By Dr. Katherine Loflin
On any autumn evening, downtown Cary feels more like a celebration than a ghost story.
Couples stroll through the Social District with glasses of wine in hand. Restaurants buzz with conversation. Live music drifts through the streets. Families walk the sidewalks of the historic district in downtown Cary along the same paths that have been here basically since the town was founded in 1871.
But history is imbued in these paths, imprinted with the stories, energy, and memories of those that have walked them before in times of joy, sorrow, change, and everyday life.
Long before Cary became the place we know today, our town lived many previous lives. There was a Union encampment on today’s Town Hall campus, for instance, and trains defined our town, passed through and stopped here, carrying opportunity and reunion on some days, separation and heartbreak on others. And through it all, generations of Cary residents lived, worked, loved, died, and were buried here.
Remarkably, much of the framework of that earlier Cary remains. The streets still follow the similar patterns envisioned by our founder, Frank Page, even if some of their names have changed. Along Academy Street and the surrounding blocks, some houses from those times still stand, forming the heart of Cary’s historic district. Modern Cary has grown up around them, but the old town never entirely disappeared.
It’s not unusual to ask — at least for me, as someone who has studied Cary history for years — what still lingers here? What would those who have come before think of what is here now? What stories remain untold that patiently await discovery?
Over the past several years, I have searched for those answers through hours of conversation, research, and building trust with the owners of historic homes, to collect evidence to tell that part of Cary’s story. Whether you are a believer, skeptic, or just unsure about what to think on such matters, this much I can assure you: Cary’s history is layered with enough accumulated stories, occurrences, experiences, and features that if any place is a prime candidate to be a haunted town, Cary is on the short list.
A Town Built on Ancient Ground
Many places associated with hauntings share certain characteristics. They sit on ancient landscapes shaped by dramatic geological forces. They lie at crossroads where travelers once passed through. They contain buildings that have stood for generations, witnessing births, deaths, celebrations, and tragedies. And sometimes they are towns that have undergone profound cultural change — places where the identity of a community has shifted dramatically over time.
Cary possesses all of these ingredients.
Cary lies within the Piedmont region of the eastern United States, a broad band of rolling hills stretching from New Jersey to Alabama. The word “piedmont” means “foot of the mountains,” referencing its position between the coastal plain and the towering ridges of the Appalachian Mountains. Yet the land here is not simply old; it is extraordinarily ancient.
Beneath and throughout Cary is gneiss, schist, quartz, and granite formed hundreds of millions or more years ago. These were once sediment and volcanic fragments resting on ocean floors long before North America took its present shape. Over immense stretches of time, continental collisions compressed, folded, and transformed these materials deep within the earth, creating the metamorphic formations that now lie hidden beneath neighborhoods, parks, and roads.
But Cary’s geology holds another layer of complexity. It sits near the boundary between two distinct geological zones: the ancient crystalline rocks of the Piedmont and the softer sedimentary formations of the Durham Basin. This basin is itself a remnant of a dramatic moment in Earth’s history — the breakup of the supercontinent Pangaea around 200 million years ago.
In other words, Cary exists at a literal meeting point between worlds, between deep-time continental crust and the remnants of a rifting planet.
In folklore across cultures, boundaries matter. Places where different terrains, energies, or histories intersect are often associated with heightened spiritual or paranormal activity. Whether attributed to subtle electromagnetic variations, environmental psychology, or something less easily defined, many reputedly haunted locations share a common characteristic: They sit on very old ground, often at points of transition with the addition of the prevalence of certain rocks and minerals adding to this unique geological dynamic.
In Cary, the land beneath your feet may be older than a billion years. And while geology alone does not create ghosts, it establishes a foundation — one that is both physically and symbolically layered in ways that have long captured the human imagination.
Indigenous peoples, primarily the Tuscarora, were the first to call Cary home. Then the Colonists arrived. Revolution created the land that would be Cary as a new place of opportunity to a new country.
Then came the railroad.
Few inventions transformed a community as profoundly as the arrival of the railroad. Cary’s tracks carried commerce, opportunity, and the promise of connection to a world beyond the small village. But during the Civil War, those same rails also carried wounded soldiers — and the dead.
