Description of Place: The Old Adams House is a modest sprawling estate on almost four acres of land on the east side of Leesburg. Two stories tall with a nearby caretaker's cottage on the hill over a small lake, the house was designed with a French Colonial plantation style; the front of the mansion faces the large expanse of yard which runs along East Willoughby Road with a ranch-style wooden fence and gate at the perimeter of the property. The eight-room mansion includes large windows, wide halls, elaborate stairways, a full attic and a separate wing for the garage, a former carriage house which was added on to the house at the turn of the century. 

Ghostly Manifestations: On a warm spring day on March 11, 2012, an eighteen-year-old art student named Lissa Hollister was moving into her new room at the new home of Kappa Theta Xi Sorority. Her old residence had been been destroyed by an inexplicable fire, and what was left of her belongings still smelled like smoke, but she had saved her clothes and and boxful of things that she was able to grab in a mad rush to safety just before the flames took over her old house. Rather than a view of the football field and the quad, her new view from the window was now a wooded property now on the perimeter of a small lake. Her roommate would stay the same, which was good news to her. She wouldn't have to get used to a new roommate.

Moving in would be a bit of a chore, and putting things away would be a challenge. The most likely place to store anything would be the cellar, and in the Old Adams House, that was reached by a way of a narrow stairwell down from the kitchen. It was an old house, built just over a hundred years ago, and the basement looked as if no one had been down there even longer than that. The cellar walls were built from stone and brick, and entering it felt like going into the belly of a mausoleum. It was dark and dank with numerous cobwebs and a bit of long-term damage from moisture and mold. Old boxes lined the downstairs corridor, and in the shadows, she could see the relics of another year. Old steamer trunks, a deserted armoire, tall floor lamps, a child's tricycle hanging from the rafters and other vague shapes lurked in the dark. 

As Lissa's eyes grew accustomed to the dark, she noticed an old style bureau against the wall. It was old and dusty with extensive hand-worked designs in it. It was the sort of thing her grandmother might have owned. The top doors hung down on two chains and had smaller drawers for concealing jewelry. Up on top, it had a mirror supported by two curved pieces of wood. Who would store such an elaborate piece of furniture down here? Lissa began to wonder what it would take to get it upstairs, but as she pulled the white sheet hanging over the mirror, she caught sight of a presence beside herself in the mirror. It was the presence of a shadowy young girl in period dress standing behind her reflection in the cellar. Standing? She was floating a foot off the floor...

Seconds later, Lissa would run screaming up the stairs on to be met with the jeers and insincere platitudes of her so-called sorority sisters, and yet, these would be the girls she would form the bonds of friendship that would last a hundred years?

It sounds like a scene from a bad television movie, and yet, virtually every college or university in the United States boasts at least one or two ghost stories. Ghostly professors haunt their old classrooms, and lost students return to their old alma mater. Located across town from La Roux University, formerly the Stendahl Academy of the Creative and Performing Arts, the Old Adams House is now the home of Kappa Theta Xi Sorority, the home of twelve girls who call the old edifice home.

"I don't believe in ghosts..." Daria McFarland announces. "But I'm not sure what's going on here either. I just know that there's something weird going on here."

Blonde, attractive and out-spoken, Daria is one of several other young ladies who have experienced odd things in their new domicile. Since moving in, she has heard strange sounds at night that sound like footsteps wandering the halls at night, the clanging of pots and pans from the darkened kitchen, whispering sounds from over their heads and the feeling of being watched.

"Of course, it's going to be haunted..." House mother Margo Pritchard adds. "It's been empty for over forty years."

A tall,  regal and attractive woman, Pritchard is related by marriage to the Adams family, who once lived there. She tried to turn the house into a bed and breakfast, but old rumors and nervous contractors made long-term restorations unlikely. Painters described being watched by a tall lean bald man from the top landing. He looked real enough, but the fact that he never talked and seemed to vanish at will seemed to unnerve workers. 

