Description of Place: A foreboding two-story structure, the Rimshaw House is an American Federal style structure with Gothic Victorian undertones in halted dilapidation. Nearly restored to its original condition, the aging edifice has a preserved turn-of-the-century museum interior lacking in modern conveniences. American Federal furnishings fill the house replete with items from the history of North Carolina, including a Confederate flag, Civil War muskets and currency donated by the estate of Frank Myers, a town local. The wood-burning stove and water pump sink are original, but are rarely used. Guests are encouraged from 10:00 - 3:00 with scheduled tours booked in advance.

Ghostly Manifestations: The Old Rimshaw House has actually been a haunted site for a relatively short amount of time to professional ghost hunters. Many of the stories about the place have been spread from one of mouth and obviously embellished over the years. Nevertheless, several citizens of the wonderful little town of Mayberry insist that “something” still exists in the old house. For an accurate depiction of the house, one just needs to track down the original witnesses to the phenomenon and the old courthouse records.

In 1949, Sheriff Abe Poindexter was constantly reporting to reports of lights wandering through the darkened structure. Despite how often he searched, he never reported seeing anything. Several people who drove by the house insisted that they saw the figure of a man walking by the house and former residents from that street confirm this. A few added comments continue that the figure of the man vanishes from sight as he reaches the end of the property. Some accounts are that neighbors saw this same figure peering out from the darkened windows of the top floor.

In later years, Deputy Sheriff Dale Buckley was consistently patrolling the area near the house looking for a glimpse of this man. He has left a written report of a figure he saw in an upstairs window of the place, but that the figure must have “escaped out the back as I approached because said person was missing as he investigated.” He also makes several references to locking the place up, but finding the house completely unlocked when he returned. When Buckley became sheriff, though, he couldn’t keep up the patrols and sent his Deputy Andrew Gilley to keep an eye on the place. Gilley, however, became responsible for out right fabricating many of the stories of the tall tales based on screams, phantoms and ghostly laughter later spread through town. Long since retired, he’s a bit amused that some of the tales are still being told and even being revised by new so-called witnesses.

Another person who insists the place is haunted is a long time Mayberry resident named Floyd Lawson. His father, Charles Lawson, owned the house down the block from the Rimshaw House during the late Forties to mid Fifties and knew a lot about the shenanigans that occurred on that street first hand. In fact, back then, the Lawsons had a direct view of the house up until the trees increased in size and obscured that view. Several of the neighbors had problems with figures that prowled their yards and knocking on the door at night. Having since passed away from complications of a stroke in 1969, Floyd recalled:

“Dad was getting waked up at least three to four times a month. He never found a thing when he answered the door and searched the yard and sometimes it started up just as fast as he closed the front door. It took him a while before he started blaming the ghosts from the Rimshaw; eventually, he just moved us into town and started renting another house to get away from it, but he never sold the former homestead. Later renters said they too were harassed by someone exploring the property and knocking at the door in the dead of night.”

During the Sixties, both tramps and illegal moon shiners looking for a hiding place to brew their illegal whisky frequented the place. A calm, laid-back and jovial person, Sheriff Andrew Taylor never heard any more weird stories from near the house, but then he adds that no one has lived in the vicinity of that back road in years. A completely rational person, he blames many of the lights shined on the house from car lights and sounds from the nearby highway.

His successor, George Patterson, refutes the car lights theory. An enterprising con artist apparently sold the house to Arnold Bailey, a local young man fresh out of high school, and Bailey decided to move into the house and start repairing it, eager to achieve adult independence, but two things halted him. The supposed deed to the house wasn’t legitimate, and the form of a figure lurking the upstairs halls didn’t cater to Bailey living in his house and trying to restore it.

