Mississippi is full of interesting and odd structures. This isn’t surprising, given its history. You kind of expect to find interesting landmarks like a ruined plantation with nothing left but two story high columns, standing like soldiers in a field in the middle of nowhere. Or a graveyard in the middle of a circular offramp from the Natchez Trace onto a four lane highway. But I wasn’t prepared to find castles in the Magnolia State, let alone castles for sale.
This particular adventure started with my new job as a remote Program Manager. The job required me to work from home, and after a couple of months, it became pretty clear that we needed a bigger place so I could have my own office. Our existing casita was okay, but it didn’t quite measure up to a forever home by any means, despite the time and money we sunk into trying to make it so.
By now we had outgrown Clinton as well. Any time we wanted to go shopping, or go out to dinner, or visit friends, we usually drove up the Trace into Madison, about 25 minutes away. Most of our friends were in Madison as well. About the only thing I regularly did in the city we lived in was teach yoga at the Clinton location of Baptist Healthplex.
We started going to open houses just to see what was out there in our targeted price range and hone our wish list. It was fall and the pickings were kind of slim. But that was okay, because we were saving money hand over fist and figured the longer we waited, the more money for a down payment we’d have. Plus we were expanding our list of must and must-not haves.
After a couple of weeks of playing potential homebuyer at open houses, we ran into a super sweet real estate agent named Mary Ann. She had the uncanny ability of showing us just how small and interconnected Mississippians are with one another. Once we were talking to the owner of a FSBO property and it turned out they went to the same high school in some dinky town out in the middle of nowhere. Mississippi is funny that way. But I digress….
So we sat down over dinner with Mary Ann at one of our favorite Madison haunts, explained our timeline and gave her an overview of what we were looking for. The plan was that she would scout potential matches for us and we’d keep checking online listings to see if anything rocked our boat. No pressure, as we figured our move date would be closer to the following spring/summer.
Generally our research consisted of opening up Zillow every few days and sorting from most expensive down to cheapest (because why not look at all the places we couldn’t afford, for kicks?). At the top of the list every day was a castle in Fondren for $1.5 million. The listing was almost two years old.
A Castle? In the middle of Jackson?
Yep. An honest to God, brick and stone castle with a turret and everything. Right smack in the middle of Jackson MS. We fantasized and joked about this for weeks. What if we bought a castle? After all, it had to be one of the coolest houses I’d ever seen. With three stories, seven bedrooms, eight bathrooms, a pool, tennis court (seriously?), pool house and over 7800 square feet, on a two acre parcel in the middle of a historic neighborhood that also had a Frank LLoyd Wright house (two doors down), it was pretty bad ass. According to the listing, it had been completely restored and the pictures were from an article in Architectural Digest.
I did the math – lots of math. If we were able to get them to lower the asking price – by a lot – we could actually afford it. Sure it would be a little tight for a bit, but we could do it. I called our real estate agent.
“Hi Mary Ann, I know we said we weren’t going to start looking at houses until next spring, but there’s a rather interesting property we’d like to look at.”
“Sure! What’s the address and I’ll set up a showing”
I gave her the address. “It’s that castle…”
I could almost hear her jaw drop. “Oh my! Are you sure?”
“Absolutely.”
“That is such a cool property. It’s been on the market forever!”
“I know,” I replied, eying the Zillow listing. “Looks like its been more than two years…”
In her excitement, she cut me off. “Oh I know it’s been a lot longer than that. They keep pulling down the listing and then relisting it every couple of years. but in the Realtor database I can see the real length it’s been listed for.” I could hear her manicured nails clicking on her computer. “It’s been off and on for…let’s see.. No that can’t be right…It looks like almost ten years?”
“Let’s go look at it. Maybe we can get them to negotiate the price…”
“Well as a matter of fact, I know the listing agent. Our kids used to go to the same ballet class, years ago, and we just bought a house from her last year. Let me give her a call right now.”
Of course you know her, I silently chuckled to myself.
