In the 1800s English folksong "Are You Going to Scarborough Fair," made famous in 1966 by Simon and Garfunkel's version, each herb represents a virtue. Parsley=Comfort. Sage=Strength. Rosemary=Love. Thyme=Courage. These four herbs, native to the Mediterranean basin, were used for centuries to treat a variety of afflictions. Parsley was thought to cure digestive disorders, bronchitis, and cure urinary tract problems. Sage was taken for ulcers, a sore throat, and to stop bleeding. Rosemary was seen as a memory enhancer, relieved migraine headaches, and thwarted nervousness. Thyme was a pain reliever, an antidote for poison, and had antiseptic properties. Even today, thymol, the active ingredient in thyme, is used in mouthwashes, toothpaste, and hand sanitizers.

Nineteenth century Americans relied on herbs for culinary purposes in backyard kitchen gardens, but also as cure-alls because current knowledge of medicine was only in relative infancy. An influential early book on the subject was American Medical Botany by Jacob Bigelow, published between 1817 and 1820. Throughout the 20th century advances in medicine skyrocketed. Penicillin, the first naturally occurring antibiotic drug, became available in limited quantities in 1928. Erythromycin, a sulfa drug combating bacteria, was developed in Germany in 1935. Jonas Salk (in 1955) and Albert Sabin (in 1961) introduced their polio vaccines to Americans. The first measles vaccine was licensed for public use in 1963. Smallpox, one of the world's deadliest infectious diseases, was first vaccinated against by Englishman Edward Jenner in 1796. It persisted, killing some 300 million people in the 20th century alone, but was declared eradicated in the United States in 1980 thanks to the widespread adoption of the smallpox vaccine.

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Dill: Chewing the seed of this herb was said to freshen breath, and the green of the plant was prescribed for new mothers to increase the flow of breast milk.
Hops: We associate this traditional herb with beer making, but it too was considered a medicine. A tea made from hops was used commonly for relaxation and considered helpful for insomnia.
Butterfly Weed: The plant, though not thought of today as an herb by most people, was considered to have a curative use for diarrhea and rheumatism. Its benefit came from the root of the plant.
Lavender: It was used to treat insomnia and as a relaxing agent. Crushed leaves and flower heads were tucked in bed pillows or oil of lavender was applied directly to the specific locations on the head, arms, and feet.

The Wizard’s advertisement lists supposed curative qualities. Active ingredients included: alcohol, camphor, sassafras oil, clove oil, turpentine, ammonia, and chloroform. The company even went so far as to promote its use for cancer. A case was brought against Hamlin’s in Illinois for that cancer 'treatment.' The company was found guilty of false claims and fined $200.

In the beginning, PNC decided that this site should be more of a "museum in a house" than a traditional house museum, which was innovative at the time. Instead of filling space with Victorian ephemera, some rooms are set up as historic vignettes, while others are galleries for rotating art and history exhibits. As a result, the space is dynamic rather than static, and the art shows, family days, lectures, and jazz concerts we host give the community a reason to keep coming back.

Through the years, we've adapted to changing audiences. These days, we offer an accessible, virtual on-site tour as well as neighborhood walking tours. Our self-guided tour features smartphone narration, and written versions are multilingual. Our guided tours use Bluetooth headsets to make sure everyone is able to the hear the guide. We collaborate with teachers across New Hanover County to align our school tours with changing curriculums, and work with neighboring museums on cross-disciplinary programs for the community.

However, the innovation I'm most proud of is the fact that we continually strive to be honest about history. We talk about the history and legacy of both white supremacy and Black achievement. Our daily tours begin the slave quarters and integrate the stories of everyone who lived and worked in the site. We host talks about charged topics like slavery, the Wilmington 10, and the 1898 massacre in the parlor of a house built by enslaved craftsmen for 1898 leaders in front of descendants from all sides of those events. Our volunteers and staff engage in direct discussions about these topics every day, because truthful stories are the most interesting and useful.

Museums like this one provide people with a nuanced, layered understanding of our shared history, which in turn helps to inform our future. We do not and cannot always get the scope and language of social history right. But I am confident that we give it our best shot on a daily basis. We find that almost all our visitors respond positively to a complicated story, truthfully told. One of my favorite quotes is attributed to American anthropologist Margaret Mead. "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."

For more visuals, including many before and after photos, check out Our Story on our website here.

Below are two video discussions on the 1859, interpreted, urban slave quarters. One describes the building and its restoration. The other highlights urban and rural enslavement and details the builders and workers originally at the site.

