In this special Halloween edition of Rome Home Journal, we're exploring four of Rome's most intriguing historic homes—and the ghost stories that have become part of their identities.

The Printup House on East Fourth Avenue is said to be haunted by two sisters who sold their home but continued living upstairs. According to local legend, they never quite moved out.

Thornwood, one of Rome's great antebellum Greek Revival houses, has witnessed nearly two centuries of history, including the Civil War and generations of students. Somewhere along the way, it acquired a reputation for being haunted.

Claremont House, better known to Stranger Things fans as the Creel House, may be Rome's most famous fictional haunted house. But according to former owners, the real supernatural activity might be in the Gothic guest house rather than the mansion itself.

And then there are Rome's other mysterious residences, where stories of unexplained sounds, lingering spirits, and former occupants have been passed down through generations—sometimes with more folklore than documented evidence.

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Age helps explain Berry's ghost stories…But architecture explains something more.

Roosevelt Cabin represents the school's rustic beginnings. Oak Hill preserves Martha Berry's domestic world. The main academic campus developed with brick buildings and the classical language American colleges often used to express permanence and institutional importance. Mountain Campus combines stone school buildings with an almost rural isolation. The Ford Complex appears like something transported from another country entirely.

Berry College isn't simply old. It contains an unusually broad collection of environments in which history remains physically present.

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The Kitchen After the Algorithms

As I write this, the renovation is finished enough that we've stopped treating the kitchen like a project. The coffee maker has found its home. The refrigerator has fingerprints. The countertops already have stories.

There are things I'd do differently next time. There always are. Every renovation becomes part of your education, which is one reason I enjoy working with buyers and sellers of older homes. I've asked many of the same questions they're asking.

But this kitchen taught me something new. Technology can give us more information than we've ever had before. AI can compare products, analyze photographs, suggest alternatives and challenge our thinking.

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The dealership fit into the existing city. Then automobile businesses began moving into larger buildings and onto streets outside the traditional retail core.

Eventually they moved to second Avenue and Turner McCall Blvd, where the dealership became part of an increasingly automobile-oriented commercial landscape.

And today the biggest dealerships occupy sprawling campuses along Highway 411 and Veterans Memorial Highway, where the showroom itself is only one small component of acres devoted to displaying, servicing and storing automobiles.

The progression is almost perfect. First, we put the automobile dealership inside existing city buildings. Then we designed buildings around the automobile. Eventually, we designed whole sections of the city around it.

That is architectural history, whether the building involved has Corinthian columns or a giant Ford sign out front.

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You may remember these two houses on Maple Avenue in East Rome. I do—because I showed both of them to real estate clients before they were demolished.

And in one of them, I fell through the floor. 😬

They were beautiful once. They were also, by the time I walked through them, in genuinely terrible condition.

I started researching their history and discovered they were considerably older than the dates in the tax records. Both were already standing when the 1898 Sanborn map was drawn, and 801 Maple may date to the early 1880s. It was once the home of prominent Rome physician Dr. W. H. Boyd, although parts of its earliest history are still being pieced together.

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Kitchens can cost a fortune. But they don’t necessarily have to.

After renovating more than a dozen kitchens, I’ve learned a few things about spending intentionally. That doesn’t mean I was willing to compromise on everything. I certainly had a wish list: a professional 48-inch range, built-in refrigeration, dishwasher drawers, and enough storage that every cabinet had a purpose. What I didn’t want was to buy the most expensive version of everything simply because a magazine, TikTok video, or showroom told me I should.

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Colonial Revival probably will never be the style that makes people pull over because they have never seen anything like it. That is not really its appeal. Its strength is familiarity. The best examples feel as though they have always belonged where they are. They are calm without being boring. Formal without necessarily being grand. Historic-looking without needing to be ancient. And perhaps that is why the style has remained so persistent.

For more than a century, Americans have repeatedly changed what we want inside our houses. But outside? We keep coming back to the same centered door, balanced windows, familiar roofline, and quiet sense of order. Sometimes architecture survives not because it shocks us. Sometimes it survives because it feels like home.

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Before Battey disappears, Rome needs to have a conversation.

Hidden behind the gates of the former Northwest Georgia Regional Hospital is something most Romans probably haven’t seen in years: abandoned brick houses, tree-lined streets, old institutional buildings, and the remains of a campus that once employed hundreds of people.

This one is less about a building we've already lost. It's about a decision we still have time to make.

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One is a dramatic Modernist house perched on the cliffs of Laguna Beach overlooking the Pacific Ocean. The other is a Collegiate Gothic library nestled beneath the pines of Berry College. Both are architectural memorials in their own way. This is a story about how buildings preserve memory long after the people who inspired them are gone. Sometimes the most fascinating connections in architecture aren't found in the buildings themselves—but in the people whose stories they continue to tell.

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People often talk about East Rome and West Rome as if Rome High began when two longtime rivals finally joined together. Architecturally and historically, I think that leaves out an essential part of the story. The path to today’s Rome High did not run through two schools. It ran through three.

East Rome and West Rome gave generations of students identities they still carry proudly. Main High created generations of scholars, musicians, athletes, teachers, and leaders under circumstances that required them to build excellence within an unequal system. Rome did not simply construct a new high school in 1992. It spent generations learning how to become one.

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For more than 100 years, the towers of Shorter College dominated Rome's skyline, rising above the city like a castle. Around the same time the courthouse became one of Rome's defining landmarks, visitors arriving downtown would have looked up and seen something entirely different—a sprawling collection of Gothic-inspired buildings perched dramatically on Shelton Hill.

Today, only fragments remain. But if you know where to look, the architecture still tells its story. If these building still stood today, they would almost certainly be one of Georgia's most photographed Victorian landmarks.

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