Within 24 hours we were parked in front of the property. It looked a little more worn on the outside than the pictures and the landscaping was quite a bit more overgrown, but we’ve learned to expect this when comparing actuals to the retouched photos that accompany online real estate listings.
The listing agent pulled up. She had insisted on accompanying us, “Not because I don’t trust you,” she had told Mary Ann, “but because the place is a bit of a labyrinth and you might miss some things.” Indeed she was right. There were rooms we never would have found on our own, including a servant’s apartment and a wine cellar.
She consulted her phone. “Let’s see… the key is under the pumpkin.” Stepping over to a trio of orange squash, she knelt, lifted up the closest one and produced a dirt-encrusted brass key that definitely belonged to an antique lock. “Well there you go,” she said. “Such a safe neighborhood…” She glanced at her phone again. “The tenants said to make sure we close the doors so the dogs don’t get out.”
Tenants? Dogs?
She opened the door and we were greeted by two rather elderly but amiable golden retrievers followed quickly by the pungent smell of a home in dire need of a housekeeper. We stepped inside a stone foyer that was designed to look like the entrance to a medieval castle. Even though it had that neglected feeling of being occupied by transient renters who didn’t care about it, we immediately fell in love with the place, Rising up to the second floor was a vertigo inducing space circled by a grand staircase illuminated by floor to ceiling leaded glass windows.
We were right about the attitude of the present occupants. According to the listing agent, the owners moved to Florida a decade before and had let friends and friends of friends stay in the castle for protracted periods of time ever since. She explained that the interior pictures in the listing were actually from an Architectural Digest article published right after the owners finished restoring the place in 2004. The latest “house sitters” were staying there (and apparently storing the contents of several storage units in the unused sections of the house) for a few months while their teenaged son finished his senior year in high school.
To the left was the dining room. A cheap, big box discount store light fixture looked out of place with the gorgeous (and expensive) reproduction wallpaper in reds and golds and heavy silk drapes.
I wondered who took the beautiful antique crystal chandelier featured in the photo. The owners? Or one of their many tenants? The listing said that light fixture alone was worth over $10,000.
To the right was a short stairway into an enormous formal living room featuring a beautiful stone fireplace with carved angels on either side. “That fireplace is a replication of the one in Frogmoore Cottage in England,” the listing agent informed us. “That’s the one Harry and Meghan lived in.”
A crack ran through the center of it.
Beyond the living room was an amazing hexagon-shaped room with floor to ceiling leaded glass windows on three sides and built in bookcases on the rest. The room looked out across a pool towards a cute brick gazebo designed in the same style as the castle. Next to the pool was a large poolhouse.
We circled back and went through another cozy sitting room with a second fireplace and into a open space that featured an eating area and a wet bar. Then we saw the kitchen, which had been remodeled and expanded in the early 2000’s into a gourmet kitchen with all the bells and whistles and a Viking stove.
But at this point we started getting nervous about the tenants. Beyond the dirty dishes in the sink and general clutter, we noticed the telltale stained and curled planks of a hardwood floor destroyed by extensive water damage. The dishwasher had obviously been leaking for sometime and not addressed.
The listing agent’s eyes widened and she sounded alarmed. “I didn’t know about this,” she assured us. “I’m also managing this property for the sellers, and I promise you this will be taken care of right away.”
We passed through the kitchen and down the back staircase into the original covered driveway which at one point had been a music room with a baby grand piano. It was now a storage area full of disintegrating cardboard boxes and junk piled along the wall.
Now we were confronted with the first real issues – structural problems indicated by a series of long cracks in the brick wall that once was the exterior. We noticed recent water damage that had damaged both large window frames on either side of the room. It seemed as though the tenants simply didn’t care.
I made a mental checklist of repairs and started dropping the offer price in my head.