Beyond Wilmington the Spanish Flu (a.k.a. La Grippe), first appeared on American soil in March of 1918 at the US army base of Fort Riley, Kansas. Within five weeks, 1,000 men were infected and 47 were dead. One “preventive measure” as seen in the image above was gargling with salt water.  With no vaccine to protect against the virus, people were urged to isolate, quarantine, practice good personal hygiene, limit social interaction, and wear masks.
​
The worst outbreak of the entire pandemic for any U.S. city occurred in Philadelphia. A massive outdoor parade with an estimated attendance of 200,000 had been scheduled to take place on September 28, 1918, to promote the sale of war bonds to the public in support of The Great War. The city’s health director, Wilmer Krusen, refused pleas from medical professionals to cancel the parade, and thousands lined the parade route.

The consequence: 20,000 died in Philadelphia. Deaths mounted so quickly that even burials in mass graves dug by steam shovels weren't quick enough to avoid bodies decomposing in the streets. Families that could find cold storage units waited weeks for undertakers to prepare for funerals. 

The aftermath: World War I ("The Great War") and the Spanish Influenza turned 1920s America inward toward isolationism. Despite pushing for a League of Nations, the United States did not join. Citizens became fearful of the world and what the world seemed to offer - including ideologies like bolshevism and communism. America First rose as a new motto.

The 19th Amendment guaranteeing women the right to vote passed, but misogynistic comments didn't disappear in this jazz age … “Bobbed hair! Painted faces! Smoking cigarettes! Hemlines at the knee! Wearing brassieres! Having jobs outside the home! All sure signs of a harlot!” That recently won right of women’s suffrage, to some, was abhorrent. [3]
​
Returning African-American soldiers who fought to liberate Europe, now sought to continue their fight for equal rights as American citizens. They were faced with continued federal and state sanctioned government discrimination and Jim Crow Laws, coupled with the exploding growth of the Ku Klux Klan to deny Blacks these inalienable rights. As the decade of the roaring 1920s moved forward, America looked backward to what some believed were the good old days. [4]

Prepared by Wade Toth, Bellamy Mansion Museum Volunteer Committee Chair, during the COVID-19 pandemic (with updates). Original publish date: August 2020.
​

Infectious diseases like typhoid, cholera, tuberculosis, polio, the Spanish flu and, more recently, COVID-19 have had a major impact on the way we live. Today, we take for granted running water and flush toilets, but do you know why homes are built with half-bathrooms, typically referred to as the "powder" room? The latter term originated in the 17th century when aristocratic citizens would use a private space to freshen their wigs. Wigs were often made of real human hair and required regular "powderings" to maintain their appearance. In the early 20th century, as the importance of hand washing to prevent the spread of diseases became well known, these “powder rooms” offered a place for guests to wash their hands as they entered a home, and also for delivery workers dropping off items like milk, coal, and ice to wash up.

Sources: [1] Building Ships for Government, Sept. 2017. NC Dept. of Cultural and Natural resources. https://www.dncr.nc.gov/blog/2017/09/21/building-ships-government
[2] World War I Left Enduring mark on Southeastern NC, Oct. 2013. Star News/Wilbur D. Jones. https://www.starnewsonline.com/story/news/2014/10/30/world-war-i-left-enduring-mark-on-southeastern-nc/30970559007/
[3] National Association Opposed to Women's Suffrage. National Women's History Museum.  https://www.crusadeforthevote.org/naows-opposition/
[4] An Anatomy of Isolationism. Council on Foreign Relations. https://www.cfr.org/excerpt-isolationism

Articles of clothing such as pants, hats, frocks, handkerchiefs, ribbons, socks, cravats, and hand-me-downs were given. Also, tobacco, beads, toys, candy, blankets, pocket knives, pipes, and sometimes money.​

​Some enslavers gave their enslaved workers a feast. According to different slave accounts, the enslaver provided the food, or they allowed the enslaved to go hunting. Occasionally enslavers provided liquor, and some foods and drinks they gave at Christmas included:

• Roasted oxen, pigs, turkey, sheep and wild game like raccoons, rabbits, and possums
• Whiskey, eggnog, brandy, cider, wine, or beer
• Some even received desserts like peach cobbler or apple dumplings

Enslaved people might have dances that lasted for most of the night and were incorporated with the feasts that enslavers allowed. Watching these festivities was a form of entertainment for the slave-holding families themselves. ​

In North Carolina, some enslaved people had a holiday traditional celebration called Jonkonnu. The celebration has roots that go back to the Caribbean and West Africa. Wilmington and New Bern were the main places in which the celebrations occurred, but similar versions of Jonkonnu could be found in coastal South Carolina and Georgia dating to the 1700s.

