King's Tavern

The story

King's Tavern stands on Jefferson Street in the Natchez On-Top-of-the-Hill Historic District and has long been described as the oldest building in Natchez. How old it really is remains an open question. Wikipedia repeats a traditional date of 1769, linked to a story that the structure began as a blockhouse of the colonial fort. The 1971 National Register nomination is more cautious: the earliest record it found is a Spanish land grant of May 31, 1789, to a Prosper King, worded in a way that suggests buildings already stood on the square, and a search of the state archives turned up nothing older. An architectural survey by the Society of Architectural Historians places construction around 1798, the year Richard King acquired the property, and local historians quoted in the Natchez Democrat also favor the late 1790s. Wikidata gives 1795. The safest statement is that the building dates from the late eighteenth century, during the Spanish period in Natchez.

Richard King, from a Long Island family that had moved to Mississippi under British rule, is a well-documented figure. He organized subscription quarter-horse races in 1794, making him one of the founders of racing in Natchez, and the Spanish governor Gayoso put him in command of a mounted police force raised to deal with the bandits who infested the roads. On June 6, 1799, he received a license "to keep a public house," which confirms the long tradition that he ran the place as a tavern.

The location gave it importance. The tavern sat at the southern end of the Natchez Trace, the overland road that boatmen used to walk home after floating cargo down the Mississippi on flatboats. It served as a mail and stagecoach stop, and the nomination credits it as the point where the first United States mail arriving over the Trace was handed out. In the taproom, travelers swapped stories about the outlaws who preyed on the road, among them Sam Mason, John Murrell and the Harpe brothers. Word-of-mouth tales recorded in the nomination speak of men murdered on the threshold after dark and of gangs attempting to raid the house.

After Richard King's death the property went to his heir Samuel King, who according to the nomination sold it in 1817 to Charles B. Green, a candidate for governor in 1821. In 1823 Green pledged it as security for a loan from the Bank of Mississippi, and after foreclosure it passed to Elizabeth Morgan Postlethwaite, widow of Henry Postlethwaite. Through her heirs, including Mary Anne Bledsoe, it became known as the Bledsoe House, a name it kept for six generations. The family's descendants kept it until the Pilgrimage Garden Club of Natchez acquired the building at the end of 1970, and it was added to the National Register in 1971.

The legend

King's Tavern has one of the best-known ghost stories in Mississippi, and the label "most haunted restaurant in Mississippi" follows it everywhere. That label is promotion, not a measured fact, and Wikipedia flags its own haunting section as lacking citations.

The central figure is Madeline. According to local tradition, she was a young woman hired by Richard King as a servant who became his lover and was murdered at the command of his jealous wife. One retelling says she was about sixteen, but that detail is not confirmed. No record of her or of a murder has been found; the whole story rests on oral tradition.

What anchors the tale is a discovery said to have been made in the 1930s. During work on the building, the story goes, the skeletons of three people, two men and a woman, were found sealed in the wall behind a fireplace, along with a jeweled dagger, sometimes described as Spanish, which was taken to be the murder weapon. The woman was assumed to be Madeline; the men have never been identified. Other versions put the remains in the chimney or the cellar. No contemporary record of the find has been located, and by 2013 the dagger was said not to have been shown publicly for more than thirty years.

Staff and visitors have described a young woman in old-fashioned dress, faces appearing in windows and mirrors, and strange reflections in the glass. An empty bed upstairs is said to feel warm, as though someone had just been lying in it. Employees have reported hearing a baby crying, which the legend attributes to an infant murdered by one of the Harpe brothers. A third figure, a menacing red-haired man in a top hat, is sometimes linked to Sam Mason or Wiley "Little" Harpe, though that identification comes from a single source. The historical outlaws were real enough: Big Harpe was killed in 1799, and Little Harpe was hanged in 1804 after presenting Mason's head for a reward; whether he actually killed Mason is unclear.

The tavern's reputation reached national television when Ghost Adventures devoted its seventh-season finale, episode 18, "King's Tavern," to it in April 2013, focusing on Madeline and the dagger. In January 2016 WLBT's "Look Around Mississippi" segment followed a local ghost-hunting team led by David Childers as they tried to make contact using a phone app. That same year a talk in Natchez promised "The Real Man Behind the Legend of Madeline's Murder." In March 2023 Fangoria reported that director Corin Hardy would make a horror film called Lure inspired by the tavern, though its release has not been confirmed.

What remains today

The National Register nomination describes a plain two-story building of brick and of poplar and cypress clapboards, compared to a frontier blockhouse, with hand-hewn timbers joined by wooden pegs, low ceilings and narrow window and door frames. The brick basement walls rise straight from the sidewalk, and the building was originally entered at that level. The first floor was a single room with a fireplace on the west wall, cypress paneling and exposed beams, once wrapped in a gallery that was partly enclosed in the early 1820s. A narrow winding stair leads to the second floor, and the pegged roof timbers in the attic still show axe marks. The whole roof leans to the east, pushed by a tilting chimney, and was reinforced in that position to stop it moving further.

The building reopened in the fall of 2013 as a farm-to-table restaurant. Wikipedia reports that by 2022 it was closed and up for sale, and accounts differ on whether it operates today.

Visiting

Check the current status before you go. King's Tavern has opened and closed as a restaurant more than once, and as of 2022 it was reported closed and on the market. If it is operating, the only way inside is as a customer during business hours; if it is closed, it is private property and must not be entered.

Either way, the exterior can be seen from the street in the Natchez On-Top-of-the-Hill Historic District. No regular ghost tour dedicated to the tavern is documented in reliable sources.

Sources

1. National Register nomination #71000444 (texte intégral) — U.S. National Park Service · Public record
2. National Register of Historic Places file (NRHP #71000444) — U.S. National Park Service · Public domain (U.S. government)
3. Wikimedia Commons category : King's Tavern, Natchez, Mississippi — Wikimedia Commons
4. USGS 1:24000-scale Quadrangle for Vidalia, LA 1909 — U.S. Geological Survey, 1909 · Public domain (USGS)
5. USGS 1:250000-scale Quadrangle for Natchez, MS 1959 — U.S. Geological Survey, 1959 · Public domain (USGS)
6. "Corin Hardy Will Turn This Notoriously Haunted Bar Into A Movie" — Fangoria (20 Mar 2023). — Fangoria (20 Mar 2023).
7. "Danni Compton Weatherly at King's Tavern – April 23, 2016" — djs.org (genealogy/talk page). — djs.org (genealogy/talk page).
8. "Ghost Adventures – King's Tavern" (S7E18) — TheTVDB. — TheTVDB.
9. "King's Tavern" (MS-02-ND41) — SAH Archipedia, Society of Architectural Historians. — SAH Archipedia, Society of Architectural Historians.
10. "King's Tavern" — Paranormal Mississippi research guide, Hinds Community College Libraries. — Paranormal Mississippi research guide, Hinds Community College Libraries.
11. "Look Around: Kings Tavern ghost hunting" — WLBT / Walt Grayson (15 Jan 2016). — WLBT / Walt Grayson (15 Jan 2016).
12. "Natchez couple to return tavern to restaurant royalty" — Natchez Democrat. — Natchez Democrat.
13. Wikipedia article — Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Text written by AI from the sources above and checked by a separate AI fact-check (how we work). Images: credits and licenses under each picture.