Every morning the Snow family gingerly makes the bed in the vacant upstairs bedroom of their 1852 antebellum home.
Every day the sheets wrinkle as if a small child has napped on the covers.
But no small children live in the house now.
“My momma was the first one in our family to see her,” recalled Melanie Snow, who was 7-years-old when her family moved into the deserted mansion called Waverly Plantation.
“(Mother) was on the stairs balcony sweeping and a voice beside her called ‘momma, momma.’ That’s when we began to notice the indentation,” Snow said.
“My dad thought she was losing it,” Snow said, chuckling softly.
For 100 years rumors of a ghost have haunted the antebellum mansion-the ghost of a young, blonde female child, wearing a high-collared bluish/gray dress, Snow said.
More than a year after her mother saw the apparition, Snow saw the ghost for the first time. She said she wasn’t frightened.
“I felt like there was this sweet little ghost girl-our protector,” Snow said.
The ghost tale isn’t a rumor, Snow said. The ghost is real and her family has lived with it since they moved into the home in 1962. The little girl’s room, called by family members the “ghost room,” now stays empty.
The child is commonly seen climbing up the balcony steps.
“It’s almost like you have something in your eye,” Snow said. “It’s like a blurred cloud, but you can see through the cloud. She looked at me and smiled and then disappeared.”
“We’d heard a lot of unexplained noises and found things out of place over the years. If she’d have been translucent it would have scared me more, but she was so real looking,” said Cindy Snow Henson, Melanie’s sister who now works at Mississippi State.
“I’ve seen her twice so I do believe that she’s there in the house. I’m kind of skeptical, but I can’t discount that I’ve seen her twice, ” Henson said. “I don’t know how to explain what I saw. I looked at her for probably a good two minutes. It was almost as if she was looking at me and wondering if I could see her.”
But more than family members have seen the ghost that has captivated the attention of ghost-seekers nationwide. Waverly Plantation hosts tours 365 days a year and some tourists have seen the ghost without realizing it, Snow said.
One time a man who’d been to Waverly several times, brought friends to visit the plantation, but stayed outside while they toured. After the group had gone, they stopped at a pay phone and called the Snows to make sure that someone kept watch over the child playing by the pond, Snow said.
“It was hard to convince that man that there were no children there,” she said.
The mansion was built in 1852 by George Hampton Young, Waverly, who was secretary of the U.S. Land Commission, came to Mississippi to sell land ceded to the government by the Choctaw Indians. He purchased 40,000 acres of land and built Waverly.
His six sons joined the Confederate Army when the Civil War broke out and five returned home. The last of the Young’s died in 1913 and the house soon fell into disrepair and stood vacant for nearly 50 years before the Robert and Donna Snow purchased the house in 1962. The family, with three children ages five, seven and 11 plus one on the way, moved in and began restoration.
Tours are available daily from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. for $7.50. Children under six are free and group rates are available. For more information, call 325-2382.