The Garrison Orphanage

The Garrison Orphanage: Perched on the edge of town, the brick mansion that became Garrison Orphanage was first built in the 1840s by a shipping magnate whose fortune was decimated by war. When the Civil War reached the region, the house was commandeered and hastily converted into a field hospital. The grand parlors became crowded infirmaries, the dining hall a surgery ward, and the once-elegant ballroom a morgue. After the war, the mansion was abandoned for years, its windows blackened, its halls echoing with phantom footsteps and the cries of unseen patients. It might have crumbled into ruin if not for a generous but curious endowment from the enigmatic Garrison family...wealthy benefactors whose faces were rarely seen, their motives never entirely clear. With their funding, the estate reopened as a home for displaced and orphaned children, offering shelter, meals, and a strict but watchful care. Children whispered of visitors at night: pale soldiers wandering the corridors, a nurse who tucked blankets around feverish sleepers, and shadowy figures that seemed to linger at the foot of beds. Some claimed to hear soft weeping from the locked west wing, where the old operating rooms had once been. Staff dismissed these tales as imagination - though more than one caretaker resigned after seeing “small things” in the lantern light. Despite its troubled aura, the orphanage stood as refuge for decades, raising generations of children through hardship, war, and lean times. But by the early 1950s, scandals of neglect and rumors of hauntings drove attendance down. The state declared it unfit for use and shuttered its doors. The house still looms today, shutters hanging loose, its grand facade cracked with time. Travelers passing at dusk claim to see candles glowing faintly in the upper windows, and some say the echo of tiny bare feet and whispered prayers still drifts across the empty halls - reminders that though the orphanage is gone, history has not released it.