Haunted place · Georgia, United States

Briarcliff

Updated November 20267 sources How to visit

Protected heritage
3 archive documents

The boarded-up 1920s mansion of Coca-Cola heir Asa Candler Jr. in Druid Hills, Atlanta, later an alcohol clinic and psychiatric campus, with vague ghost tales.

The story

Briarcliff was the country home of Asa Griggs "Buddie" Candler Jr., who lived from 1880 to 1953 and was the eccentric son of Coca-Cola co-founder Asa Griggs Candler. Buddie helped turn his father's soft drink into an empire and then moved into real estate, building among other things the Briarcliff Hotel in Atlanta's Virginia-Highland neighborhood. His own home rose on a 42-acre tract along Williams Mill Road in Druid Hills, between downtown Atlanta and Emory University. Within a few years the road took the estate's name and became Briarcliff Road.

Sources disagree slightly on dates. A 2007 history published by the Druid Hills Civic Association credits the design, begun in 1916, to C. E. Frazier working with Dan Boden and dates completion to 1920, while Wikipedia and the 1988 National Register nomination give 1922 for the completion of the main block. The result was a three-story Georgian Revival mansion of buff brick with carved stone quoins, keystoned window heads, a rusticated granite base and a semicircular portico about 30 feet tall carried on four Corinthian columns. Inside were a fifteen-foot entry hall with a split grand staircase, a carved and coffered library, a solarium decorated with oil murals painted by a friend of Candler, and a music room added by 1925 to house a pipe organ. A summer pavilion was built across the drive in 1924 for the wedding of his eldest daughter, Lucy.

The grounds were once lavish: terraced formal gardens with pergolas, a sunken garden, greenhouses from about 1922, a private family pool, a public pool and bathhouse open by 1933, a nine-hole golf course, tennis courts, its own power plant and a commercial laundry that burned in 1943. Most famous was Candler's private zoo, built in 1932 with cages designed by the architect Boden. Its residents included lions, a Bengal tiger, a black leopard, baboons, a gorilla and six elephants named Coca, Cola, Pause, Refreshes, Refreshing and Delicious. Neighbors were not amused: one won a $10,000 settlement after a baboon escaped over the wall and ate $60 in cash from her purse. In financial trouble by 1935, Candler offered his pipe organ for sale and gave the entire menagerie to the city, forming the core of the Grant Park Zoo, today Zoo Atlanta.

Candler did not die at Briarcliff, as is sometimes said. He sold the estate to the federal General Services Administration in 1948 (the same article also says 1949), and he and his second wife, Florence, took an apartment on the highest floor of the family's Briarcliff Hotel, where cancer killed him in January 1953. In 1953 the mansion became the Georgian Clinic, the state's first facility for treating alcoholism, and in 1965 the Georgia Mental Health Institute, a hospital whose tower and cottages were connected underground by tunnels, was built on 32 acres of the old grounds; it operated until 1997. In 1988 the house and ten acres joined the National Register of Historic Places.

The legend

For a place with such a dramatic past, Briarcliff's ghost lore is remarkably vague. Wikipedia simply notes that hauntings have been reported at the estate, citing an October 26, 2011 Emory Report article by Kim Urquhart about a Halloween-season event at the "abandoned mansion." That article could no longer be read, and none of our sources names a ghost, describes a specific sighting or dates a first report. The 2007 neighborhood history of the estate does not mention ghosts at all, and no paranormal television investigation has been found.

It is easy to see where the reputation comes from, and we offer this as our own reading rather than a sourced fact: a grand house left empty and boarded up for years, decades of use as an alcohol clinic and then beside a psychiatric hospital, tunnels under the campus, and an eccentric millionaire with elephants on the lawn. That mix makes Briarcliff a natural setting for campus ghost stories. Its screen career has helped too: the mansion served as a filming location for the first season of the TV series Doom Patrol. Until a concrete account surfaces, Briarcliff is best described as a building with a spooky atmosphere rather than a documented haunting.

What remains today

Briarcliff now belongs to Emory University's Briarcliff Campus. The main house still stands behind a seven-foot granite wall, but it has long been closed and boarded up, its original tile roof replaced by asphalt shingles and much of its interior later cut into offices. In 2007 the DeKalb Historic Preservation Commission opened a demolition-by-neglect procedure against the university, which responded with promises of repairs. Around the house, the 1988 survey recorded the garage and servants' quarters, two greenhouses, two pergolas, three terraces with granite walls, the crumbling public pool and bathhouse, and only concrete slabs where the zoo cages once stood.

Visiting

Visitors are not admitted to the closed mansion, and the grounds are university property; do not enter the building or climb the walls. A better legal outing is the surrounding Druid Hills Historic District across Briarcliff Road, combined with a visit to Zoo Atlanta in Grant Park, the descendant of Candler's private menagerie. The Briarcliff Hotel building, where Candler spent his last years, still stands in Virginia-Highland.