​During this celebration enslaved men and women would dress up in colorful outfits and parade around performing music for their enslavers “demanding” gifts. The enslavers’ families then participated by giving out small gifts.

Often enslaved individuals had relatives enslaved by other families on neighboring plantations or in nearby towns. In order for slaves to travel to visit family, the enslavers distributed passes. During the holiday season, enslavers issued these passes more often than during other times of the year.
​
Why did enslavers give these gifts of goods, time off, and even visits with family members? One major reason was to try and prevent enslaved individuals from revolting or running away. The holiday season meant “hiring out” of slaves for contracted work was nearing. Enslavers negotiated these contracts on or near January 1st each year and a contract could be for many months or even a full year. Individuals and businesses contracted enslaved men, women, and children to engage in often backbreaking and dangerous work. For example, the railroad company "hired out" many men and even offered insurance policies to enslavers in case of injury or death to the workers. It's possible the stress of this impending change was deliberately defrayed by the slight loosening of the usual order within slavery during the holiday season.

Henry Taylor's perspective was as an enslaved carpenter working on construction of the Bellamy site. He was described by Booker T. Washington in The Story of the Negro as, "the son of a white man who was at the same time his master. Although he was nominally enslaved, he was early given liberty to do about as he pleased." Taylor was a successful carpenter–builder before the Civil War. After emancipation, he continued carpentry and ran a grocery store. His later projects included Wilmington's original Hemenway School (c. 1868) and Giblem Masonic Lodge (c. 1871), the first lodge for Blacks in the city and second oldest in the state. He was also a founding member of the Chestnut Street Presbyterian Church and active in local politics, including as a member of the Executive Board of the Colored Union League.

After the Civil War, the Colored Union League mobilized newly enfranchised Black voters, working primarily to ensure they remained loyal to the Republican party, providing them with opportunities to debate political and societal issues, negotiate labor contracts, and plan how to care for the sick among them. The Ku Klux Klan’s increasingly successful violent intimidation efforts against White and Black Union Leaguers revealed a deep fear of Republican dominance and perceived Black domination. 

Taylor's son, Robert, was the first Black graduate from MIT, in architecture, and he was featured on a 2015 US postage stamp for his pioneering role. His great-great granddaughter is Valerie Jarrett, who served as Senior Advisor to President Barack Obama, and her daughter Laura Jarrett was a CNN correspondent and now is a contributing legal journalist on NBC.

In the immediate postwar years, other builders of the Bellamy site became prominent in civic life, including the Howe and Sadgwar families. Perhaps most prominent in local politics was George W. Price Jr., who had daringly escaped by boat on the Cape Fear River in 1862 alongside enslaved plasterer William B. Gould and six others. The men were picked up by a Union ship and joined the Union Navy. On his return to his native city as a veteran, Price promptly became a leading Republican figure. He was elected to the city board of aldermen in 1868, served in the state legislature from 1869 through 1872, and became city marshal and justice of the peace in 1874 and for several years thereafter.

Union veteran Gould headed north after the war and settled in Dedham, Massachusetts, with his wife Cornelia, also formerly enslaved in Wilmington. Their great-great-grandson William B. Gould IV is an emeritus Stanford University law professor and served as chair of the National Labor Relations Board under President Bill Clinton.

After the occupation of Wilmington in February 1865, the Federal government seized all of Dr. Bellamy's property, including his highly profitable naval stores operations in Columbus County,  Grovely Plantation in Brunswick County, his stores and buildings in Wilmington, and the residence on Market and 5th. Bellamy enslaved 115 people, many on these plantation businesses. We unfortunately do not know much of what happened in the lives of these populations. Throughout the summer of 1865, Bellamy worked to gain the necessary pardon and to reclaim his business properties and home. He finally received a presidential pardon, signed by President Andrew Johnson. Johnson himself was the last President to own enslaved people and is noted for allowing white supremacy to regain power in the post-war South.

In the summer of 1874, as Reconstruction faltered, son John Bellamy Jr. returned home after graduating from the University of Virginia law school. The new minister of First Presbyterian Church, which the Bellamy family attended, was Joseph Ruggles Wilson, the father of Thomas Woodrow Wilson. John Jr. became a friend and tutor to young Wilson, then of college age. The two young men shared an interest in books and history, and Tommy (as he was fondly called) spent many hours at the Bellamy home before leaving Wilmington to study at Princeton. Woodrow Wilson later served as president of Princeton University and as the governor of New Jersey before winning the 1912 presidential election. From 1913 to 1921, he was the 28th President of the United States. His domestic policies as President were notably segregationist and his expressed opinions marked him an apologist for slavery and a supporter of the lost cause myth.

