Nemacolin Castle (Bowman's Castle)

OVERVIEW

A brick house on a bluff over the Monongahela at Brownsville, begun in 1789 as Jacob Bowman's trading post on the Nemacolin Trail and enlarged by three generations of the family into a castellated house of twenty-two rooms, kept with its furnishings when the last Bowman died in the 1950s. The Brownsville Historical Society runs it as a museum and, in October, as a ghost tour.

HISTORY

The Bowmans were merchants, bankers and a Fayette County judge; the house stayed in the family for 160 years, which is why its contents survive.

REPORTED ACTIVITY

The society's tours and regional press describe a woman in the tower window, a child in the nursery and footsteps on the stairs. The house's keepers tell the stories as part of the house's history; nothing is claimed beyond that.

VISITING

Museum tours in season; ghost tours in October by ticket.