A Comprehensive Guide To Haunted Places In Durham, NC

You’re gonna do more in Durham than just hunt for ghosts. We highly recommend checking out OC Aerial, a ninja warrior course in town. We went on our trip and absolutely loved it.

A Comprehensive Guide To Haunted Places In Durham, NC

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Bad Machines Esports Bar

(108 E Main St Floor 2)

Bad Machines closed in December 2023, but before it did, it was located in a renovated building with a basement, down the block from the (also haunted) Kress Building.

The owner of Bad Machines retold two spooky stories on Reddit of things that happened when he was in the bar alone. He said that twice, between 2 am and 3 am, he was looking in one direction and saw something moving out of the corner of his eye.

He also said the back staircase leading to the basement is very old and rough. His ghost-obsessed son wouldn’t finish walking down the stairs or check out the basement. The owner said he didn’t have any encounters down there, but just got a creepy feeling about it.

Bull City Burger And Brewery

(107 E Parrish St)

Bull City Burger And Brewery, one of the numerous breweries in Durham, is located on the first floor of a building below condos.

When the building was being renovated, some of the workers were in the basement and found a pile of clothes. No one knew who they belonged to, if they were left there, or if someone died there and that’s how the clothes got there.

However, on cold nights, tenants of the condos have recalled hearing someone saying, “Heat … heat … turn up the heat.”

Cabelands Cemetery in Eno River State Park

(4950 Howe St)

There used to be mills, farms, and homesteads in the Eno River State Park area. In 1780, John Cabe bought 300 acres in the area and established a community, plus the Piper-Cabe schoolhouse, there.

Eventually, as people do, people in the community started to pass away. So the Cabelands Cemetery was established. There are only 12 marked graves now, however, historians say there are actually 51 total. Back then, families who couldn’t mark graves with headstones used personal artifacts like shoes or just a rock to mark the grave. The family members knew who was there, but now, over 200 years later, they’re just unmarked graves.

The people buried there may be upset.

The spirit of a young man, a young woman, and a girl are there. The latter has been described as chatty. Someone else saw a shadow of a man as he was trying to leave the cemetery. 

Hikers have mentioned feeling like someone was hiking near them, blowing in their ears and whispering to them, only to find out they’re alone. On the opposite side of the sound spectrum, other hikers have heard shrieking in the woods. 

Catsburg Country Store Building

(1072 Old Oxford Rd.)

The Catsburg Country Store closed in the 1990s and the building is gone, but that doesn’t mean the spirits have left.

But let’s chat about the store itself because it has a storied history. It was opened in the 1920s, by Eugene Belvin, who eventually became a sheriff of Durham. Belvin was nicknamed Cat because of his ability to sneak up on bootleggers.

​There is a rumor that he was running them out of town because he was a distiller and wanted to wipe out his competition.

Either way, he built the Catsburg Country Store in the 1920s, known for its giant black cat painting on the second floor. The store operated until the 1990s and, with no buyer (or taker — the building was offered up for free), demolition on the historic landmark was done in 2020 (that year really took so much from us, didn’t it?).

There was a tall building behind the store and a cabin a little further away in the woods. An older woman, Mrs. Kitty Raegan, who walked to the store daily, lived there. And then train tracks nearby.

The tracks, and any tangible parts of them, are gone. However, the story of a man who was killed when he was walking on the tracks remains. It’s said that on some moonless nights, a light, like one from a train, appears. The sound of an engine and a train’s whistle appear, but the light never moves.

Some say that you can see the shadow of the man, a headless man, walking on the tracks, looking for his head.

Duke University Bell Tower Residence Hall

(40 Brodie Gym Dr)

Duke University’s Bell Tower houses a 6,400-pound bell that’s been on campus for over a century. Known as the Trinity Bell, it came to campus in 1911. It’s the third bell on campus. The first was destroyed by wear and tear and the second was destroyed in a fire.

The bell used to ring for class changes and campus celebrations … which annoyed the neighbors. So for years, the bell fell silent. It was revived in 2005 and moved to the bell tower.

Duke has three other bells: a 50 bell set at Duke Chapel; the Victory Bell, which comes out during the Blue Devil’s sporting events; and a small red bell over Kilgo Quad, which was once under control of a secret society.

