🕯️ Special Edition: Haunted Covington — Ghosts Beneath the Oaks

Haunted Covington: Ghosts Beneath the Oaks

The drive to Covington was just over an hour, but it felt like a slow exhale out of everyday life. Cool autumn air slipped in through the cracked window, carrying that faint, leafy smell that only happens when summer finally gives up its hold. The sky was a bright, friendly blue, and every tree we passed seemed to be in mid-transformation—green melting into gold, rust, and ember-red.

I told myself we were making this little pilgrimage for something simple: a caramel apple from Scoops on the Square and lunch at Mystic Grill. But under that excuse, there was another truth tugging at me. I have been quietly, insistently drawn to a house I had never stepped inside—The Twelve Oaks in Covington, Georgia. I’d seen the photographs, read the stories, and still, nothing quite explained why I felt that sharp, familiar pull toward a place I’d never lived.

We parked, wandered past a big church whose steeple rang clean against the sky, and let ourselves drift toward the square. The sidewalks were scattered with leaves that crunched softly underfoot, the kind of day where everything feels a little more vivid. Scoops beckoned with sugar and nostalgia, Mystic Grill promised comfort food and fandom. But beneath all of that, there was the steady awareness that somewhere just beyond the square stood the house that had called me here.

The first time I saw Twelve Oaks was at night during a ghost tour. The mansion seemed almost alive beneath its glowing lights—its towering columns lit like candles against the dark. It was stunning, hauntingly beautiful, as though the past itself had paused to watch us from the shadows.

I have still never crossed its threshold. I have only stood outside, watching its white columns catch the afternoon light. And somehow, that was enough. Sometimes the strongest hauntings happen from the other side of the gate.

The House That Called Me: Twelve Oaks

Twelve Oaks began life as the town home of Judge John Harris around 1836, one of the grand antebellum homes that still give Covington its particular silhouette.[1] Today it operates as a luxury bed and breakfast, all polished wood, deep porches, and sweeping staircases. On film it has played inspiration and backdrop—its lines echoing the famous “Twelve Oaks” plantation in Gone With the Wind and appearing in various productions that have turned Covington into the “Hollywood of the South.”

But for all its screen credits and renovated elegance, Twelve Oaks keeps another story in its walls. Local lore says there are at least two resident spirits: “The Lady of the House” and “The General.” The Lady is believed to have died in 1864 after the loss of her children, her grief woven into the very era that scarred so much of Georgia.[2] Guests and owners alike have reported a womanly presence moving through rooms, and mediums claim to have “spoken” with her, learning that she recognizes another figure in the house as a military man—“the General.”

One of the more oft-repeated accounts comes from an owner who heard distinct, heavy footsteps overhead while he was alone in the house. Assuming his fiancée had simply arrived before he noticed, he dismissed it—until he heard her car pull into the drive. When he rushed upstairs, the rooms were empty, the air strangely still.[3]

Standing outside on a cool fall afternoon, you don’t need those stories to feel that this house has lived many lives. The columns rise like pale sentinels amid turning oaks, and every window seems to be watching in its own quiet way. I found myself thinking—not “I’d love to stay here,” but I could live here. Not as a guest, but as if some part of me recognized the place and simply wanted to go home.

Child’s Play Upstairs: The Newton County Visitors Center

Just off the square, in a white Greek Revival house that now serves as the Newton County Visitors Center, the ghosts are less grand—but no less persistent. Staff have long suspected that the building has a resident spirit, and the stories they tell sound deceptively simple: the sound of a game of jacks being played above their heads, over and over, when no one is upstairs.[4]

Tourism Director Jenny McDonald has described sitting at her desk while the unmistakable clatter of jacks and a rubber ball carried down from the floor above. Each time she climbed the stairs to investigate, the noise stopped and the space stood empty. She returned to her work. The game resumed.[5]

The Flower-Scented Girl of Church Street

For years, one of Church Street’s storefronts held the Church Street Antique Market, and with it, one of Covington’s most distinctive ghosts. The owners spoke of a young, female spirit who followed them from their previous shop. Her signature was not a silhouette or a shadow, but a smell: a strong, old-fashioned floral perfume that would drift through the aisles with no visible source.[6]

Customers noticed it too. Some asked what scent the store used, assuming it was an intentional fragrance. Others reported catching a glimpse of a pre-teen girl moving lightly between the antiques, only for her to vanish a heartbeat later, leaving nothing but the lingering smell of flowers behind.[7]

The Undertaker Behind the Bricked-In Doors

Walk a little further from the square and you come to an unassuming facade: a pair of old double doors, bricked-in around the edges, wide enough once to admit a horse-drawn carriage. It looks like nothing more than a forgotten corner—until someone opens it. Behind those doors lay a dusty, half-ruined space, the remains of a workroom once occupied by an undertaker. When they stepped inside to take photographs, their brand-new camera began to malfunction.[8]

