Haunted Attmore-Oliver House: New Bern’s 1790 Landmark

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated August 6, 2026 · How we verify

Reputation outruns evidence at the haunted Attmore-Oliver House, a white three-story frame building on Broad Street in New Bern, North Carolina. The documented history is solid and easy to check. The ghost story is not: it survives as a single stubborn line of local reputation, repeated often enough that visitors arrive expecting something without ever being told quite what.

511 Broad Street at a Glance

The house stands at 511 Broad Street, inside the New Bern National Historic District, and is itself listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It was originally built in 1790 and enlarged around 1834, which accounts for the slightly stretched proportions visitors notice from the sidewalk. It is white, three stories tall, and carries a large porch on both the front and the back, so there is no obviously blank side to the building. Whichever way you approach, you get a facade.

What 1790 and 1834 Left Behind

Two dates do most of the work in understanding this house. The 1790 construction places it among New Bern’s early surviving buildings, from a period when the town was one of the most consequential ports in the state. The enlargement around 1834 belongs to a different era of taste and money altogether. Houses that grow in stages tend to accumulate odd interior geometry: rooms that do not quite align, ceiling heights that shift, stair runs that end where an older wall used to be. Anyone inclined to look for a physical explanation for strange noises in an old frame house will find plenty to work with in a structure that was expanded four decades after it went up.

The Ghost Claim, Stated Plainly

Here is the honest position. The house is supposedly one of the most haunted houses in New Bern, and that is the extent of what the record offers. No specific apparition, no named spirit, no dated incident, no witness account attaches to that claim in the documentary sources. It is reputation rather than testimony.

That matters for anyone planning a trip on the strength of the ghost story. Places with a long paranormal profile usually generate a body of reported detail over time: footsteps on a particular stair, a figure at a particular window, cold spots that staff learn to expect. Nothing of that kind is on the record here. Treat the haunted reputation as local lore in circulation, not as a catalogue of encounters, and you will not leave disappointed.

Getting Inside: Appointments, Not Open Doors

The house is owned by the New Bern Historical Society and is used for Society functions. It no longer operates as a house museum, so there is no ticket desk and no set schedule of guided tours. Limited displays are open for self-guided tours by appointment, which means contact in advance is the only reliable way in.

Visitors who turn up hoping to wander through will find a private working property serving an organisation, not an attraction. The exterior, however, is fully visible from Broad Street, and the surrounding historic district gives context that a single house cannot: block after block of the architecture the Attmore-Oliver House belongs to.

Address: 511 Broad Street, New Bern, North Carolina

See Attmore-Oliver House for Yourself

Sources

• New Bern Historical Society
• NPGallery NRHP Archive Search (National Park Service)
• GeoHack – Attmore, Oliver House
• Wikipedia: Attmore–Oliver House

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