Illustrative of how Civil War politics lingered well past Reconstruction is the career of ​John D. Bellamy Jr. He became a prominent Wilmington attorney and served as a State Senator before running for US Congress during the White supremacy campaign of 1898. In 1898 a statewide effort by Democrats to regain elected positions from Black politicians used voter intimidation, propaganda, voter suppression, and fear mongering to win elections "by whatever means." John Jr. did win the election, but it was so clearly fraudulent that the man he beat, Oliver Dockery, contested the election results. He sought witnesses and evidence for a case that sought a Congressional hearing into the election and the murders that took place in Wilmington two days later.

The Wilmington Massacre -- where an unknown number of Black citizens were killed and run out of town by White assailants -- was part of the only successful coup d'etat in American history. It removed a multi-racial 'fusionist' city government, erased the burgeoning African American middle-class, and instituted a white supremacist government by force. Events in Wilmington led to a sea-change across the state and was a facet of the replacement of Reconstruction with Jim Crow. John Jr. claimed in his diary not to be in town during the massacre but it is highly likely he aided in the planning leading up to the events. John Jr. had already served as a Democrat in the North Carolina Senate (1891-1892) and joined the US House of Representatives from 1899-1903. He was a delegate to the National Democratic Convention in 1892, 1908, and 1920. He also served as a delegate to the Washington Disarmament Conference in 1924 and 1932. In 1936, he was selected to cast the electoral vote of North Carolina for Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Of Dr. Bellamy's six sons, the only other politician was George Bellamy. He was also a farmer and ran Grovely Plantation in Brunswick County for his father after it became a post-war sharecropping enterprise. George was active in the county's politics earning him the nickname the "Duke of Brunswick." According to his brother John Jr., George "served many times as legislator in the Lower House and also in the Senate, until he was appointed US Marshal for the Eastern District of North Carolina."

These sketches of some of the figures related to the history of the museum site come from The Bellamy Mansion Mansion: Wilmington, North Carolina by Catherine Bishir (2004), Memoirs of an Octogenarian by John Bellamy, Jr. (1942), Back with the Tide, Memoirs of Ellen Douglas Bellamy (2002) and excerpts of the diaries of Rufus Bunnell. As a point of interpretation it is important to recall that memoirs inherently reflect the biases of their authors and are not objective.

Researched and written by Leslie Randle-Morton,
Bellamy Mansion Museum Associate Director.

Fall—when days get shorter, leaves change color, and pumpkin spice reigns. It is also the time of year when the sublime and spooktacular seep into every corner of our lives. More things seem to go bump in the night and houses, especially old houses, are presumed extra haunted and active. But in the world of historic house museums, it’s like Halloween year-round as ghosts and ghouls are always on visitors’ minds. Museum goers of every age, every culture, and every background ask Bellamy Museum staff and volunteers daily about the supposed spooks and historic haunts on property—and some even come back from tours with stories of their own.
        Sometimes a visitor has an experience they did not expect and did not seek out. This summer a Marine came back with photos of light anomalies he captured on the children’s level of the main house after a seemingly normal self-guided tour. A mother recently came into the visitor center visibly shaken because her child, whom she claims is sensitive to spirits, was so upset by what he felt and saw in the house, he ran out crying. Some visitors come with the expressed desire of encountering the paranormal while they tour, and on the most extreme end are those visitors who rent the site to conduct para-scientific “investigations” in an attempt to get to the bottom of the ghostly goings-on.
            The question is why do so many people not only assume the site is haunted but desire it to be haunted…almost need it to be haunted? Why do vacationers seek out death during their down time? This article attempts to shed light on why modern visitors spend their leisure time and discretionary income in the pursuit of what has become known as “dark tourism.”[1]