Still we weren’t deterred. It was still hands-down the absolute coolest home we had ever seen and we entertained all kinds of possibilities of how to monetize the place once the place was fixed up – as a movie location, tours (it was one of Mississippi’s most visible historic monuments) charity functions, etc…
We followed a corridor back into the house and went up the staircase to the second floor. The tenants hadn’t even bothered picking up their bedrooms. Dirty underwear lay on the floor of the teenaged son’s room. In the bathroom, a dead fish floated in a fishbowl full of algae. The parents’ room was no better. There were cigarette burns on the fireplace mantle and the leaded glass bookcases were being used to store shoes. The room stank of unwashed socks.
The rest of the bedrooms were devoid of occupants, and it showed. All looked as if nobody had entered them in months – if not years. One room had black mold growing in between the shutters and window panes and rotting plaster on the ceiling. (More roof issues, I thought to myself). Another exposed more structural issues. Long cracks snaked down the walls and there was a pretty wide gap between the wall and a built-in bookcase. We moved on to the third floor, which actually wasn’t bad – until we opened the door to the attic and surprised a family of squirrels.
Stepping out of the french doors on the far end of the long room, we found ourselves in a walled garden between the house and garage. It was sorrowfully in need of serious repair – the borders of the weed-infested raised beds were rotten and most of the plants were in some state of decomposition, but all I could see was the potential. A few trailing vines issued from the stumps of muscadine grapevines, which had once snaked up the support posts of the covered path and even now fought destruction.
The garage needed to be torn down. Even if it was in good shape (which it wasn’t) and wasn’t a really ugly seventies-era addition that didn’t match the home’s aesthetics (which it was), the large cracks in the brick foundation indicated some pretty severe and probably uncorrectable foundation issues. Teardown and building new garage: I mentally dropped the offer another $200K. We walked around to the back of the home, past once lush landscaping that was now choked by Asian jasmine.
The pool wasn’t bad. Sure there were leaves on the bottom and it looked like it definitely needed a replaster, but it didn’t appear to be leaking. It was rectangular, like a regular pool, but something about the dimensions seemed a bit off.
“This was the first pool built in Jackson. Can you believe it?” the listing agent gushed. She pointed beyond the gazebo. “And that tennis court is also original to the home. It used to be grass, because that’s what people used to play on. It was converted to cement in the seventies.”
The tennis court was the one thing I wasn’t exactly sure what to do with. It was obviously in need of substantial repair, and the nature-loving part of me wasn’t sure I wanted to continue having such a large and ugly heat-generating section of concrete that we would never enjoy its intended use. Maybe “restoring” it back to grass wouldn’t be a bad idea.
The gazebo had more tell-tale cracks of settling, but looked pretty stable for a 90-year-old structure. I walked into it and heard rustling and a high-pitched chirping.
Bats.
Cool. I’m actually fond of bats, but this was something where the general population’s fear and loathing could be exploited in our favor. There wasn’t an abundance of guano present, so either someone was keeping up on this (which didn’t seem likely given the castle’s general state of decay) or it was a small colony that wasn’t a nuisance.
The pool house was a mess. Once upon a time it had been an outdoor kitchen, but the major components had long since been removed, leaving only counters encrusted with mouse droppings and a defunct refrigerator that we dared not open. The walls were covered in wood paneling painted an atrocious shade of baby blue. Moisture had gotten into the walls at some point and the wood panelling bowed outward. I found a pile of tiny wood pellets that looked suspiciously like termite droppings and made another mental note.
By now it was getting dark, so we took advantage of the receding light to test the lights. Some of the lights in the pool house worked, but we couldn’t verify that any of the other outdoor lights worked – including the huge commercial grade spotlights for the tennis court. The listing agent assured us that this was probably the result of nobody changing burned out light bulbs rather than electrical issues.
We wrapped up the tour and retired to a nearby restaurant, where we sat down with our agent over margaritas and tacos. “Well, what do you think?” she asked.
We looked at each other. “We absolutely love it,” I started.
“It’s amazing!” Mark added. “Of course there’s A LOT of work that needs to go into it, and I think the asking price is a bit high, especially since it’s been on the market for almost ten years.”
Mary Ann nodded. “I totally agree.”
