James Thurber Boyhood Home and Columbus Literary Center
77 Jefferson Avenue, Columbus, OH 43215
Research updated May 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
Self-guided museum visits are free; guided tours and select programming may carry separate fees. Check the Thurber House website for current programs.
Access
Limited Access
Multi-story late-Victorian residence with stairs
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1873 · National Register of Historic Places · James Thurber Literary Legacy · Twentieth-Century American Humor
The brick house at 77 Jefferson Avenue was constructed in 1873 in a residential block adjacent to the original Ohio Penitentiary site, which occupied the area until its 1998 demolition. The house passed through several private-residential and rooming-house tenancies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
James Grover Thurber, born in Columbus in 1894, lived in the Jefferson Avenue property with his parents and brothers from 1913 through 1917 while attending Ohio State University. Thurber's experiences at the house provided the source material for several of the autobiographical essays collected in his 1933 book My Life and Hard Times, including The Night the Ghost Got In and The Night the Bed Fell. The essays established Thurber as one of the foremost American humorists of the twentieth century and became staples of mid-century American humor anthologies.
Thurber spent the bulk of his subsequent career at The New Yorker, where he and E. B. White produced the magazine's signature voice for several decades. He died in 1961 and is buried at Greenlawn Cemetery in Columbus.
The Jefferson Avenue house was acquired by a nonprofit literary organization in the early 1980s and underwent extensive restoration to support its conversion to a literary center and museum. The Thurber House opened to the public in 1984. The property is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and operates today as a literary arts nonprofit hosting public programming, writers' residencies, and a children's literary education program. The Thurber Prize for American Humor, established in 1997, is among the foundation's signature programs.
Sources
James Thurber's essay The Night the Ghost Got In, first published in The New Yorker in 1933 and collected in My Life and Hard Times the same year, describes a late-night episode in November 1915 when Thurber and his brother Herman heard the sound of feet walking in a continuous circle around the downstairs dining-room table. The brothers' subsequent attempt to investigate produced a comic cascade involving the Columbus police, a thrown shoe, and the family's neighbors. The essay is widely anthologized.
Thurber's own framing of the episode was characteristically deadpan: he reported the experience as one of several family stories rather than as a paranormal claim, and the essay derives its effect from the gap between the calm narration and the absurdity of the events. The walking footsteps themselves are presented without explanation.
Museum staff and visiting writers in the contemporary literary center have continued to report intermittent footsteps in the same dining-room space, now configured as the museum's gift shop. Staff working alone in the upper-floor administrative offices have described the sound of pacing on the dining-room floor below, particularly during early-morning and late-evening hours when the building is otherwise empty.
The Thurber House foundation treats the paranormal narrative as an extension of the Thurber literary legacy rather than as an investigation target. The published Thurber essay is the primary source, and the museum's interpretive program presents the contemporary reports as part of the building's character rather than as evidence of supernatural phenomena. Visitors interested in the literary record will find the essay itself a richer experience than any structured paranormal program.
Media Appearances
Walk through the 1873 Victorian home where James Thurber lived as a college student from 1913 to 1917, the setting for his classic stories The Night the Ghost Got In and The Night the Bed Fell. The dining room where Thurber described hearing circular footsteps now serves as the museum shop, and the upper-floor bedrooms preserve the Thurber-family configuration.
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