Paranormal Popularity: Ghosts in Modern America      
       The concept of the ghost is universal,[2] yet expressions of ghosts are culturally constructed according to the needs of a particular culture at a particular time. Ghost stories have been used by societies in myriad ways including as discursive metaphors, as moral warnings, and as vehicles of social ritual. According to media professor John Potts, the ghost as an idea is utilized as a solution to a problem; it is an answer to a question.[3] The concept of the ghost, the solution, does not change, but its performative function evolves as cultural challenges evolve over time. From a scholarly perspective it is pointless to postulate whether ghosts are real or not. What is important is how ghosts and their corresponding stories culturally function.
         In the 21st century, the paranormal seems as popular as ever and can be found in many facets of American culture beyond books and movies. Reality television series such as Ghost Hunters, Paranormal Witness, and Ghost Adventures have multiplied in recent years and now ghostly programming is offered by almost every major cable channel. Even scripted forensic dramas such as The Ghost Whisperer and Medium achieved popularity in a post-9/11 America that assuaged new anxieties with detectives who could see the unseen.[4] The internet is awash with websites selling ghost hunting equipment and promising definitive paranormal proof, one goal of which is to recruit would-be ghost hunters.
       The thirst for paranormal experiences has spilled over into other free-choice learning environments where an amalgam of walking ghost tours, haunted reenactments, and cemetery tours are a short walk or a leisurely drive away for most Americans. History museums have not been spared from America’s obsession with all things paranormal. John Potts argues this is partly because ghosts “are representations of the past as [they] endure in the present. To be haunted by a ghost is to be haunted by the past.”[5] And in this age where younger visitors desire an experience for their Instagram story over a boring old souvenir, being haunted by the past is all the rage.

Death and Disney: Visitor Motivations and Learning in Museums
       Visitor study researcher John Falk offers a possible explanation as to why Americans seek out ghosts during their leisure time. He explains that many 21st century citizens focus on the higher ends of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: security, self-esteem, and self-fulfillment. The struggles for food, shelter, and warmth are no longer major driving motivations in developed nations, and moving up Maslow’s hierarchy is now enacted through leisure rather than work including in free-choice leisure learning environments like museums. Americans expect their spiritual, cultural, and intellectual needs to be simultaneously met during their leisure time in a type of “consumptive multi-tasking”[6] which are congruous to the overlapping motivations of the personal, the sociocultural, and the physical which Falk and Lynn Dierking argue each visitor brings to a free-choice learning setting.[7]
       These qualitative shifts in leisure needs have given rise to a quantitative explosion of leisure opportunities, and visitors exert choice and control over where they go and what they learn. According to Falk, this control fuels self-actualization and feeds the higher end of Maslow’s hierarchy creating and affirming personal identity. So, when a visitor chooses a certain museum or a specific guided tour, they are essentially affirming who they are through their leisure activities.[8] But why do visitors expect all old buildings, especially historic house museums, to be busting at the seams with specters, and why are they so bummed out if we tell them they’re not? 
​
From Pilgrimages to Post-Modern Angst: The History of Thanatourism
       For centuries, humans worked through the emotional, spiritual, and psychological effects of death, dying, and the afterlife within formal settings such as the church, but one fairly-new lens through which to examine the modern American fascination with death and the paranormal is that of the burgeoning, yet sometimes problematic, study of “thanatourism,”[9] or “dark tourism.”
       First touched upon in the early 1990’s by Chris Rojek, who discussed tourism’s ‘black spots,’[10] the term thanatourism was first coined by Anthony Seaton in 1996. Seaton defines thanatourism as “…travel to a location wholly, or partially, motivated by the desire for actual or symbolic encounters with death… particularly, but not exclusively, violent death…,” although this interest in violence only developed over time.[11] Seaton argues that this interest represents a metamorphosis of thanatopsis—the contemplation of death itself, an almost universal concern. According to Seaton, thanatopsis became thanatourism as pilgrimages to sites of martyrdom and holy shrines became stylish for the eighteenth-century European elites.
       In the early stages of thanatourism, the supply side was spontaneous such as battlefields or sites of executions, and often religious in nature. Visitors were focused on the idea of death itself rather than the manner of death. This defining characteristic evolved during the Romantic period as science began to obfuscate religion which, according to Seaton, dislodged thanatopsis from the church, and thanatourists became motivated by a spiritual need to “…make death a highly normal and present element in every-day life…”[12] Thanatourism continued to develop, even with deliberateness, involving both historical and contemporary sites. The Romantic notions of the Sublime, the Other, the Gothic and Black Romanticism further transformed thanatourism through the abandonment of “older notions of communal morality and belief…” and the development of “a secular taste for murder and violence…”[13] As a result, the particular manner of death began to matter as much as the notion of death itself.

