Andrew Jackson's Hermitage

Andrew Jackson's plantation home, now a major operating museum outside Nashville. The seventh president and his wife Rachel are buried in the tomb in Rachel's garden, beside the mansion.

Jackson enslaved more than 300 people here. The grounds hold a cemetery for the enslaved, and the museum interprets the lives of the community who lived and worked the plantation.

When Col. Andrew Jackson III moved out in 1893, the Ladies' Hermitage Association took over the emptied mansion, and 2 of its officers slept on a pallet inside to guard it.

The account goes: the pantry seemed to toss its pans and dishes to the floor, chains clanked over the porticoes, and a din rose like Jackson riding his war charger through the hall.

A morning search of closets, chimneys, and cellar found nothing. The identical sounds returned the next night at about the same hour, in the account's phrase “the same war horse tread.”

Visitors and staff report Jackson himself, a figure matching the president, in the halls and the study. In the garden by Rachel's tomb they report footsteps, a gate swinging open, and cigar smoke.

Mary Dorris, the association's co-founder, wrote it down in a 1915 chapter, “The Ghost at the Hermitage.” Her own text dates the events to July 1893, not the 1889 most retellings use.

The museum is open daily except Thanksgiving and Christmas; admission from $19 covers the mansion, grounds, and tomb. Its lantern-lit Ghost Tours run Sept 17 to Nov 7 in 2026 and sell out.