Epperson House

Kansas City's Epperson House was never a wedding gift, and the woman whose ghost is said to haunt it was not a bride. The insurance underwriter Uriah Spray Epperson and his wife Mary Elizabeth completed this fifty-four-room Tudor-Gothic mansion, then called Hawthorn Hall, in 1923, and built an organ loft into its Great Hall for Harriet Evelyn Barse, a professional organist and childless friend of the family in her late forties whom newspapers politely called their "adopted daughter". Barse chose the instrument's specification herself at the Reuter Organ Company in Lawrence, Kansas, then died of a perforated gallbladder on 20 December 1922, before it was finished. The Eppersons covered the console with a tapestry and left it silent until a memorial recital on 29 November 1925. Since the 1970s, students and campus security at the University of Missouri-Kansas City have reported organ music, footsteps and a woman in an evening gown inside the empty house. The difficulty is straightforward: the organ was sold and broken up in 1943, and the loft has stood empty ever since. The mansion has been closed since 2010, awaiting a restoration meant to turn it into a hotel.

Uriah Spray Epperson (1861-1927) made his money in fire insurance and meat packing, not timber. His father, William, founded one of the first meat-packing plants in the Kansas City region shortly after the Civil War, and Uriah — who preferred to be called "U. S." — turned that inheritance into a succession of businesses and finally into the U. S. Epperson Underwriting Company, which wrote fire risks for grain elevators and lumberyards. That last detail appears to be the whole basis of the widely repeated claim that he was a lumber baron. In 1919 the Eppersons began building an English-style manor on what was then the south-eastern edge of Kansas City. They hired the French-born architect Horace LaPierre, and by 1923 they had a four-storey, fifty-four-room, roughly 24,000-square-foot Tudor-Gothic house that cost somewhere between $450,000 and $500,000: elevators, a swimming pool, a billiard room, a barbershop, a tunnel linking the east and west wings, and a Great Hall with a stage and an organ loft built into its western end. Mary Elizabeth Epperson (1855-1939) called the project "Epperson's Folly" while it went up. Finished, it was named Hawthorn Hall. It was not a wedding gift, and there was no bride. The Eppersons were childless. Through their work with the Kansas City Art Institute and the city's musical life they had become close to Harriet Evelyn Barse (1871-1922), an organist who had studied at the Kansas City Conservatory of Music and had held posts in several leading Kansas City churches, including eight years at the First Church of Christ, Scientist. When Harriet's mother died in 1921 she moved into the Epperson household. Newspapers of the day called her their "adopted daughter". No adoption was ever made, and the arithmetic shows how figurative the label was: Harriet was ten years younger than Uriah and sixteen years younger than Mary Elizabeth, who was then in her sixties. It reads as a polite period formula for a friendship that had no other convenient name. Harriet's playing is what put an organ in the house. She travelled repeatedly to the Reuter Organ Company in Lawrence, Kansas, selected the equipment, wrote the specification and later superintended the installation. Reuter's Opus 74 was a two-manual, twenty-rank instrument with electro-pneumatic action, contracted in May 1922 for $9,800 "cash" and shipped on 22 May 1923. The main organ spoke through a grille in the great living room, with an echo division and chimes on the third floor and an eighty-eight-note player mechanism. She never heard a note of it. On 20 December 1922 Harriet Barse died of a perforated gallbladder at forty-seven, with the instrument still unfinished. The Eppersons shrouded the oak console and its ivory keyboards in an antique tapestry and left it silent for three years. On 29 November 1925 they finally gathered Harriet's friends and admirers in the Great Hall for a memorial dedication: Powell Weaver, her friend and mentor and later conductor of the Kansas City Philharmonic, played, assisted by the soprano Winifrede Repp Railey. The Kansas City Times reported the following morning that the two-manual "proved to be an instrument of fine quality" and that the programme "revealed a particularly sweet tone of the lighter passages". Uriah died in the house on 3 June 1927, four years after moving in. He left Hawthorn Hall not to his widow but to his friend and business partner James Jesse Lynn, on condition that Mary Elizabeth could remain there for the rest of her life on a generous income. She did, and died in the same house on 22 October 1939 at eighty-four. Lynn first considered moving the underwriting company's offices in; the neighbours objected, so in 1942 he gave the mansion to the University of Kansas City, today UMKC. Short accounts — including Wikipedia's — usually say the widow donated it. She had been dead three years. The war finished the organ. Converted into a dormitory for Navy flyer cadets, the house was altered heavily, and in 1943 the organist and organ dealer Walmer August Heinrich Brummer (1905-1995) bought Opus 74 and broke it up for a market starved of organ parts. Some of it is believed to have gone into the organ at Trinity United Methodist Church in Granite City, Illinois. The loft at the west end of the Great Hall has been empty ever since — more than eighty years. The house served as a dormitory until 1956, then housed the School of Education and finally the Department of Architecture, Urban Planning and Design; in the 1980s the Conservatory of Music was based there. Staircases, split levels and the impossibility of cheap accessibility compliance gradually squeezed the building out of use. It has stood vacant since 2010. One caution for anyone reading around the subject: there are two Epperson buildings and two Epperson organs. Mary Elizabeth paid for the U. S. Epperson Memorial Hall at the Kansas City Art Institute, dedicated in 1928, and for a second Reuter instrument there, Opus 335 of 1929. That hall caught fire on 24 April 1967 and that organ was lost. It had nothing to do with the house on Cherry Street, but accounts routinely merge the two.

Epperson House stands at 5200 Cherry Street, on the southern edge of UMKC's Volker campus in Kansas City, Missouri, at the corner of Cherry Street and 52nd. You cannot go in. The building has been vacant since 2010, belongs to the University of Missouri-Kansas City and is closed to the public with no interior access of any kind — not on Halloween, not for paranormal investigators, not by appointment. It has significant weather damage, has been broken into, and its tower has been boarded up for decades. Entering is trespassing on university property as well as physically unsafe, and the university has spent years simply keeping it standing, at a maintenance cost it has put at around $60,000 a year. What you can do is look at it. The exterior is fully visible from Cherry Street and from the open lawn that falls away below the stone terrace; that is the view in almost every photograph of the house, and it is best in afternoon light. The campus is publicly walkable in daylight. Chris Wolff, UMKC's bookstore manager and unofficial campus historian, has for years led haunted walking tours of the campus that stop outside the mansion. They are occasional rather than scheduled, so ask the university rather than assume. One note for heritage travellers: despite being described everywhere as a landmark, Epperson House is not individually listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It has appeared on the Historic Kansas City Foundation's Most Endangered list, and the developers now attached to it intend to apply for state and federal historic tax credits. That may eventually change what visitors can see. In January 2025 UMKC selected a team from Sunflower Development Group — Mark Moberly and Jason Swords — working with the hospitality operator Jen Gulvik and the Kansas City architects Generator Studio, to convert the mansion into a fourteen-room boutique hotel with a cafe, a restaurant, a library bar, event space and a hydrothermal spa. Restoration has been costed at $12-15 million, and the developers said at the announcement that assembling the money would take several years before construction could begin. No opening date has been given. If it happens, it will be the first time in a century that anyone outside the university can stand in the Great Hall and look up at the empty organ loft. Getting there: the KC Streetcar's Main Street extension serves the UMKC area. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and the Kansas City Art Institute are both a short walk away — and the Art Institute is where U. S. Epperson Memorial Hall, the family's other Gothic building and the home of their other vanished Reuter organ, still stands.