Tourism scholar Graham Dann alliteratively extended Seaton’s categories without considering a spectrum of intensity to include:

1. Perilous Places: which include towns of terror from the past as well as dangerous destinations of the present
2. Houses of Horror: refer to buildings associated with violent ends. This category also contains edifices that have been appropriated by the tourism industry as places of display (dungeons of death) or accommodation (heinous hotels)
3. Fields of Fatality: encompass tracts of land devoted to the commemoration of fear, fame or infamy. This group comprises bloody battlegrounds, the hell of holocaust and cemeteries for celebrities
4. Tours of Torment: as the name suggests, place the accent on group visitation of dark attractions. Subsets include trips to sites of mayhem and murder, and meetings with the now notorious.
5. Themed Thanatos: relates to various collections that have been constructed around life and death. They include morbid museums and monuments to mortality.[15]

 
​       While Seaton analyzed the development of dark tourism in antiquity, other scholars have considered the topic of dark tourism as a modern manifestation. John Lennon and Malcolm Foley maintain that thanatourism is an exclusively modern manifestation which grew out of early twentieth-century industrialization, universal suffrage, and the spread of education in America. These hallmarks of modernity gave some the “wealth and freedom to travel and the education to benefit from the experience,”[16] spawning a tourism industry that encompassed travel, accommodations and attractions.
       In spite of their interpretive disagreements, Anthony Seaton and John Lennon joined forces in 2004 in order to further expound on the definition of dark tourism. Blending their understanding of dark tourism, they acknowledge that “mass media have largely usurped the function of the church as an institution with the power to sacralize people and places as targets of devotional travel.”[17] They further remark that contemporary members of developed societies feel a need to find new ways to connect with death, as modern hospitals, nursing homes and funeral parlors have served to privatize death and erode its place in the modern collective mind. With death separated from everyday life, the “media and tourism [now] offer opportunities for legitimate, vicarious contact with death”[18] and visitors often believe we museum professionals are just hiding the truth about ghosts from them.

​Into the Light: Victorian Spiritualism and the Afterlife
       Seaton and Lennon argue that secularization and anxieties associated with the processes and products of modernity play a part in visitor motivation to sites of dark tourism, but they leapfrog neatly over major modern societal developments of which we are still heirs—namely the evolution of modern religion that came about during the 19th-century and man’s quest for proof of the afterlife.
       Just like thanatourism, the exact origins of American Spiritualism are elusive. Spiritualism, “a popular religious practice conducted through communication with the spirits of the dead,”[19] contained traces of Shakerism, Quakerism, mesmerism as well as tenets of some lesser known fringe groups like the followers of the mid-eighteenth century mystic Emanuel Swedenborg. Swedenborg attempted to use theology as empirical proof of man’s immortal soul. His practical blending of empirical scientific thought with the reading of Scripture led Swedenborgians to believe that there was an absolute truth beyond man’s external senses. The mystic laid out a detailed geography of heaven that both Swedenborgians and later Spiritualists used to explain communing with the spirits and their objections to the formation of formal churches. Swedenborgians eventually succumbed to a formal church system and rejected communication with spirits which is why some historians give the Swedish mystic credit for planting the “cosmic seeds of a system”[20] without actually giving him credit for the Spiritualist movement itself.
       Most historians maintain that the true timeline of American Spiritualism can be traced to 1848, on a New York farm, where two sisters, Kate and Margaret Fox, began communing with Mr. Splitfoot, the spirit of a murdered peddler who had died in their home. Through raps, taps, and various knocks, Mr. Splitfoot answered the girls’ questions in conversations that were more personal than any spirit communication Swedenborgians or Shakers experienced. The Fox sisters maintained that they operated a “spiritual telegraph”[21] through which messages could be received from and sent to spirits. Unlike that of Quakers and Swedenborgians, the Fox sisters’ communication methods and messages were of a more personal nature which, when considered with the cultural and historical confluences of antebellum America including sectarianism, revivalism, African religious influences, and utopian experimental societies, help explain why within a few short years American Spiritualism was ubiquitous. Séances were held from coast to coast where spirits rapped, levitated, and spoke through mediums delivering everything from benign messages of comfort for surviving loved ones to portents of doom in a rapidly industrializing society.

       ​According to historian Molly McGarry, Spiritualism, which began “as a children’s ghost story, and later as an after-dinner entertainment, quickly became a popular national phenomenon and a powerful new religion.”[22] This religion did not require faith, but merely asked potential devotees to investigate the spiritual plane, which could therefore prove the existence of an eternal spirit, and Spiritualism’s need was “unflagging—and at times desperate—in its effort to prove survival.”[23]
       This blending of new scientific thought with mystical elements of traditional religion exemplified the Victorian struggle with modernity in a society in which the traditional was seen as being quickly supplanted by the innovative. Spiritual mediums even imbued modern technologies with magical properties as they channeled human telegraphs and produced spectral photography. This dichotomous belief in unseen forces and the need for scientific proof of their existence is embodied today in what John Potts describes as the “enlightened believer.”[24] Ghost hunters, equipped with electromagnetic field monitors, full spectrum cameras, and electronic voice phenomenon recorders are simply secular late modern versions of 19th century Spiritualists “who firmly suspect that ghosts and other supernatural phenomenon do exist, but that plausible evidence must be found for them, based on empirical evidence.”[25]