Mark and I looked at each other.
“But, if we can get the sellers to come down in price, it’s perfect,” I said.
Mary Ann’s face lit up. “Cool! It is such a neat place. I’ll go draw up some comps and let’s see what we can do. Can you get a pre-qualification letter from your bank?”
I nodded. “I’m pretty sure that won’t be a problem.”
Inside I was a bit nervous about whether a bank would qualify us for a million dollar home loan. But hey, the worst that could happen would be they would reset our expectations and we’d have to pass on this home and look for something a bit more modest. Which would simply just put us back where we started before we started entertaining crazy ideas. No harm, no foul. In fact, Honestly, I expected the bank to come back with a solid, resounding “nope!”
I was wrong. The bank happily gave us a pre-qualification letter for a 1.5 million dollar loan to buy a castle.
Oh boy…
We sweated over this for a few days. Meanwhile the listing agent sent along an article on the history of the place, a detailed blueprint, an $100K estimate for roof repairs dated January of the prior year and a structural report showing substantial settling and a recommendation (made using a lot of CYA language) against doing anything to correct the issues lest it destroy the structural integrity of the castle as a whole.
Mary Ann was having trouble finding anything comparable. About the best she could do was look at the neighborhood an guesstimate some sort of approximation based on price per square foot. We were right – the castle was probably priced about $300K over what it would be worth, had it been in decent shape. With all the work though…
We put in an offer. My darling and I expected the sellers to laugh at the offer. After all, we were asking them to lower their price point by half a million dollars and pay all the closing costs.
They accepted the offer.
My darling and I looked at each other in disbelief. My God! We just bought a castle!
* * * * *
A few days later (and about $1500 poorer) we stood in front of the castle again, this time accompanied by a slightly larger group of people. The listing agent was back, along with Mary Ann, her husband Monty (real estate attorney and all around nice guy who just wanted to see the inside of this place), another real estate agent from Mary Ann’s new brokerage (a result of some extremely bad timing of this deal) with a small child in tow (babysitter didn’t show up) and the home inspector, Josh.
Josh had done a fairly thorough examination of the home and surrounding structures. I say “fairly” because since we had structural report AND that roof repair quote, our guy hadn’t inspected either. We also discovered that since he wasn’t accompanied by the listing agent that day, he had missed a few areas of the place – like the wine cellar – and would need to go back and revise the report. But we had paid him extra for a pool inspection, so at least we had that.
“This has to be one of the coolest homes I’ve inspected,” he started. “And for how old it is, it’s pretty stable. But before we get to the home itself, I really want start in the back.”
“Sure,” I shrugged, thinking that we knew the backyard was going to be a project, but since there wasn’t much there that was original besides the pool and gazebo, we could probably take our time renovating everything else. We walked through the house and into the music room. Before we got to the door leading to the back yard, he stopped.
“Okay. Let’s start here.” He pointed to the water stains and rotting plaster above the french doors.
“Right,” Mark said. “We know there’s some flashing that needs to be replaced where the squirrels ate it.” My darling hates squirrels.
Josh shook his head and opened the door. “Mmmmm, not exactly,” and motioned us to follow him outside.
“The issue is this covered walkway going to the garage. It was built in the seventies, and it’s in pretty bad shape.”
He pointed to the spot where it met the shingles of the house. “The shingles are just old cedar shake and they should have been replaced years ago. Not to mention it wasn’t done right to begin with. You’re going to have to tear that whole roof and redo it to fix that leak.”
He pointed to some rot in one of the wooden support beams. “I’m not super confident those beams are solid either. If I were you, I’d tear down this whole thing and rebuild it right.”
He turned to the garage and pointed to the long cracks in the brick foundation. “We have some pretty significant structural issues here. But here’s what I really wanted to show you.”
He walked into the garage and produced a small penlight from his pocket. He focused the beam on one of the metal support beams, which was bowed and sported a pretty significant indentation that almost exactly matched damage on the tenant’s car parked nearby. He touched the flaking paint. “This damage is new and doesn’t look like much, but it’s warped the whole structure so none of the grade bay doors will open and close.”
