If you drive through Hawks County, along the banks of the misty Holston River near Kingsport, Tennessee, you might find yourself turning onto Netherland Inn Road. Rotherwood Mansion looms up through the tangled dark web of tree branches that line the winding country road. Perched on a high hill overlooking the river, the antebellum house has a tragic history.
The property’s story begins in the late eighteenth century when a young man named Fredrick Ross inherited several hundred acres of land stretching along the Holston River. Ross not only built the imposing brick mansion in 1818, named after a house in Sir Walter Scott’s novel Ivanhoe, but he also owned enslaved people. The mansion, with white columns, a curving staircase, hanging gardens, and a pool on the roof, did not save the Ross family. Ross’ daughter, Rowena, planned to marry a man she loved. On their wedding day, her fiancé drowned in front of her eyes in the Holston River. His death plunged Rowena into depression. For two years, she shut herself up as a recluse on the mansion’s third floor. Ten years and two marriages later, Rowena returned to Rotherwood to visit. No one knows exactly what happened next. Some say that Rowena heard her drowned love calling to her from the river at night. Wearing her wedding dress, she walked barefoot into the water and disappeared. When a devastated Ross fell into financial ruin in 1847, he sold his estate to Joshua Phipps, his bookkeeper, and a slaveholder with a savage reputation. When Phipps became master at Rotherwood, its history took a darker turn. Phipps built slave cells with iron bars in the cellar and erected a whipping post in the house and yard. He also had his daughter’s lover murdered in battle during the Civil War. During the hot summer of 1861, Phipps fell ill. According to family legend, Phipps suffocated in a vast swarm of flies that disappeared as quickly as they came.
Black horses pulled Phipps’ funeral hearse while a violent storm whipped over the estate. As thunder rumbled and lightning split the sky, a huge black dog clawed its way out of the coffin and tore into the woods, followed by Phipp’s screeching laughter.
Today, Rotherwood is a private home. Although it’s closed to the public, that hasn’t stopped the ghostly rumors that surround the manor house like fog. After Phipps’ death, the enslaved men and women revolted. They tore up their old master’s grave and smashed his headstone. They also beat Phipps’ mistress, an enslaved woman who treated them with similar cruelty, to death.Since then, houseguests reported seeing a ghostly White Lady with black hair like Rowena Ross wandering the grounds or watching them from the house. In the 1940s, a terrified workman claimed that a man dressed in a black suit like Phipps emerged from a wall, followed by a huge, snarling black hound from hell that chased him from the property. Some say that if you stay at Rotherwood, you can hear a dog’s claws scrabbling through the hallways. At night, Joshua Phipps appears at the foot of beds to pull the covers off terrorized guests.
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