       Historian Robert S. Cox elaborates on the performative nature of Spiritualism to include Victorians’ search for personal identity through the notion of soulmates. To find one’s authentic self, men and women began opting for sympathetic relationships based on love and interconnectedness rather than societal pressures of status or socioeconomic assuredness. Spiritualists espoused the benefits of free love and sympathetic, referred to by Spiritualist A.B. Child as “soul affinity.”[26] Spiritualists who adopted Child’s fascination with soul affinity believed that every person on earth has a spiritual counterpart but understood that the pitfalls of the mortal world might inhibit true soul affinity until after the spirit departed the body. They maintained that two destined souls could never truly be separated. This Victorian emergence of mutual love and a bond everlasting bestowed ghost stories with a reoccurring theme recognizable still: lost love. Doomed spirits, usually sad Victorian women robed in long white or gray dress, are destined to wander the cliffs, or the widow’s walk, or the cemetery in an eternal search for their soulmate. One longtime Bellamy volunteer who has been involved with the site since before it was even a museum has his own “lady in grey” story about a forlorn ghost he claims many used to see wandering the rooms in the main house.
       Spiritualism and the idea of soul affinity did more for 19th century women than turn them into forlorn spectral protagonists of Victorian ghost tales. The idea of a soulmate made women spiritually necessary. Spiritualist discussions of a balanced universe emphasized equally the importance of men and women. Female mediums channeled spirits who delivered radical messages on topics from marital rape to women’s role in public office. The most visible evidence of “the link between female empowerment and Spiritualism is the historic connection between suffragism and Spiritualism.”[27] Not all Spiritualists were suffragists or vice versa, but the first suffrage leaders in America noted that Spiritualism embraced the equality of women with a zeal yet unheard in antebellum America. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony acknowledged the religion’s positive position on women in suffragist writings. Spiritualist newspapers openly advocated for women’s rights, and female mediums commanded public speaking platforms.
       The end of the era of Spiritualism with a capital “S” cannot be neatly packaged. Some historians, like Robert S. Cox, determined the 1870’s as the twilight years of American Spiritualism asserting that the half million casualties of the Civil War did not speak through mediums with any amount of fervor found in antebellum America.[28] Others, like Molly McGarry, asserted that Spiritualism continued, though fractured, through the beginning of the twentieth century because “the ghost is a powerful way of understanding memory and identity.”[29]
       Even if Spiritualism as a religion faded way, the search for an afterlife has not.  In a 1993 article for the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Brian Harley and Glenn Firebaugh found that over 70% of Americans believe in some form of an afterlife. In fact, the overall trend in Americans’ belief in an afterlife rose, although slightly, between 1970 and 1990.[30] There is evidence, from the proliferation of pseudoscientific ghost hunting societies to Americans’ insistence in belief of an afterlife that remnants of 19th-century Spiritualism are still at work in American society today.

Paranormally Perceived: Opportunities and Obstacles of a “Haunted” Historic Site
            So it seems pushing back on visitors’ desire to encounter death and life after death at historic sites would just be an exercise in futility, so how do museum professionals harness this deep, intrinsic visitor motivation, and should they? The majority of museumgoers is under the age of fifty[31] and is more accustomed to “curating culture” and filtering personal preferences through mass media avenues like Facebook and Instagram. As institutions like print newspaper and fraternal organizations decline, websites like Reddit and YouTube continue to gain popularity because, like other leisure options, the user has choice and control of what content to explore along with the option to give feedback or engage in discussion with likeminded users. These qualities appeal to the population that already makes up the majority of museum visitors, and museums need to respond to these “extremely creative consumers”[32] lest they run the risk of losing them to other leisure options. Historic sites and museums that offer ghost tours, historic happy hour, adult arts and crafts, and other specialized classes or tours are tapping into modern visitors’ personal, sociocultural, and physical needs of consumptive control, self-actualization, and identity making, but it remains to be seen if these offerings fulfill the educative mandates inherent in museum mission statements and programming goals.  
       An area dark tourism can have a continued, positive impact is when it comes to a museum’s bottom line. So many historic house museums, the Bellamy Museum included, are not-for-profit organizations or run by small nonprofits which receive no state or federal funds. Revenue comes from grant writing, donations, admissions, and after-hours private rentals. This means a site’s ability to host weddings, business meetings, and even paranormal investigations can be an integral part of the annual budget. Most recently the Bellamy Museum leaned into people’s deathly desires not by offering ghost tours ourselves, but by renting to ghost hunting companies like Haunted Rooms America who offer anyone the ghost hunter experience in historic places across the U.S. for a fee. Haunted Rooms America will hold six overnight investigations at the Bellamy site in 2025. Please note the Bellamy Mansion Museum does not allow any investigating in the site’s original slave quarters building. These groups only have access to the main house on property.

