Upon closing on Panola Hall, the stately, historic home directly across Madison Avenue from the Eatonton Library, Michael Homeier says he and his wife, Diana, were informed, “And oh, by the way, you’ve also inherited a ghost.”
Fortunately, the California transplants were unfazed by the news, though it perhaps did explain the “welcoming presence” Diana insists she felt upon entering the first time. “It's the only house we walked through that I felt like I was being welcomed home,” she says.
Since that time three years ago, the Homeiers have heard many stories from locals who insist they’ve seen and felt the presence of Sylvia, easily the most famous spirit to haunt old Eatonton.
Legend has it Sylvia perhaps threw herself off the grand home’s tall, second-story balcony after learning of her intended husband’s death during the Civil War.
An alternate tale has her determined to avoid marrying a man she did not love, but in her attempt to escape out her bedroom window, Sylvia fell into a large, open trunk that closes and locks her inside.
Upon finding the room empty, the window open and Sylvia missing, her distressed family supposedly boarded up her room, trapping the ghost of Sylvia forever. Yet another telling has Sylvia attempting to climb down a rose trellis outside her window but slipping and falling to her demise in the garden below.
Regardless of the story, Sylvia is said to reveal herself only to those she deems worthy of her company, making it a privilege and honor to make her ghostly acquaintance, but she is said to always be attired in a hooped, white dress and distinctly smelling of fresh-cut roses when she appears.
Michael and Diana both say they’ve yet to meet Sylvia, though Diana says she does occasionally smell roses when none are present. And both point to their five-year-old dog, Flynn, who often sits quietly at the foot of the stairs leading to Sylvia’s former quarters, tail wagging and staring at … nothing?
“It seems interesting that he can be a perpetual motion machine running all over the place, except in the house. And it’s not like there’s the cat or some bug or something that he’s interested in. He sees something that he likes,” Michael says of Flynn’s mysterious obsession. “But people say an animal’s vision is different than ours’ so he may be sensitive to things that we aren’t. One thing I can guarantee you, he's not telling us a thing.”
Beyond Sylvia, Panola Hall features at least one more oddity of Eatonton lore, a tunnel long ago filled in with dirt but with its entrance easily found beyond a pair of trapdoors on the floor beneath the home’s front porch.
Also the source of local legends, the Panola Hall tunnel reportedly leads to the downtown courthouse or old jail, each at least a half-mile away, which would make for a long, scary, claustrophobic crawl through pitch-black darkness.
Others claim it meets up with train tracks heading out of town, conjuring up images of the Underground Railroad, representing pathways to freedom for enslaved 19th-century Blacks, despite actual train tracks not necessarily involved. Or, it may simply lead to the nearby, decommissioned, domed well just beyond the north end of the porch.
Regardless, its beautiful, arched-brick entryway would make a fine wine cellar someday, Diana points out.
As Panola Hall’s latest caretakers and host to Sylvia herself, the Homeiers have embraced their ghostly boarder and remain open to periodically sharing their – her – home as part of local ghost tours organized by Eatonton’s Georgia Writers Museum.
They also opened Sylvia’s: A Supernatural Coffee Bar in July within the museum’s South Jefferson Avenue storefront in downtown Eatonton.
“Sylvia has become a really big part of our lives,” Michael says. “I’ll be honest, I never thought I’d ever enjoy a ghost so much.”