation of the house centers on the Bellamy family rather than on the enslaved people who built and ran it, and the museum is careful to treat the two histories separately.
Ellen Douglas Bellamy is the figure most often named. She was born in 1852, moved into the house as a child, and died in her bedroom in 1946. Visitors and staff have described a woman in late Victorian dress on the top floor near the old nursery, and docents have long pointed to ink smudges that reappear on the wall of Ellen's bedroom near a sconce, which tradition connects to her habit of reading the newspaper in old age. In a 2018 post on the museum's own blog, intern Kasey Baker catalogued the stories and the museum's plainer explanations: the smudges are most likely fingerprints on white plaster, and the unease some people feel on the children's floor fits its dark woodwork and dim light. The same post recounts an incident during a 1990 film shoot in which the heavy front door reportedly swung open and slammed, followed by a cold draft that scattered papers and pounding on the library door. The museum suggests pressure changes or an unnoticed employee.
Staff have also reported the sound of heavy boots on the wooden floors, alarms tripping without cause, piano notes, and a man in dark clothing whom some have taken for a Union officer from the 1865 occupation. Since the late 2010s the museum has licensed occasional after-hours investigations, which report the most activity on the upper floors near the nursery and the daughters' rooms. The museum presents the history of the enslaved residents through documented biography, not ghost lore.
Notable Entities
Ellen Bellamy
Media Appearances
- Ghosts at the Bellamy Mansion?, Bellamy Mansion Museum blog (web, 2018)