Families gathered near the railroad crossing at what is now Academy Street as wooden coffins were unloaded, one by one, from arriving trains. Cary’s eventual founder, Allison Francis “Frank” Page, would read aloud the name written on each coffin while neighbors waited, hoping — and dreading — that the next name would not be theirs to recognize. In a village of barely 300 souls, the death of a son, brother, husband, or father was not learned privately. Grief arrived by train, announced before the community gathered beside the tracks.
Places that witness such sorrow repeatedly have a way of holding onto it. Whether one believes that something of the emotion itself remains or simply that its stories become embedded in the landscape, the past does not always leave when the people who lived it do.
It was during these early chapters of Cary’s history that the town’s supernatural folklore began to take shape. Two of Cary’s oldest and most enduring ghost stories emerged from these eras and then were passed down from one generation to the next.
The Phantom Horse of Downtown Cary
The first comes to us through the voices of those who helped keep it alive. In an oral history recorded in October 1998, Warren Williams recounted the tale to Anne Kratzer, preserving a story that had already been re-told to generations of Cary residents. Williams had a particularly close connection to the place at the heart of the story: He was a former owner of the historic Page-Walker Hotel, today home to the Page-Walker Arts & History Center. This is how he remembered the legend:
“Back in those days, the Union troops took their horses, wagons and paraphernalia and guns all up on [the Page] property. And while they were there, maybe two or three weeks they were there … one of the soldiers there one night died. The next morning, they found out about this soldier passing on, they took care of that. Some of the fellows went out to where they had the horses hooked, to get the horses lined up and … they noticed this soldier boy’s horse was not there.
Mr. Sanderford had told me at one time about a horse that, from time to time, was known to come up … the street, an old dirt road at that time. It wasn’t named Ambassador then. But this horse could be heard coming up that street a galloping and just going fast as he could go, but nobody’d ever seen any horse.
Years later, we had moved then, after talking to Mr. Sanderford, my brother and myself roomed together. My brother had this on his mind, I guess, but he told me one night he heard a horse … coming through there. And he said right at that time he heard our ponies up there in the barn about a hundred yards from the house cutting up, jumping around and squealing and carrying on. And he told me the next day about it, and I told him I didn’t hear that horse. But he said you be on the lookout …
So, it was about a week or so after that, one night about 10:30 I guess, I heard a clamping, something like hooves hitting the street … and I actually heard a horse come by. I went to the balcony on the front side of our house and looked down to see if I could see the dust or anything like that … But I seen absolutely nothing. I went to the window; it was warm weather. I stood then and wondered and I heard our ponies up in the barn, maybe 100 feet or more, … cutting up so no doubt these ponies picked up something that my brother and myself had heard and was delivered up in a message from this neighbor years ago, going back to these Union troops.
Well, this is a horse that had no body on it at all. Because this soldier boy had already passed away. That was the story that was told… I heard it, I heard the noise. I didn’t see the horse, but I heard our ponies cutting up. My brother had already told me he had heard the same thing. I just believe that … we are sometimes given warning signs some way or another that something will come to you.
There’s something out there that can make contact with the human anatomy from their head to their feet. I know I’m not making it up because my brother had heard the same thing. And the old man that had told my brother started it out; there were three of us that knew about it. The old fellow’s wife had heard about it ever since they been living down on the corner of Ambassador and the other streets there. We had all heard it and there’s no doubt other neighbors around the countryside had heard it and knew about that tale. But I lived through that myself, backing up something that had already happened a hundred years before I got here. But there is something to that just as sure as I’m sitting in this chair.”
Today, visitors to the Anne B. Kratzer Educational Garden behind the Page-Walker on Ambassador Loop will find a striking aluminum horse sculpture created by artist Victoria Reed in 2010. Titled Dapple I, the sculpture features a curious detail: the saddle area is hollowed out, leaving the horse unmistakably riderless. In the moonlight, the aluminum takes on an almost eerie glow.
The sculpture is said to have no connection whatsoever to Cary’s old phantom riderless horse ghost story… Of course not.
The High House Hauntings
Perhaps no story better illustrates Cary’s haunted reputation than that of the long-lost High House.
Built during the Revolutionary era along what is now High House Road, an imposing two-story home once stood atop a hill west of what would later become downtown Cary. Known for generations simply as High House, the landmark eventually gave the road its name. The house itself is long gone, but the stories surrounding it have proven far more difficult to erase.
