Most haunted mansions get turned into museums, hotels, or roadside attractions once the paranormal stories start piling up. Woodburn took the opposite path. Delaware bought the house in 1965, renovated it, and moved the sitting governor in. Every governor since has lived alongside a documented haunting that dates back more than two centuries, and almost nobody outside Delaware knows the state’s chief executive shares an address with a ghost.
From Sheriff’s Sale to Governor’s Residence
The land beneath Woodburn traces back to a 1684 Swedish crown grant to David Morgan and his heirs. In the 1780s, Charles Hillyard III bought the property at a sheriff’s sale for just $110 and built the Georgian home known as Woodburn in 1790, according to research compiled by US Ghost Adventures. The house passed through several private owners over the following 175 years before the state of Delaware purchased it in 1965 and converted it into the official governor’s mansion.
Unlike a single-owner property with one tragic story attached, Woodburn accumulated decades of residents, and apparently, several of them never left. Georgian architecture, tall windows, and formal gardens lend the house a stately presence that belies just how many separate ghost stories now live under one roof.
The Bates family owned Woodburn for a long stretch of the nineteenth century, and much of the house’s early ghost lore traces back to their tenure. Their name comes up repeatedly in the earliest written accounts, tying the property’s oldest reported haunting to a specific, documented household rather than an anonymous colonial-era rumor.
The Ghost on the Stairs
The earliest recorded sighting at Woodburn involves a traveling preacher named Lorenzo Dow, who stayed overnight at the house sometime in the early 1800s. According to accounts documented by Seeks Ghosts, Dow passed a man on the staircase dressed in the clothing of a much earlier generation, complete with a powdered wig and knee breeches. He later learned the homeowner’s long-deceased father matched the description exactly.
That encounter set the tone for two centuries of similar reports. Woodburn’s ghosts tend to appear briefly, dressed for a different era, and vanish before anyone can ask them a question.
The Wine Thief and the Girl in the Garden
Some spirits at Woodburn do not seem interested in scaring people. During Governor Charles Terry Jr.’s time in the mansion, staff reported a ghost helping itself to vintage wine in the dining room. One previous owner claimed he filled a wine decanter every night and found it empty by morning, a detail that has stuck in local retellings for generations.
A second recurring figure is gentler still. Visitors and residents describe a young girl in a red gingham dress who plays in the mansion’s garden pools and fountains. She appears most often near water, splashing and running, and disappears just as quickly as she arrived. Nobody has connected her to a specific historical death, which makes her one of Woodburn’s more mysterious residents.
The Hanged Man in the Poplar Tree
Woodburn’s darkest story involves Dan Cowgill, a Quaker who owned the house during the era of the Underground Railroad and used it as a stop for people escaping slavery. When a group of slave raiders arrived at the property looking for escapees, Cowgill drove them off. One man attempted to flee up a large poplar tree on the grounds, slipped, and became caught in a knot of branches, where he died.
Locals say that screams and the sound of rattling shackles still carry from that part of the property. Whatever the truth of that claim, the underlying history at Woodburn, a documented safe house on the Underground Railroad, is worth remembering for its own sake.
How Woodburn Compares to Other Governors’ Mansions
Plenty of American governors live in historic homes. Woodburn’s ghost story is more thoroughly documented than most others. Most state residences either are too new to have accumulated real folklore or actively downplay any paranormal reputation to avoid distracting from official business. Delaware has taken the opposite approach, allowing Woodburn’s history, ghosts included, to remain part of the public record rather than something the state tries to bury.
That openness is unusual. A sitting governor effectively serves as the long-term caretaker of a documented haunted house, inheriting the stories along with the address every time a new administration moves in. Few other states can claim that kind of continuity between an active government office and a two-century-old ghost story.
Why Woodburn Stays Under-Covered
Most haunted government buildings attract heavy media attention: think the White House or state capitol buildings with centuries of political drama attached. Woodburn is different. It is a working residence with a sitting governor and family living inside, which limits public access and, in turn, limits how much paranormal content gets produced about it. Local coverage from Only In Your State and a handful of haunted-house directories represent most of what exists online, a thin footprint for a location with this much recorded history.
Woodburn does allow limited public tours and events on select days, offering rare chances to see the interior spaces tied to these stories. Checking with state tourism and historic house resources ahead of a visit is the best way to catch one of these openings.
Woodburn proves a haunting does not need abandonment or ruin to survive. Delaware’s governor has lived with these stories for six decades, in a house the state actively maintains and occupies. That combination of an active government residence and a fully documented haunting is rare enough that Woodburn deserves far more attention than it currently receives. Every new administration inherits the same stories. The wine thief, the girl in the garden, and the tragic figure in the poplar tree all come with the address, whether the new occupants believe in them or not. Few historic homes anywhere in the country can claim that kind of unbroken, government-verified continuity.
References & Further Reading
Haunts at Woodburn Mansion — US Ghost Adventures
A Haunted Governor’s Mansion — Seeks Ghosts
One Of The Most Haunted Places In Delaware — Only In Your State