The longer they stood there, the worse they felt: a sudden, pounding headache; muddled thoughts; a heavy pressure that only lifted once they stepped back into the light and the more cheerful energy of the nearby shop. Later, a paranormal team reportedly concluded that more than twenty entities still linger within those bricked walls—spirits tied to the undertaker’s work and to the rougher, “Wild West” days of early Covington.[9]

Souls Locked Inside: The Old Newton County Jail

Built in 1901 and used until 1983, the old Newton County jail has long been rumored to house more than memories. Deputies working late reported hearing furniture scrape and footsteps above them when the building was empty. Case files moved on their own. Televisions switched on in locked rooms. Toilets flushed without anyone nearby.[10]

Most disturbing of all, the gallows room—where only one man was ever officially hanged—still resonates with unexplained rattling and the sight of a translucent figure hanging in midair. Though the trapdoor has been welded shut for decades, something in that space refuses to settle.[11]

The Red-Haired Soldier of Dixie Manor

Tucked near the intersection of Monticello and Church Street, just outside the square, stands Dixie Manor—a brick beauty built before 1840, unique for its early English Regency design. Legend holds that during the Civil War, the home hid a Confederate cavalryman named Ben Camp in a dry well concealed beneath a chicken coop.[12]

Today, though, it’s remembered for a different soldier: a red-haired Confederate ghost said to favor red-haired women. Visitors have glimpsed his apparition in mirrors and hallways, and folklore warns that if a red-haired woman sleeps there, he may kiss her as she dreams.[13]

Back to the Oaks

By the time we circled back toward Twelve Oaks, the fall light had shifted into something softer. The leaves around the mansion glowed in gold and copper, the sky still washed in blue. I thought about the child upstairs in the Visitors Center, the perfumed girl of Church Street, the undertaker’s bricked-in doors, the restless inmates of the old jail, and the red-haired soldier who leans too close in the dark.

And then there was this house—white, stately, watchful—standing quietly as if it had seen all of that and more. I haven’t stayed a night inside Twelve Oaks. I haven’t sat on its stairs with an EMF meter or whispered questions into a digital recorder. I have, however, stood beneath its oaks on a crisp, blue-skied afternoon and felt the unmistakable sense that the place was alive in ways that history alone can’t explain.

Some places call to us because of their architecture, their film credits, their beauty. Others call because the stories inside them feel unfinished, as if they are still looking for someone who will listen carefully enough. Covington, to me, is both—a town of caramel apples and television tours, of bright churches and busy restaurants, and also a town where the past still brushes against your sleeve when you’re not looking.

Twelve Oaks may yet let me in one day. For now, it is enough to know that just standing under its trees, on a cool autumn day with the leaves turning and the air sharp in my lungs, I felt that rare, uncanny thing: the sense that in a haunted town, one particular house was quietly, insistently, haunting me back.

Footnotes

  1. Basic historical details on Twelve Oaks’ age and role as an antebellum home and B&B are drawn from local historical and tourism materials. ↩
  2. The “Lady of the House” and “the General,” along with the story of her death around 1864, are summarized from the Newton County Chamber’s article “Covington History: The Ghosts at Twelve Oaks.” ↩
  3. The owner’s report of footsteps upstairs while alone in the house is also recounted in “The Ghosts at Twelve Oaks.” ↩
  4. The “game of jacks” story and the crib blocking the door come from the Chamber’s blog post “Haunted Covington, Georgia – The Newton County Visitors Center.” ↩
  5. Additional lore about the ghostly nanny and strange events at the Visitors Bureau appears in “Haunting at the Newton County Visitor’s Bureau.” ↩
  6. The account of the antique store owners and their perfumed ghost comes from “Haunted Covington, Georgia – Church Street Antique Store.” ↩
  7. The car story and “Ghost Girl of Elm Street” framing are drawn from “Christmas Ghost Stories: The Ghost Girl of Elm Street.” ↩
  8. The undertaker’s workroom, camera malfunctions, and investigation are detailed in the Chamber post on Covington’s undertaker legend. ↩
  9. Further mentions of multiple entities in the undertaker’s space appear in East Georgia Paranormal Society reports. ↩
  10. Historical facts and paranormal experiences in the old jail are summarized from Amber Pittman’s “Souls Locked Inside the Historic Jail.” ↩
  11. The gallows haunting and translucent apparition are from the same Phantom Folklore series in The Covington News. ↩
  12. Architectural description and Civil War-era story for Dixie Manor are taken from the Newton Chamber’s “Self-Guided Tour: Dixie Manor in Historic Covington.” ↩
  13. The red-haired Confederate soldier folklore is described in the Chamber’s “Famous Historic Dixie Manor Hauntings” and “Haunted Places to Visit in Covington.” ↩

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