At night, Pritchard heard what sounded like a little girl crying somewhere in the house. She wasn't sure where it was coming from; at times, it seemed to be coming everywhere at once. Small footsteps echoed through the house at times, and on one occasion, she felt what seemed like a presence coming down next to her on the staircase. Opening her house to the Kappa Theta Xi sorority wasn't so much an act of generosity but an attempt to keep from losing her mind. Besides the fact that the girls were willing to restore the house themselves, she was looking forward to the company.

"Since the girls have moved in," Pritchard remarks. "Things have started happening much more often, but then, I guess there's just a lot more eyes to see stuff now. Strange noises still occur, objects vanish and figures wander through where no one should be. Just last week, I thought I saw someone sitting in one of the benches outside overlooking the lake in back. I turned my head away and looked back, and whoever it was had vanished."

The general belief is that the ghost haunting the house is that of eleven-year-old Rosemary Adams, but history tells us that she returned to the house as an adult. Could she be revealing herself as a young girl and as a grown woman? Paranormal experts believe this is possible; ghosts allegedly have the ability to control how we perceive them. On the other hand, she is not the only apparition here.

"Shortly after moving in here," Daria reveals. "I had an experience which kind of had me rattled for a few days. Our previous house was on the university grounds against Greencastle Road which is very well traveled so getting used to the sounds of cars going by to complete silence was kind of a sensory shock.  On this night, I was struggling to fall asleep and I was struggling to get comfortable. I'd face the window, then the closet, then the window again, then the closet again.

"Anyway, I was laying on my right side and looking into the closet when I kind of noticed what kind of looked like a shadow sitting in the bottom of the closet. It had no details, but I could see two eyes from it staring back at me. I looked at it, and it looked back at me and we're staring at each other back and forth and I'm suddenly wondering, "What the heck is this thing?" so I reached up, hit the light, looked back and it was gone. There was nothing there.

"A couple of nights later, I was up again trying to fall asleep and for some reason, I caught myself thinking about this thing and wondering what it was. I think I had rationalized it away, but I must have finally drifted off because I felt my feet suddenly freezing as if they were a block of ice. I looked down and this thing was back. It was at the foot of the bed and holding on the my legs and looking at me. This time I saw a few more details; it looked like a small girl, but she was dark and blurry, and her eyes were completely black. She was staring at me as if she was possessed. Her hands were as cold as ice, and she wouldn't let go as hard as I tried to break free. Somehow, I managed to scream and woke up all of my sisters in the house. The shadow finally went away, but I was not that well liked for a few days..."   

Daria's sorority sisters soon began having their own experiences, such as strange noises in the middle of the night and footsteps in empty rooms, and TV's and computers that turn on by themselves. A number of figures are said to have been seen late at night and in the early morning hours wandering the downstairs and outside ground and coming up the exterior staircase. The spirit of a former student is believed to play with lights and televisions. On the third floor in the chapter room, the sounds of screaming have wakened everyone in the house.

"I caught a lot of grief for that." Daria groans. "I mean blame the girl who thinks the house is haunted for every strange thing that happens." She rolls her eyes annoyingly. "I catch grief for stuff when I'm not even here."

Kappa Theta Xi President Colleen Wyrick isn't first to confess to blaming everything that goes on in the house on Daria, but she is often the first to complain when the activity inconveniences her. Electricity is quick to go off in the house, and pledges are often stricken with the task of replacing fuses. In one week, Daria says she switched out the same two fuses back and forth five times, and yet, the power still goes off at the most inopportune times. Although hazing is banned on campus, Daria and the other pledges are often forced the miserable task of doing every dirty job that Colleen suggests, including cleaning the basement with toothbrushes in their underwear.

Kaylee Switzer tells this story: "It was the week after the hot water failed, and Colleen was being particularly bitchy especially since Dorothy dropped that house on her sister." She and Daria bond over the "Wizard Of Oz" reference. "Anyway, Colleen somehow decided maybe the strange sounds in the basement would go away if we dragged everything out, scrubbed it clean and completely reorganized it. Miss Margo liked the idea, but no one predicted that Colleen would go all Hitler ordering us around to do it while she stretched out and waited for her ass to get bigger. 

