By Kristin D’Agostino
As autumn lights a fire in distant trees, Fernihurst looks out over the French Broad River toward the Biltmore mansion and the Blue Ridge Mountains just beyond. Now home to A-B Tech’s culinary department, the 19th-century brick home has hosted many culinary fine-dining events over the years. But, for the past three decades, the building has also sparked campus ghost stories about Mary Connally, one of the home’s most unusual residents. (Read her haunting story in the two previous Campus Obscura columns linked at the end of this story). Unexplained happenings in and around Fernihurst have raised the question: Is there something lurking behind the mansion’s doors? In the spirit of Halloween fun, we’ll explore some of these tales here.
Police Officer Mike Lanning has worked at A-B Tech since 2009, covering the third shift from 9:00 p.m. - 7:00 a.m. Though he currently works at the Enka campus, from 2012 to 2019 he worked at the main campus and part of his shift involved locking up Fernihurst after Housekeeping had left for the night. It was very common during this time, Lanning said, to see the interior lights come back on by themselves after he’d turned them off. “It happened so often I didn’t pay any attention,” He said. “Every night I’d go in and turn off all the interior lights and they’d come back on. I asked another guy I work with and he’s seen it too.”
Another strange happening: One night during this time there was a culinary dinner going on next door in Magnolia and Lanning had settled down in a second-floor office in Fernihurst to wait for the event to finish. The room had a flat-screen TV perched on a long table. Lanning was relaxing, looking out the window, when suddenly he heard a thud and looked up to see the TV cord swinging rapidly back and forth.
“It was hitting the table thunk, thunk, thunk like someone had pushed it,” he said. “I was sitting at the window ten feet away and knew I’d locked every door in the house. There was nobody in there but me. I left and tried to put it out of my mind, but it convinced me there was something in Fernihurst.”
A-B Tech security officer Cody Smith has had similarly strange experiences. The 35-year-old has worked the campus overnight shift for seventeen years since he started at age 18. He remembers at that time hearing older officers say that the house was “weird and haunted”, but he never took them seriously. Then, he began to notice the lights coming on by themselves in the middle of the night.
“I’ll drive by once and it’s just the lights on the top floor; sometimes the middle of the building; sometimes all of them,” he said. “I’ll make another lap and they might be off. You go in and cut them off and they’ll come back on sometimes.”
Has the lighting problem been reported to maintenance? Both officers say yes, many times. “They’ve checked it over the years,” Smith said. “We don’t even report [the lights] at this point. It’s become such an anomaly of the campus. If you reported it every time you saw it’d be harassing maintenance.”
Smith shares what he calls a “goofy story” from ten years ago on a quiet Sunday when he was working the night shift sitting in front of the Advanced Manufacturing Building. At that time, he said, nobody ever came to campus on Sundays. He was entirely alone. Around 10 p.m. a taxicab pulled up beside him and the driver told him he’d gotten a call from a woman at Fernihurst. He’d gone to look for her but didn’t see anyone there.
Smith drove up the hill with the cabbie and they looked around the house and grounds together, but there was no one in sight. The cabbie left and Smith got back in his car to patrol the campus. Driving back around, he saw a frightening sight. “When I came back up on the hill every light in Fernihurst and in the smaller carriage house behind it were on.” Luckily, Smith said, he was due to go home so the next officer had to go investigate; he was off the hook.
The lights at Fernihurst came on by themselves as recently as three weeks ago, Smith said. At this point, he said, he knows to stay a respectful distance away. He drove by and said to himself “Mary must’ve turned the light on…I don’t play around with that stuff,” Smith said, adding, “That’s Mary’s house. I knew the building was locked so I just kind of let her be.”
Ghosts of the Hearth
Retired A-B Tech Baking and Pastry Arts instructor Charles deVries has had his own ghostly encounters at Fernihurst. For the two decades he taught in the culinary department he began his day at 7 a.m.. After standing outside to watch the sunrise over the mountains, he’d go into the Fernihurst kitchen to set up for the day. Every morning before class began he’d prop open a large industrial kitchen door that held to the wall with magnets. One morning upon opening this door, it bumped up against a wire shelf in the hall that held students’ backpacks. He pushed the shelf back into its place, not thinking anything of it until the next morning when it was back again. This continued for months.
“Every time I opened the door I’d have to move the shelf,” He recalls. “The second, third time I didn’t think much of it. Finally, I put a mark on the floor to show where the shelf was. The next morning I opened the door and it hit the shelf again. Eventually, I got used to the shelf being there,” he said. “I gave up and said to Mary, ‘Thanks for the fun!’”
