#rotherwood mansion

Rotherwood Mansion

Kingsport, Tennessee

The Rotherwood Mansion was built by the Reverend Frederick A. Ross in 1818 and is rumored to be the home of a ghostly Lady in White. Legend says that the lady is Ross’s daughter, Rowena, who was said to be looking for her love who drowned in the Holston River nearby. After several more tragedies, Rowena went to the same river where she drowned herself. Ever since, her spirit has lingered at the mansion.

The funeral of the most hated man in Kingsport, as the pastor began to give Phipps his final words, the river below the gathering began to bubble and churn, as if it were boiling, the currents moving so fast the water itself was muddy. The coffin was vibrating, as though something inside wanted out badly. They heard the scrabbling of what sounded like claws against wood and with a roar, a gigantic black dog blasted out of the casket, bolting out from under the black cloth as the attendants screamed in terror. The dog snarled at them with its gleaming eyes before bolting off across the grounds and vanishing into the woods.

Some say the angry ghost of Joshua Phipps can be seen or heard roaming the halls of Rotherwood and others report hearing a phantom dog barking. Phipps was known in life to be a cruel man and his evil laugh has been heard throughout the mansion. His evil did not stop at the slaves and his treatment of them. Phipps was just as cruel with his own family and had a strange request about his death. He wanted to be buried standing up on the top of the hill at Rotherwood, so he could always be looking down into the bottoms and see the slaves working.

The remaining family began to whisper of things moving in the shadows of the house, of hearing animal feet running through the hallways and most horrifying of all, that the laughter and sound of Joshua Phipps stalking his way around the home as he would appear at night at the foot of the bed and yank the bed clothes off, keeping anyone from sleeping.  The slaves claimed that the ghost of Joshua Phipps had risen from the grave along with a giant black dog to torment them every night. Fed up with such reports, the family to calm their own fears agreed that Phipps’s grave would be dug up to prove once and for all that the man was truly dead. Opening the grave turned out to offer more mysteries and terror than anyone imagined. The coffin was still there and once opened, it was empty.

Not longer after, violence struck Rotherwood again as the slaves were unable to bear the torment from their unseen attackers, they revolted, destroying Phipps’s headstone, desecrating his grave and finally and killing their last torturer, Phipps’s equally cruel mistress, the mulatto woman. They beat her to death and what happened to her body is unknown.

Hell Hounds and the apparitions of not only Joshua Phipps, but also that of Rowena Ross, Pricilla and the spirits of slaves murdered on the grounds are said to wander the property. 

It is also reported that you can hear the moaning, the wailing, the crying of slaves who were tortured or killed on the plantation grounds.