McRaven House

McRaven, in Vicksburg, Mississippi, sells itself as "the most haunted house in Mississippi" — a title it awarded itself, and has advertised on its own website since at least 2013. The documented house is stranger than the marketing. Its tour dates the oldest room to 1797 and credits a highwayman called Andrew Glass; the 1978 National Register nomination dates the earliest surviving fabric to about 1836 and names the original landowner Anthony Glass, an early settler, with no highway robbery attached. The nomination's chain of title contains no Sheriff Stephen Howard and no Mary Elizabeth Howard, the young wife the house calls its most active ghost. What it does contain is John H. Bobb, recorded in the 1860 census as a planter — a slaveholder — who bought the property in 1844 and paid for the Italianate front. A year after Vicksburg fell to Grant, in May 1864, Bobb quarrelled with Black US soldiers picking flowers in his garden, knocked a sergeant down with a brick, and was seized on his way home and shot dead. The house needs no ghost to be haunted.

There are two McRavens. One is the house the tour sells: a highwayman's hideout of 1797, a bride dead in childbirth, a Confederate field hospital, ghosts. The other is the house documented in the National Register of Historic Places nomination filed in 1978 — and the documented one is both later and far more brutal. The nomination was prepared by Mary McCahon Shoemaker, an architectural historian at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. She worked from Warren County deed books and the federal census, and she reached conclusions that the tour does not repeat. In her reading, the earliest surviving part of the house is not an 18th-century cabin but the rear ell, a two-storey brick block "constructed in two stages ca. 1836 in the conservative vernacular of the late Federal tradition". The grand part — the north wing with the double-tiered gallery that appears in every photograph of McRaven — she dates to the 1850s. That is the whole building: a ca. 1836 block and an 1850s wing. The property was listed as the Bobb House on 8 January 1979, reference number 79001337. The land does have a Glass in it, but the nomination names him Anthony Glass, "an early settler in the area", and it says only that the ground the house stands on was once part of his extensive holdings, subdivided as the riverport of Vicksburg grew. It does not say he built anything, and it does not call him a highwayman. The chain of title in the nomination runs like this. William Bobb bought the 6.3-acre house lot in 1837 (Warren County Deed Book J:479) and "may well have constructed the rear portion of the house" before selling the property — by then nearly eleven acres — to his brother John H. Bobb in 1844 for $5,000 (Deed Book U:598). Family tradition, collected by Shoemaker from Lucy Critchler, a great-niece of John H. Bobb, in an interview on 1 June 1978, holds that it was John who added the Italianate front. Sheriff Stephen Howard, whom the tour credits with the middle section, does not appear in the nomination's chain of title at all. What John H. Bobb was is not in dispute. The nomination records him flatly as "Planter John H. Bobb (1808-1864)", citing the 1860 population schedule for Warren County. In Mississippi in 1860, planter was not a job description; it was a statement about who did the work. This was an elite slaveholding household on the edge of a river city whose wealth was cotton and the people forced to make it, and the plasterwork the visitor admires in the parlour was paid for out of that. That is what makes the end of the story so exact. In the spring of 1863 Ulysses S. Grant closed on Vicksburg; after a siege the National Park Service counts at forty-seven days, the city surrendered on 4 July 1863 and was garrisoned — increasingly by regiments of Black US soldiers, many of them men who had been enslaved in that same countryside a year or two earlier. In May 1864 John Bobb found some of them in his garden. The only account we have comes from the white Vicksburg press, reprinted across the Confederacy and quoted at length in 1916 by the Lost Cause historian J. S. McNeily. In that telling, Bobb ordered the soldiers out, was cursed, and knocked a sergeant down with a brick. The soldiers left vowing revenge. Bobb went straight to headquarters and was promised protection by Major General Henry W. Slocum. On his way home, fifteen or twenty soldiers led by a sergeant seized him and his companion Mattingly, marched them through the machine shops and about 150 rods down a bayou, and shot Bobb in the back and then in the face. Mattingly ran and escaped. Slocum sent a staff officer, who found Bobb dead and his wife over the body. Only the sergeant was arrested. Slocum's response survives as General Orders No. 7, issued at Vicksburg that same month: "The recent murder of a citizen, by colored soldiers in open day in the streets of this city should arouse the attention of every officer serving with these troops to the absolute necessity of preventing their soldiers from attempting a redress of their own grievances." McNeily's verdict on what followed was blunt: beyond the order, "nothing seems to have been done." The nomination calls Bobb "the first Vicksburg civilian killed as a result of tensions arising between residents and the occupying black Union forces". His widow Selina sold the property in 1869. William Murray, a local machinist and inventor, bought it in the early 1870s, and his unmarried daughters lived in it, increasingly alone and increasingly poor, until 1960. That year O. E. Bradway, Jr. bought the overgrown house and opened it for tours in 1961. It has been a paying attraction ever since.

McRaven is a private house museum, open only for paid guided tours; there is no free access to the grounds. The house gives its address as 1445 Harrison Street, Vicksburg, Mississippi 39180, and its telephone as 601-501-1336. The 1978 National Register nomination gives the address as 1503 Harrison Street, which is the same property under earlier street numbering. As published by the house in 2026, there are four ways in. The History Tour lasts 45 minutes with a costumed guide and covers the building, the families and the furnishings: $15 adults, $10 students aged 6 to 18, free under 5, offered Monday to Saturday 10:00-17:00 and Sunday 13:00-17:00. The Haunted Tour lasts an hour and a quarter, is led by a theatrical guide in period costume and is built around the ghost stories: $25 for adults and students alike, Friday and Saturday at 19:00 and 20:30, with weeknight slots arranged for groups of four or more. A Combination Tour bundles both for $35 adults, $30 students, and the two halves can be taken on different days. Once a month the house runs a public Ghost Hunt at $75 a head, limited to eighteen tickets: guests join the 20:30 haunted tour and may then stay until 02:00 using the house's own ghost-hunting equipment, with refreshments around midnight. Private investigations are arranged by phone or by email to the house manager. Prices, hours and event dates change, and the ghost hunts in particular are scheduled month by month and sell out on a small ticket allocation. Check the house's own site before travelling. If your interest is the documented building — the 1850s Italianate wing with the inlaid gallery piers, and the plasterwork the National Register nomination singles out as among the finest in Vicksburg — the daytime History Tour is the one that covers it; the ghost stories dominate the evening tours. Vicksburg National Military Park, which preserves the siege lines that decided the fate of the city and of this house, is a few minutes away at 3201 Clay Street and is a separate visit.