by Jacquelyn Cook

I knew about the ghost before Jimmy and I moved into the house, but I wasn’t really afraid of it," says Rosalynn Carter, her eyes sparkling. "I just never disturbed it by going into the 'haunted room alone at night."

The "house" is an old frame building in plantation style, with a wide center hall, twin living rooms and many fireplaces. Built about 1850, in Plains, Ga., the house is set in a grove of tall magnolia trees. By the time Rosalynn and Jimmy Carter and their three young sons moved into it in 1956, the handsome old home was already long famous for its spooky phenomena.

Most of the ghost’s activities were reported to take place in the large front room on the west side of the house. According to Inez Laster, who’d worked as a cook in the house in the early 1950s, "Things would happen in that room. I could hear knocking on the door. Then it would open and shut and I’d hear walking. I’d see a woman with a long white dress coming from the cemetery. Dr. Wise, the man I worked for, could see her too. He’d say it was our imagination, but when he spoke to the woman, she and the light she carried both vanished. Sometimes I’d hear her walking on the attic stairs."

Mrs. Carter’s memories of the house go back to her own childhood. "When I was a little girl," she explains, "my best friend was Jimmy’s sister Ruth [Ruth Carter Stapleton]. We had to pass the 'haunted house’ to visit each other. We were about 11 and so afraid of the house that we took the long way around." The path the little girls used to avoid the house led down a steep incline and through a dense and darkly forbidding wooded area. Yet the scary woods seemed more inviting to the youngsters than the old "haunted house."

Years later, when Rosalynn and Jimmy were married and he’d left the Navy to return to Plains to help run the family business, the Carters moved into the "haunted house," They lived there with their three sons from 1956 to 1960. Then they moved into the home they built in Plains.

In the summer of 1973, while her husband was Governor of Georgia, Rosalynn and a group of friends decided it would be fun to see if they could uncover he mystery the ghost was guarding. They embarked on a tour of the house that turned out to be quite an adventure.

Standing in the specter-haunted front room, with its old hand-planed floorboards running the entire 18-foot width, Mrs. Carter revealed, "When we lived here our living-room furniture was in this room. But there was no heat, so we didn’t use it very often. One night we heard a crash in here. We waited a bit, then the whole family trooped in together, thinking a window had fallen.

shut. But the window was still wide open. She laughed. "I wasn’t afraid of living in the house, but I would not have gone into the room at night by myself."

Several in the group contributed stories of people who were so frightened by the ghost they’d moved out of the house. One tenant was terrified when the sheets were snatched off the bed in the middle of the night.

Mrs. Carter recalled hearing about a little white dog which would come up on the front porch, but it would disappear if anyone reached down to pat it.

Rosalynn Carter and her friends climbed up to the attic where there are two fireplaces that face toward the windows about five feet away instead of facing into the room. In front of the west fireplace the hearth is missing. Below the floor is a compartment three feet by five feet, not deep enough for a man to stand up in without his head coming above floor level. But the little room is wide enough to provide a hiding place for three men lying down. Completely concealed for more than a century, this tiny room had hung suspended between the attic and the "haunted room."

Kneeling beside the hole, Rosalynn Carter explained how it was found. 'When we lived here, Jack was 10, Chip, seven, and Jeffrey, five. They liked to play in the attic and one day they noticed a loose brick in the hearth. They discovered that the bricks and the boards under them would lift out to reveal this room. Chip thinks he remembers seeing a small chair down there. The boys often played in the hidden room."The reports of ghostly activities were obviously related to keeping the secret of this hiding place. Had someone been hiding there from Indians? (The land around Plains was Creek Indian territory until 1825.) Had a lunatic been concealed there, as the deranged prisoner had been hidden in a secret chamber in the novel Jane Eyre? Had Confederate soldiers been led there for safe hiding by the lady with the light? Was it a hiding place for the Underground Railroad? Had it been a refuge for escaped prisoners from nearby Andersonville Prison? No one knew for sure. On the day of Rosalynn Carter’s visit to the house, a young boy in the group decided to find out why the secret room had never been detected from the room below. The reason: It was concealed within a sealed closet. And, on the other side of the house, the boy discovered an identically sealed closet.

Running back up to the attic, the boy began to remove the bricks from the east hearth. As he pried up the flooring, he found another suspended room. And in the room a treasure was found for Mrs. Carter – a cardboard folder, which had probably fallen through a crack in the floor. The folder contained one of the few wedding pictures of Mr. and Mrs. Jimmy Carter.

When Rosalynn Carter and her friends left the antebellum house, the mystery of the tiny concealed rooms was still a mystery. Clearly, the ghost was not talking.