DeVries, who works as a sculptor these days, jokes that if there are spirits in the air in the Fernihurst kitchen, they may have added a little spice to the baked goods.
“When I put out flour with students it would collect yeast from the air because yeast floats around the building from years of cooking in those kitchens,” he said. “Maybe there’s a little flavor of the Connally family’s baked goods in there.”
Mary’s Manor: A History of Fernihurst
Victoria Road where A-B Tech is located was one of the city’s first roads. According to “The History of Asheville Buncombe Technical Community College” by Joyce Justus Parris, the road was part of the Buncombe Turnpike, a seventy-five-mile road completed in 1827 that served as an interstate thoroughfare for farmers. In the 1880s, the city became a hub for tourists and the elite, thanks to the newly built railroad, and large houses sprung up on the outskirts of the city, including Victoria Road. The Smith McDowell House, built by John Patton Smith on Victoria Road in 1840, was one of the first mansions, a working plantation that was taken over when he died by Smith’s daughter and her husband William McDowell.
After losing the family fortune in the Civil War, McDowell In 1875 sold 30 acres of surrounding land to Colonial John Connally, a lawyer turned minister who aimed to build a house for his family. At the time, the land up on the hill was home to the McDowell-Smith family cemetery, which was moved to make way for the construction of Fernihurst. (Apparently, not all the graves were moved as bones were discovered in the basement of Fernihurst in the 1930s during renovation.)
At some point in the 1880s, George Vanderbilt passed through, fell in love with the panoramic mountain view, and offered to purchase Fernihurst, but Connally declined. Biltmore was soon built and soon Fernihurst, the largest home in the area, was overshadowed by the nearby estate.
In the late 1800’s the Connallys hosted the city’s most elite residents, including the Vanderbilt family. Over the years the Connallys added on thirty bedrooms to make room for their many overnight guests. Mary, the eldest daughter, was raised in a world of privilege. She and her two sisters had the finest clothes and their own individual servants to dress them.
Traces of Fernihurst’s decadent history can be found in a second-floor conference room, home to framed family photos, a portrait of Mary Connally, and a glass cabinet where family heirlooms, including Mary’s beaded purse, are displayed. (These can be seen in a video linked at the end of this story.)
Throughout her life, Mary was well-known in Asheville. After her elite upbringing, she had two marriages to prominent men. (Her second husband Otis Mills Coxe built the Battery Park Hotel.) Connally was heir to a fortune; much of which in her later years was given in support of Brother Twelve, a British mystic visionary who started a strange religious group called the Aquarian Foundation.
Mary Connally left Fernihurst’s elegant halls in 1929 for the Aquarian’s farmstead headquarters in Vancouver, British Colombia. The house was later inhabited by different owners over the years, including the Catholic Diocese who used it for educational purposes. In 1974, almost exactly a century after it was built, A-B Tech purchased the building to use for classrooms. These days Fernihurst is home to staff offices and our college’s award-winning culinary department. It’s a fitting role given that the house regularly hosts elegant events that Mary and her family, no doubt would have liked to attend.
For more about Mary Connally and her ties to Brother Twelve’s religious cult, including an album of photos, visit the two previous articles in this series:
- Campus Obscura - Part 1-Fernihurst's Mary Connally and the Cult of Brother XII
- Campus Obscura - Part 2: Fernihurst’s Mary Connally and the Cult of Brother XII
Fernihurst Facts
- Mary Connally died on October 20, 1947, at 76 at the Blue Gables Nursing Home in Asheville. Her parents Colonial John Connally and Alice Connally both died while living in Fernihurst in the early 1900’s; Alice died after taking a tumble down the cellar doorway. The family is all buried at Riverside Cemetery.
- Take a short virtual tour of Fernihurst, including the second-floor room that houses the Connally family heirlooms visit Pearls and Lace - Searching for Mary Connally
- In 2007 A-B Tech’s theater club, under the lead of then-Digital Media instructor Jonathan Ross, created a fictional film about Mary Connally visit Fernihurst, a 2006 Ashveille 48 Hr Film from A-B Tech DME program
- Anyone interested in seeing more photos of Fernihurst, including some taken during its most recent restoration in 2007, visit Flickr | Fernihurst.
Sources for this story: Historic Trails of Western North Carolina by Joyce Justus Parris