Marianna is the seat of Jackson County in the Florida Panhandle, a small town on US 90 between Tallahassee and the Alabama line. Anyone driving in from the west passes a tall white house with rounded two-story porches and a cupola at the corner of Lafayette and Russ Streets. It is the county’s visitor center, the home of the Chamber of Commerce, and, by local reputation, the most haunted building in town.
What happened
Joseph W. Russ Jr. was a Marianna merchant with extensive landholdings across the county when he began the house in 1892. It was finished in 1895 as a Queen Anne mansion of towers and gables, designed by a builder recorded in the National Register file only as Langston. Russ was a bachelor when he moved in with his mother; he later married Bette Dickerson and they had a daughter, Frances. Between 1910 and 1912 the house was remodeled in the Classical Revival taste, which is when the curved porches and Corinthian columns went on. The ground it stands on had seen fighting half a century earlier: on September 27, 1864 the Union 2nd Maine Cavalry charged into Confederate fire at that crossroads, then called Ely Corner, during the Battle of Marianna, and men were killed and wounded on what became the Russ lawn.
The crash of 1929 destroyed the family’s fortune. Russ applied to the banks for a loan to keep the house and was refused, and early in 1930 he took his own life. His widow and descendants held on. Pieces of the property were sold off, including part of the front yard, which became a filling station, and the family slowly rebuilt. The National Register nomination of 1983 recorded that Russ family members had occupied the house continuously from the early 1890s until 1981; Frances lived there for 89 years. By the time the last of them left it was badly run down, and in the mid-1990s it was deeded to the Marianna Chamber of Commerce and restored.
The investigation
The ghost stories came with the house. Merritt Dekle, a descendant who wrote its history for the Chamber in 2000, recalled that his grandmother turned away strangers who knocked asking to tour the famous haunted mansion with the polite excuse that there was sickness in the family; he stayed there as a child and as an adult, found it creepy, and experienced nothing. One former resident warned the new staff not to work in the building alone after dark. Employees and visitors since the restoration have reported footsteps on empty floors, objects that move between visits, the voices of children, a drift of perfume and the elevator doors opening and closing by themselves.
Several volunteer paranormal groups have spent nights in the house. Three of them, by 2012, had reported what the local paper summarized as minimal activity. That February Emerald Coast Paranormal Concepts of Panama City set up in the house with a reporter from the Jackson County Floridan present; both she and an investigator heard a scraping sound and what they took to be the word “help,” and the group logged unusual meter readings and went back several times. The one photographic staple, a shadowy figure in the window of the tower, has a structural answer: the tower has no floor and functions as a skylight over the second-floor hall, so no one can stand in it.
The explanations
A tall, elderly timber house with an elevator shaft, a hollow tower and a highway outside will creak, draw air and carry sound in ways that a quiet office after hours makes noticeable, and a building whose founder died by his own hand on the edge of ruin invites the obvious story. The Civil War dead give a second cast of characters for those who prefer soldiers to merchants. None of the groups who have worked the house has produced evidence that would persuade anyone who was not already persuaded, and the Chamber has sensibly let the reputation work for it.
Where it stands
The Russ House is open on weekdays, staffed by the county tourism office, and its volunteers will show visitors around and tell them which rooms are said to be busiest at night. It appears in the 2020 documentary Real Haunts, on every list of haunted places in Florida, and in the schedules of ghost-hunting groups from across the Gulf Coast. The suicide, the battle and the family’s long tenure are history. The rest is the kind of story an old house in a small town is expected to have.