The Haunting of Haile House

In 1854, Thomas Haile and his wife, Esther Haile and their four children arrived in Alachua County Florida from South Carolina.

This was a time in our state's history where you could just show up and claim land. This process was called homesteading and it's actually how a lot of our ancestors established themselves in Florida. In the 1800s and even into the early 1900s, you really could just show up here and claim open land. The United States government had a policy that stated if you took care of the land for a certain amount of time it would belong to you.

So that's what the Haile family did. But what separates the Haile family from other pioneering homesteaders is that the Haile family was already rich. We're talking filthy rich.

So when they showed up to Florida, they didn't just claim a small plot of land to start a farm. They claimed 1500 acres and established a plantation. And when you establish a plantation in the 1850s, you were almost certainly using slave labor.

The Haile family tasked over 100 enslaved craftsmen to build a 6000 square-foot plantation which would serve as the base of their cotton operation. It took two years to complete construction and the house still stands fully functional today, which is a testament to the workers who built it.

Thomas and Serena Haile died in the mid 1890s leaving the property to Evans Haile who was the 14th of their 15th children.

Now Evans was a little different from his parents. He wasn't interested in operating a cotton plantation because he was a prominent defense attorney in Gainesville. The issue is Evans loved to party.

Every single weekend, the front lawn of the Haile family plantation was covered with people who came to have a good time. To paint a picture I want you to think about the Great Gatsby. Champagne is flowing. People are swinging from trees and dancing, we're talking Cirque de Soleil style entertainers. Every single weekend.

The parties that Evans Haile would throw became so popular that people were traveling across the country just to spend the weekend there full of debauchery.

But around 1905 things started to get weird. Rumors started spreading that not everyone who came to the Haile family property would leave alive. At first the stories would all say that the deceased had drunk too much. Others told tales of people who simply partied too hard and died with smiles on their faces in front of everyone.

But then there were the stories about the people who were taken into the woods and sacrificed in order to, and I quote, "keep the house happy."

As you can imagine, or at least one would think, if every weekend someone is dying at these parties, people would stop showing up. But the opposite was true. The parties became more popular than ever. And more and more people would come to Florida to celebrate at the Haile family plantation and never return home.

Every time outsiders would try to get involved to investigate the deaths they would run into legal red tape that went all the way up to the governor's mansion.

Stories of death, debauchery and violence spread far and wide, but people continued to come, even though they were at risk of being sacrificed to the Haile house.

So here we have a property that was built literally on the back of enslaved people. So the base is already evil. But then the surviving son starts throwing these massive parties in which people are dying, and some of them are being sacrificed to the house itself. So the levels of evil here are astronomical.

One common thread that survivors of these parties would discuss was how the walls would talk. People would leave the plantation in an almost manic state talking about how the walls told stories of the horrors that had taken place there.

No one knows who the first person was to journal these stories but around the 1920s people began writing their experiences on the walls of the house. So the walls would speak to the guests and the guests would then journal with pen or paint or sometimes blood back onto the walls.

As of 2024 there are still more than 12,500 writings found scrawled all over the walls of the Haile house, mostly in bedrooms and in closets. The unnerving part is that most of the writings don't make any sense. A lot of it is just gibberish.

Some of the writings were actually quite funny. For example, one says "a girl can flirt a girl can dance a girl can play croquet, but she can't strike a match on her pants because she's not built that way." Another one says that 22 rats were found on December 29 of 1908 and beneath that is a line that just says "if Love be cold do not despair there's always the opportunity for flannel underwear."

The most famous writing inside the Haile house is a sentence that haunts everyone who reads it. It's a line that simply says "this house was briefly alive."

By the 1930s, the plantation was boarded up and the parties ceased to exist. As of today, the historic Haile house, now renamed the Haile Homestead, is owned by the Alachua County Conservation Trust.

Thankfully, if you decide to tour the location, the tour guides do include the fact that the house was built by enslaved people. And while the tour guides do leave out the downright evil things that were happening at the Haile parties, you can see most of the writings on the wall during the tour.

Including the one that says this house was briefly alive.