If you believe the stories, one of these bells is rung by the ghost of Eugene Morehead, the “Phantom of the Bell Tower,” a student who was working construction on the bell tower and died in an accident.

I tried to verify this as best I could and found another Eugene Morehead in Durham. He was the chair of the First Graded School Committee at the Durham Graded School, which opened in 1882. That Eugene opened Durham’s first bank, was a partner in forming the Durham Fertilizer Company, and died of a sudden illness just 11 years after coming to Durham.

He did have a son, but not a namesake. His son John Lathrop Morehead died in 1954, so not possible to be the Phantom.

Kress Building

(101-103 W Main St.)

The Kress Building, at the corner of West Main Street and Mangum Street, is an iconic Durham landmark. It was the first commercial brick structure in Durham, home to the John L. Markham Cash Store. The original structure was demolished in 1895 and a three-story building was erected in its place. A little less than 40 years later, the Kress Co. moved down the block (it was previously at 113 W. Main Street). The Kress Co. demolished the building and erected its own building, which is what stands today.

Kress closed and the building became offices, then condos.

Before the condos and offices, back in 1940, Anna Lee Powers was working in the store. She was closing up the building when she went to a shed to get napkins and heard a voice yelling her name. As the story goes, the voice was that of her dead father. She’s picking up napkins and the shed door slams.

Anna Lee was found, unfortunately dead, two days later in the shed. Markings of her trying to claw her way out of the shed were found.

Snow Building

(331 W Main St)

The Snow Building was an office building in Five Points, a section of Durham which began with more modest, single story buildings before a second wave with structures started coming in. The Snow Building, which was built in 1930, was one of the last buildings from the second wave.

There was a retail store on the first floor with multiple offices on the other floors.

Someone who worked in one of those offices was Moffett Allen. The lovelorn Allen’s footsteps can be heard on the second floor of the building, presumably walking back and forth, looking for his long lost love.

Stagville State Historic Site

(5828 Old Oxford, Highway)

The Stagville Plantation was part of the largest plantation complexes in the American South.

Historic Stagville is a state historic site with a few historic buildings: the original slave quarters, a barn, and a family house that belonged to the Bennehan family. The Bennehan-Cameron family owned 30,000 acres of land there back in the late 1700’s and, as was the time, 900 enslaved people.

Visitors to the property have reported hearing strange noises and seeing ghostly apparitions. There’s a report from a medium who heard a male voice singing. An investigator visited that same spot and recorded a man saying the word “falsetto” and singing a few notes.

Someone recalled a story on Reddit saying she and a friend saw a shadow figure in the woods in the parking lot. She was on a tour and during it saw the ghost of a little girl, who passed away on the property. The girl was peeking at the tour the entire time it was happening. This same storyteller saw the spirit of a black man in overalls (presumably a former slave) near a staircase in the old slave house.

The Carolina Theatre

(309 W Morgan St)

I’m convinced there isn’t a single city that doesn’t have a haunted theater. And Durham is no exception with its haunted theater.

The Carolina Theatre was built in 1924 and was home to a mix of live performances and movies. 

The movies part is important to this ghost story. Most theaters had live performances only and are haunted by a former actor or actress who died on stage. Not The Carolina Theater. It’s haunted by Fred, a former projectionist and the theater’s resident ghost.

As the story goes, Fred passed away while a movie was going on. Ever since, he has been seen and heard in the building with some movie goers reporting feeling his presence behind them and hearing him whisper in their ears.

More Haunted Places:

If you’ve been around Drugstore Divas a while, you know that we’re often writing about paranormal experiences. Not our own, as I haven’t been haunted at all during our travels, but we have been to a ton of haunted spots where ghost stories have taken place, like The Belmont Inn, a haunted hotel in Abbeville, SC (where we actually spent two night — and my mom was haunted by Abraham, the friendly ghost who was once a bellhop at the hotel).

The most haunted city I’ve ever been to was San Juan, which has ghosts all over. And, when I was in Yakima, Washington, I got a private tour of The Capital Theatre, which is haunted by the friendly spirit Shorty who was once a stagehand at the theater. That’s a quick road trip away from Tacoma, which itself is incredibly haunted.

Have you been to any of these Haunted Places in Durham, North Carolina? Let us know your stories in the comments.