       With investigations come “evidence” which often lives in perpetuity on online platforms. These videos, photographs, and “electronic voice phenomenon” shape a narrative outside the purview of museum professionals and an educational mission, so when a visitor asks “Is this place haunted?” the official answer is important lest people confuse the interpreted for the inferred. At the Bellamy Museum we often answer that question with an identity affirming, “if you believe ghosts are here, then they are, and if you do not, they are not.”

Interested in hearing more about the supposed spooks at local sites like the Bellamy Museum and positioning documented historical education alongside the public's interest in the supernatural? Check out the podcast link “Burgwin-Wright Presents: Haunted Tales of the Cape Fear” from our friends at the Burgwin-Wright House and Gardens—Wilmington’s oldest historic home open to the public. BWH Assistant Director Hunter Ingram talks with Leslie Randle-Morton of the Bellamy Museum about their experiences.
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[1] John Lennon and Malcolm Foley, two professors of hospitality, tourism and leisure management at Glasgow Caledonian University first coined the term in the late 1990s. Their first full length exploration and analysis of this phenomenon was Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster published in 2000. 
[2] John Potts, “The Idea of the Ghost,” in Technologies of Magic, ed. John Potts and Edward Scheer (Sydney: Power Publications, 2006), 82.
[3] Potts, 79. Potts draws on the evolution of intellectual historians such as Collingwood, Focault, and Kuhn in acknowledging that ideas are not unchanging but are dynamic in their historical function and require contextualization rather than just a moniker (the name attached to an idea) to truly understand them.
[4] Ann McGuire and David Buchbinder, “The forensic gothic: Knowledge, the supernatural, and the psychic detective.” Canadian Review of American Studies 40, no. 3 (2010): 290.
[5] Potts, 83.
[6] John H. Falk, Identity and the Museum Visitor Experience (Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, 2009), 43.
[7] John Falk and Lynn Dierking, Learning from Museums (Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press, 2000), 13.
[8] Falk, 41-45.
[9] Anthony Seaton, “Guided by the Dark,” International Journal of Heritage Studies 2, no. 4 (1996).
[10] Chris Rojek, Ways of Escape (London: MacMillan, 1993), 136. 
[11] Seaton, 240. 
[12] Seaton, 237. 
[13] Seaton, 237.
[14] Richard Sharpley, “Shedding Light on Dark Tourism,” in The Darker Side of Travel, ed. by Richard Sharpley and Philip Stone (Bristol: Channel View Publications, 2009), 20. The chart was scanned directly from the book.
[15] Graham Dann, “The Dark Side of Tourism,” Etudes et Rapports L, no. 14 (1998): 3.
[16] Lennon and Foley, 7.
[17] Anthony Seaton and John Lennon, “Thanatourism in the Early 21st Century,” in New Horizons in Tourism, ed. Tej Vir Singh (Oxfordshire: CABI Publishing, 2004), 69.
[18] Seaton and Lennon, 70.
[19] Molly McGarry, Ghosts of Future Past (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2008), 1. 
[20] Robert Cox, Body and Soul (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia, 2003), 12-13. 
[21] McGarry, 2. 
[22]  Ibid, 2.
[23] Roy Stemman, Spirits and Spirit Worlds (London: Danbury Press, 1975), 26.
[24] John Potts, “The Idea of the Ghost,” in Technologies of Magic, ed. John Potts and Edward Scheer (Sydney: Power Publications, 2006), 82. 
[25] Potts, 86.
[26] Robert Cox, Body and Soul (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia, 2003), 95.
[27] McGarry, 46-49.
[28] Cox, 233.
[29] McGarry, 175.
[30] Brian Harley and Glenn Firebaugh, “Americans’ Belief in an Afterlife,” in Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 32, no. 3 (1993), 269-278. The study analyzed answers from over 16,000 Americans who identified as Christians, both Protestant and Catholic, Jews, “None”, and “Other.”
[31] Susie Wilkening and James Chung, Life Stages of the Museum Visitor (Washington, DC: AAM,2009), 7.
[32] Wilkening and Chung, 145.