"Anyway, we were down there in the house dungeon and our only light was from  the window facing the street and the open outside doors which are at the end of the hall. Cleaning it wasn't so bad a job as it was to haul out the old furniture, but we had a good breeze blowing through those doors and keeping us from getting overheated. Anyway, while we were working, the wind lifted the doors up and slammed them shut which darkened the room on us of course. Not willing to be in the dark, we went and opened them back up, and these are large heavy wood doors. It took Sara, Daria and I to push up on them and open them again, and when they're open, they hang down low over the concrete foundation where you'd think the wind would be blowing them down instead of up. We get them open again and hook up a hose to spray the floor down, and as soon as we get the hose on the downstairs faucet, crash, the doors slam shut and the whole house practically rattles from it. By that point, we were in complete darkness, and Sara takes first shift to watch the doors so we can rush through the job in the light, and you know what, with someone out there, those doors didn't even lift up enough to swing around shut." 

"I'm not the kind of person who claims that ghosts don't exist." Margo adds. "I mean... I believe ghosts exist. There's just too much going on around here; sometimes two to three things a week, but I can't confirm what the girls are experiencing. I just know what I've experienced."

In October 2012, a student filming a story about the haunted sorority recorded a framed photo tumbling from a bookshelf. Sorority sisters also reported doors opening and closing on their own, faucets turning on and off, the sound of a chair moving in the attic, and lights flickering with no explanation. The antique piano in the parlor has also been known to play by itself, its rusty, discordant notes echoing throughout the home. Some girls report seeing faces in windows, while others have seen a wispy figure in their bedroom at night by their bedside. The girls know her as "Bloody Rosemary."

"Every year she's supposed to come through the windows to commemorate her death," Resident Sara Shaw reported in her November 2012 video blog. "She enters through the panes, walks through the room, opens our door, and then walks back up to the attic."

History: Constructed sometime around 1880, the old Adams House was once the summer residence of Dr. Eliot T. Adams whose family spent several generations here until it fell out of favor with the family in 1948. Rosemary Adams was the last family member who lived here, and reports of her ghost might have had something to do with it staying empty until 1998 when it came into the custody of Margo Pritchard, a distant relative of the Adams family by marriage.

As of November 5, 2012, Kappa Theta Xi sorority and Beta Sigma Beta fraternity have been debating over trading houses over the summer, which would allow the girls to live closer to campus once more, and the guys to have the large property around the Adams House to use as an athletic field. Margo is reticent about this possible trade; in fact, she believes the deciding factor could be the paranormal activity. 

Identity of Ghosts: Psychic Heather Burton in her 2012 visit here described several spirits here. She describes caretaker Darin Scott, the former caretaker for the Smith family, who accidentally drowned in the lake in 1960, Charlotte Hood, a ten-year-old girl scout who had been murdered on Willoughby Lane in 1977, Roberta Pena, a music teacher from the university who disappeared in 1993 and James and Sandra Adams, Rosemary's slain parents, who last lived in the house in 1937. Burton also described several other personages she couldn't identify. She didn't think the house or location was connected to the local deaths except for its proximity. 

Of all the ghosts, the strongest presence she felt is that of Rosemary Adams, who was the last tenant here in the 1960s. Eleven-year-old Rosemary was diagnosed as psychotic by doctors in 1937 when after getting punished by her parents, she crept up on them in bed at night and slashed their throats. Her nanny discovered the bodies and called the police, and Rosemary was institutionalized at the Loudon County Mental Health Hospital in Sterling. When the asylum closed down in 1958, doctors released Rosemary to her own recognizance and she was delivered to her former home on Willoughby Street. A week later, Darin Scott found her remains; she had hung herself in her old bedroom, possibly out of facing the reality of her sins or just being unable to live alone. The local account was so horrifying that she became known as "Bloody Rosemary" in the media and stories of her ghost haunting the location continued for twenty years afterward until Margo Pritchard inherited the property in absentia.

"None of my cousins wanted it." She remarks. "And they were directly related to Rosemary's mother."

Source/Comments: American Horror House (2002) - Activity based on activity at student housing structures from Morehead State University in Morehead, Kentucky, the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Ohio State University in Athens, Indiana, the State University of New York in Genesco, New York, Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee and Sweet Briar College in Sweet Briar, Virginia.