Mark sighed. I made a mental calculation of what it would cost to tear down and rebuild this. Coupled with the walkway and bringing the herb garden back to life, this was already taking a good chunk out of our renovation budget, and we hadn’t even discussed the home itself.
Josh led us around the back to the pool, stopping once or twice to point out the various HVAC units (we found a total of twelve, all numbered and all nearing the end of their life span).
He stopped in front of the pool.
“Well considering the general neglect of the place, I was surprised that the pool filters are clean. But I couldn’t tell if any of the equipment was running.”
“Isn’t checking that part of the report?” Mary Ann inquired.
“Well, yes Ma’am…but…” He shook his head. “It’s better if I just show you.”
He walked us around the pool house, past a jumble of equipment, and to the back of the building. “There. That’s the electric panel. I couldn’t safely inspect it.”
We could see his point. The large panel was originally attached to the back of the pool house. But due to a really bad design choice, the builders had not extended the roof enough to provide any overhang whatsoever. Over time, rain had poured down the side and rotted the entire back of the wood building.
The electric panel – also exposed to the elements – had not only come away from the wall of the pool house as the wall it was fastened to rotted away, but the panel was rusted to the point where it wouldn’t close. Everything had been exposed to Mississippi weather for God knows how long. A gap had formed in the piping used to house the wiring that ran from the panel and we could see the pipe was completely full of water and debris.
No wonder none of the outdoor lights worked!
“This controls everything. The pool equipment, the lights to the tennis court, everything. And this is a huge safety hazard. You’re going to have to do something about this right away.”
He led us back to the front of the pool house. “See how the roof doesn’t have any overhang here either? Everything is rotted, and I found evidence of termites too. The support beams, the roof…There’s nothing holding it up except termite spit at this point. You’re going to have to tear this whole thing down before it falls down.”
I groaned. Even if we just tore it down and didn’t rebuild, it was still going to be expensive. Not to mention that we needed to do something about the electrical panel. It controlled everything so we couldn’t just pull it out. We would have to have someone come in and completely rewire the whole thing. And not only that, but this would need to be done immediately.
Now that he had delivered the big bad news, Josh dropped any further mention of how great the property was, and started pointing out all the issues — the rotten fascia on the outside, the places where squirrel had eaten away the flashing or chewed holes under the eaves, places where mortar had deteriorated and stones that could be tripping hazards.
We went inside, where he showed us more damage – at least one very expensive repair in just about every room of the house. There were some other unpleasant discoveries as well — like the complete lack of the advertised water filtration system and absolutely not a shred of insulation throughout the place.
“My biggest concern with the inside of the house, though, is this.” Josh pointed at one of the windows. “There’s not one window that isn’t painted or nailed shut in the place. Plus they’re all covered with this plexiglass. There’s no way you could get out of here if there was a fire. It’s one huge firetrap.”
We walked down the back staircase and back into the kitchen. Josh mentioned drains in the bathroom and missing bathroom vents and a crack in the jacuzzi tub in the master bathroom. I am not a contractor by any means, but my best guest was that in the end, we’d be sinking probably just as much money in necessary repairs as the negotiated price, and IF we were able to get everything done, we would never recoup our investment.
“So, what do you want to do,” Mary Ann spoke in a low tone, out of earshot of the listing agent.
“I think I need a drink,” Mark sighed.
We retired to a trendy fusion Mexican restaurant around the corner and ordered a couple of margaritas. Meanwhile, Mary Ann lingered at the castle and had a chat with the listing agent to gauge the seller’s interest in fixing any of the really awful things the inspection report revealed. Our usually sunny real estate agent looked a bit grim when she finally joined us.
“So, what’s the next step?” Mark asked.
“Well, the listing agent is absolutely horrified at the condition, especially the pool house,” Mary Ann replied. “She told me the owner absolutely loves the property and put so much love into restoring it. He would never have willingly allowed it to fall into such disrepair.”
