PARK HILL — Fog resting in the early morning revealed a tall man with a top hat standing on the east porch of the Murrell Home.

At least that is what a maintenance worker for the museum said he saw when arriving early one morning.

“He was concerned that someone was here,” said Shirley Pettengill, site manager for the museum. “When he came in to check it out, the figure disappeared. He said it must have been George.”

But George has been dead since 1866.

“People have all sorts of experiences here,” Pettengill said. “I myself am a skeptic, but there are still things I can’t explain.”

Like the orbs she and a colleague saw floating in the parlor and kitchen.

“They were probably bugs,” she said. “But I really don’t know what they were, and I wasn’t the only one seeing them.”

George Murrell started building the Murrell Home, originally called Hunter’s House, in 1844.

The plantation home, nestled in the hills near a winding creek, is the site for many unsettling feelings and unexplained phenomena.

“We had a gentleman here touring the home who claimed to see a figure of a woman in the kitchen,” Pettengill said. “He then pointed her out in a picture. He pointed to the first curator, Jennie Ross Cobb, and said ‘that’s her’.”

Pettengill said people claim to hear children laughing and crying in the home, and other noises like a piano playing with no one touching the keys.

(Click here to watch a video of Travina's visit to the Murrell Home with Phoenix Videographer, Jennifer Lyles.)

“We hear these stories and retell them later,” she said. “It’s all a part of the history.”

With rumor of a murder in the southern bedroom upstairs, Pettengill confirmed the story.

“When we pulled the carpet up from that room, there was blood stains all over the floor. I had someone tell me it was over a poker game.”