Patterson left the sheriff’s office in 1982, choosing Mayberry’s favorite son, Bernard Fife, the former town deputy under Sheriff Taylor to replace him. The house had always spooked Fife and definitely believed the stories about it, even the tall tales that Gilley, now deceased, had confessed as lies. An Ichabod Crane-type figure of a man with a proud but thin frame, Fife was getting phone calls to check out moonshiners hiding in the house. As Fife told Taylor years later, he was checking out the house and was venturing through the upstairs bedrooms when a shadow cut in front of him and he fled the house at top speed, sending local mechanic Jerome “Goober” Pyle to retrieve the squad car left behind!

Re-elected sheriff, Andy Taylor still finds himself talking boys out of going into the house and chasing away visitors from out of state trying to locate the ghosts. In 2004, he allowed for a solitary ghost hunter to stay the night in the house, but nothing came out of it. The opinion was the house was no longer haunted and the recent stories were the products of racing imaginations and would-be pranksters.

Today, the house is a relocated museum landmark, a storehouse of antique furniture and old books on the town history. No one believes the ghost is still around, but every once in a while, a small object is found in a room where it shouldn’t be, and over off of Elm and Spring Street after dark, a confused wayward spirit wanders up and down the street near the strip mall as if it is lost.

History: The Rimshaw House was built by one of the founding families of Mayberry around 1745. Jefferson Davis reportedly stayed there once as a guest as he passed through town, but its interesting history actually begins in the 1940s while Clayton Rimshaw owned the property. Left alone by his children in the later years of his life, he began losing his temper and his patience with his hired help. Many of them left him alone to run the house that pressed him even more. According to rumor, he caught one hired hand trying to steal from him and dragged the accused thief down into the cellar where he killed him with an axe, burying him in the dirt floor. The validity of this accusation is highly in question because no records are to be found of any criminal proceedings. Nevertheless, when Rimshaw died, he did not leave the house to any of his heirs and instead left instructions for the house to never be disturbed. The deed has been unclaimed for over fifty years.

In 1975, Rimshaw’s last surviving lawyer left the deed to the City of Mayberry and because of tenuous historical connections to the house, the Mayberry County Preservation Society began trying to restore the old house. Over several years, plans to refurbish the place as a museum and landmark never came to fruition, the funds to do so never reached, and in 1998, whole plots of the deserted section of town was purchased for a strip mall, the first in the small town. At no extra charge, the developer promised to save the Rimshaw House for its local historical significance and move it to a new tract of land. The town council lead by Sam Jones and Howard Sprague decided on an empty but smaller tract of property at the end of Taylor Street down from the mayor’s residence and in the vicinity of the homes of several city councilmen, including Sheriff Taylor, whose daughter-in-law, Mary Alice Taylor, heads up the care and restoration of the house with the assistance of the ladies in the Mayberry County Preservation Society. Taylor Street was named after town founder, Seth Taylor, an ancestor of Sheriff Taylor.

Identity of Ghost: Rumor claims that Clayton Rimshaw is still patrolling the area to keep “his deep dark secret” from ever being discovered. Other accounts claim the ghost of the hired man walks the area screaming for justice. In recent years, no new paranormal research has come from the house. When the house was moved, the ripped up foundations were supervised by then Sheriff Barney Fife looking for the bones of the murdered hired hand, and while several bones of pigs, sheep, cows and even a deer head were found, none of them were human. As town records recall, Clayton Rimshaw used part of the cellar as a smokehouse.

Source/Comments: The Andy Griffith Show (Episode “The Haunted House.” The Jefferson Davis reference and Frank Myers from “Mayberry Goes Bankrupt.” Mayberry modernized inspired by “Return to Mayberry” (1986) ). Hauntings based on Rock Castle in Hendersonville, Tennessee, the Whaley House in San Francisco, California and the Kelsey House in Fish Springs, Nevada.

The Kelsey House was featured on an episode of “Unsolved Mysteries.” The overly-documented Whaley House has been featured in countless TV series including “Ghost Hunters,” “Sightings,” “Haunted History,” "Fact Or Faked"  and “Most Haunted.”