Coca-Cola Elephants and the Haunted Briarcliff Mansion, Georgia

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated September 16, 2026 · How we verify

Six elephants once lived on the grounds of what people now call the haunted Briarcliff mansion, and they were named Coca, Cola, Pause, Refreshes, Refreshing and Delicious. That single detail tells you most of what you need to know about Asa Griggs “Buddie” Candler Jr., the eccentric son of the Coca-Cola co-founder, who built this Georgian Revival pile in Druid Hills, just outside Atlanta, Georgia, and filled it with a private menagerie, a cathedral-sized pipe organ and a third-floor ballroom finished in gold leaf.

Quick orientation: the estate sits on 42 acres on what is now Briarcliff Road, it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1988, and it belongs today to Emory University as the Briarcliff Campus. The mansion itself stands empty and in disrepair.

Briarcliff Farm Came First

In 1910 Asa Jr. left the fashionable Inman Park neighborhood, where his father also kept a mansion, for a “ramshackle” farmhouse on 42 acres just north of Callanwolde, the estate of his brother Charles. What he ran there was not a gentleman’s hobby. Briarcliff Farm was a large agricultural operation supplying meat and produce to local retailers, with cows, sheep, pigs and chickens on the land, and during World War I it sent milk to Fort Gordon. The farm drew praise for electric lights and fans, individual drinking fountains for the cows, and sanitary conditions that pushed up yield and quality.

The mansion followed between 1920 and 1922, with architect Dan Bodin assisting Frazier in overseeing the completion. Williams Mill Road was renamed Briarcliff Road in the 1920s after the estate. Candler enlarged the house in 1925, adding the music room that now carries the name DeOvies Hall: 1,700 square feet under a three-story vaulted Tudor interior, with a limestone fireplace and painted walls.

An $94,000 Organ Built to Outdo the Family

Both his father and his older brother owned Aeolian organs. In 1925 Candler installed one that beat them: 88 ranks, 187 stops, cathedral sized, at a cost of $94,000. It was the largest privately owned organ in Georgia at the time and the eighth largest Aeolian had ever built for a private residence. It was inaugurated in November 1925 with a recital by family friend Palmer Christian, broadcast over radio station WSB. The instrument outlived the Candlers’ tenure at Briarcliff. It was given to Wesleyan College in Macon in 1952, renovated in 2008, and is now known as the Goodwyn-Candler-Panoz organ.

The Zoo, the Baboon and the Twenty-Five Cent Pool

Candler’s menagerie, housed in cages designed by Bodin, held a Bengal tiger, four lions, a black leopard, a gorilla, baboons and the six elephants. It ended badly. In 1935, with Candler in financial trouble and his pipe organ up for sale, a neighbor sued and won a $10,000 settlement because “a baboon jumped over the wall of the zoo and devoured $60 in currency out of her purse”. He handed the entire collection to the Grant Park Zoo, now Zoo Atlanta.

The estate also ran two swimming pools, one of them open to the public for 25 cents a head, with a neon-lighted fountain lit at night, landscaping in flowers and shrubs, and a stand selling Coca-Cola and snacks. The rest of the property carried servants’ quarters, tennis courts, stables, greenhouses, a laundry, the zoo buildings, a golf course and a community pool.

Fifty Years as an Institution

The haunting reports attached to Briarcliff owe at least as much to what came after the Candlers as to the family itself. They sold the estate to the General Services Administration in 1948. A planned veterans’ hospital never emerged. Instead the buildings housed the Georgian Clinic, later the DeKalb County Addiction Center, which opened in 1953 as the first alcohol treatment facility in Georgia. The clinic kept the public pool open for its patients until the late 1950s, then closed it for lack of funds.

From 1965 to 1997 the site was the Georgia Mental Health Institute, a multi-story tower surrounded by cottages linked by tunnels. Three decades of psychiatric care, a network of underground passages and an abandoned Jazz Age mansion on the same ground is exactly the combination that generates stories.

What Is Actually Reported Here

Be clear about the evidence. The documented record for Briarcliff is unusually rich on architecture, agriculture, organ specifications and lawsuits involving baboons, and unusually thin on ghosts. There are reports of hauntings at the estate. That is the extent of what the record states. No specific apparition, no named figure, no dated incident is established in the source material, and anything you read elsewhere assigning a face or a story to the building should be treated as folklore layered onto a genuinely strange place rather than as documentation.

Seeing Briarcliff Today

The complex is now Emory University’s Briarcliff Campus, but the mansion remains empty and in disrepair, with its red tile roof replaced by asphalt to protect the structure. This is not a house museum and there is no ghost tour. Treat it as a building to be looked at from where you are permitted to stand, and respect the fact that it is university property.

If the exterior seems familiar, that may be because it has appeared on screen. The mansion served as a filming location for the television show Doom Patrol, as noted in a making-of extra on the season one Blu-ray.

Address: Briarcliff Road, Druid Hills, Atlanta, Georgia

See Briarcliff for Yourself

Sources

• Briarcliff
• Use of electricity on dairy farms to increase production
• NPGallery NRHP Archive Search (National Park Service)
• Wikipedia: Briarcliff (mansion)

Ghost Tours Nearby

The Burning & the Bound: Grievous Ghost Tour of Atlanta★ 4.1 (215)from $26

Affiliate links: BeyondHaunted may earn a commission, at no extra cost to you.

More Haunted Mansions

Kehoe HouseCulburtson MansionBeechwood Astor Mansion NewportWhispers EstateBlaine House AugustaOverholser Mansion Oklahoma City