High House is believed to have dated to the eighteenth century and is most closely associated with Tignal Jones, later generations of the Jones family, and eventually the Williams family. The house stood near today’s intersection of High House and NW Maynard roads, on land now incorporated into the Town’s Black Creek Greenway. By the nineteenth century, the aging house and surrounding property had already acquired many of the ingredients of a classic Southern ghost story: generations of family history, deaths and a nearby burial ground, unexplained happenings in the surrounding woods — and, eventually, whispers of treasure buried somewhere on the property.
The home was first inhabited by an alleged Revolutionary War turncoat of the Jones family. Once his treachery was discovered, the community ran him out of the house, and out of the state. Out of shame, his family would thereafter refer to him only as “The Old Tory.”
The house was eventually taken over by The Old Tory’s descendants. In 1806, The Raleigh Register reported the disturbing death of a Mrs. Jones. She had disappeared and was eventually discovered in a nearby field as being deprived of all reason. She remained in that condition until her death. Later ghost stories incorporated the episode into the growing folklore of the supposedly haunted woods surrounding High House.
Other tragedies were eventually associated with the property as well. Accounts collected about High House speak of accidental deaths, shootings, and even a woman supposedly strangled by a jealous lover while watching horse racing on the property. Over generations, these stories would collectively be the basis for the woods and fields surrounding the old house being haunted.
Stories circulated of a mysterious female figure appearing around the property. The ghostly woman of High House was remembered as frightening. She appeared unexpectedly, sometimes standing silently, sometimes seen walking into the house, or riding a horse along the front property.
One account places an encounter in the 1870s.
That night, a young Williams daughter awoke and asked her father for a drink of water. The two stepped onto the porch where the girl reached for the water dipper — and suddenly screamed. Her father followed her gaze toward the yard. There, standing silently in the darkness outside High House, was a woman. She did not approach them. She did not speak. She simply stood and watched.
But the father knew exactly what his daughter was seeing. It was the same woman he had seen repeatedly while growing up at High House. In that moment, he reportedly decided that his daughter would not spend her childhood enduring the same haunting that had followed him through his own. The next morning, he packed up his family and moved to Raleigh, leaving High House behind.
According to Williams family legend, valuables were hidden somewhere on the High House property during the Civil War, when Union troops occupied the land. Such stories were hardly unusual in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century North Carolina. Before banks were readily accessible — and especially during times of war and political upheaval — families sometimes concealed money and other valuables around their homes for safekeeping. The hearth was a favored hiding place and, according to the High House story, that was precisely where the family’s valuables were hidden.
Years later, a Williams descendant who had once lived at High House awoke from a vivid dream in which an ancestor delivered an urgent message: A valuable family treasure remained hidden beneath the hearth of the now-abandoned house, and he needed to retrieve it before someone else did.
Convinced the dream had revealed the location of the family’s long-lost valuables, he went to tell his mother. But when he opened the door, mother and son reportedly spoke almost simultaneously: “I had the strangest dream last night.”
She had dreamed the same thing.
The two hurried to High House to investigate. When they arrived, however, they discovered that someone appeared to have beaten them there — and only recently. The old hearth had been dismantled, its bricks pulled away one by one. Where the dream had told them the treasure should be, they found only an empty hole.
In recent years, the family cemetery of High House has been located in an adjacent subdivision, cared for by the HOA.
The Stories We Haven’t Told…Yet
These two tales remain among Cary’s oldest and most familiar ghost stories, but they are far from the only ones. Author J. Allen Crumpler and I researched and investigated locations in preparation for writing “Haunted Cary” together, a follow-up to “Hidden History of Cary.” We encountered stories — and captured evidence — far more unsettling than we anticipated. Some of what we experienced affected us so profoundly that we ultimately made the decision to pause our investigations and postpone the book’s release, giving ourselves some needed distance from the work before returning to it.
Whether you believe that something unexplained lingers in Cary — or simply have an appreciation for the people, places, and stories that came before us — we suspect you’ll never look at this town quite the same way again.
Throughout September and October, Dr. Loflin and J. Allen Crumpler will share a sneak peek at some of their investigations, discoveries, and selected evidence from their forthcoming book “Haunted Cary.” Dates, locations, and ticket information are posted on The City Doctor Productions Facebook group.