“Okay, so let’s send along the inspection report so they can see what needs to be fixed.”
Mary Ann shifted uncomfortably in her seat. “Well, she also told me that they really don’t want to put any money into the property. She’s pretty sure they’d be more likely to drop the price more and let you handle the repairs.”
“Okay. So we will send along the report and ask them to lower the price to reflect based on the amount of repairs.”
She shook her head. “Oh, you can’t do that! You can only send the parts of the report that show the exact items you want fixed.”
I frowned. “So what you are saying is that our option here is to ask to renegotiate the asking price, but we can’t give them any pictures or anything to substantiate the reasons behind why we want a price reduction.”
She shrugged. “Pretty much.”
“That is the craziest thing I’ve ever heard,” my Darling groaned.
The alarm bells started going off. I thought back to some of the hinky little things about the property – the listing date that kept changing, the listing pictures that were more than a decade old, the fixtures costing tens of thousands that were listed as “improvements” and now were non-existent. A water filtration system that couldn’t be found, a quote for work to fix the roof from more than a year ago that was never completed, the leaking dishwasher that the agent was never told about, and above all, the insistence by the listing agent that the owners cared for a property that was literally about two years from being condemned from a decade or more of neglect and apathetic tenants.
Either they were completely clueless…. Or…
“Tell them we want everything in the report fixed, and send them the entire report.”
Mark’s eyes widened, but behind the surprise was something else. Relief?
Mary Ann’s jaw dropped. “I don’t think they’ll want to do that. Maybe it would be better if we just came up with a number…”
Mark looked at me and nodded. “No, E’s right. They really need to see what’s wrong with the property. There are some serious safety issues that need to be addressed. Hell, it’s going to be hard to get the bank to finance this with that poolhouse falling over and the electric panel open like that.”
“Okay…I’ll go type up an addendum.” She didn’t sound convinced. “If you’re absolutely sure…”
“We are.”
“…And I’ll ask for everything on the report?”
“Yes.”
She shook her head. “You know they will probably not go for this.”
“I know. But if they really care about the place being taken care of, they’ll want to know what’s going on.”
After we got back in the car, Mark looked at me. “Why’d you insist on sending the whole report?”
“Just a hunch, I guess. I don’t know if I trust the seller. Something’s off.”
Mary Ann called before we even got home. “The sellers told the listing agent they don’t want her to send the report over to them. Unless you want to take back the repair ask and sign a document accepting the findings of the inspection, they’re just going to let the contract expire without countering.”
“Huh?” Now it was my turn to be surprised.
“Well, if they have the report in possession, then they could be liable for misrepresenting the property in the listing,” she explained.
Suddenly all of the tiny alarm bells that had been sounding off made sense. These weren’t honest people looking for a new steward for a beloved treasure – these were desperate people trying to offload an unsalvageable property for three times the going price of a luxury home in Jackson by feigning innocence.
I wondered how long they’d really known about the issues.
“I guess that’s it. No castle.”
Mary Ann put on her best soothing voice, “I”m sorry guys. I know y’all really loved that place. Such a shame, though. But it’s probably for the best. We’ll find you an even better place.”
“Yeah. I think we may have dodged a bullet, there,” Mark nodded.
As soon as she hung up, Mark looked at me with a serious expression. “Are you sad we didn’t buy a Castle?”
“Nope. You?”
“Not in the least. I mean it would have been cool… but…”
“Exactly. It’s the ‘but’ that worried me.”
Nearly a year later, after a particularly wet summer that overflowed the Pearl River, Jackson made national headlines for an acute water crisis that left a large swath of the city without drinkable water and everyone else with boil water notices for months on end. This was after the mayor’s questionable decision to award the garbage contract for the largest city in the state to a one-man operation that couldn’t handle such a large contract.
Crime was on the upswing and property values in the city were crashing. Inflation made home renovation and repair projects more expensive – if low inventory due to supply chain issues didn’t completely stall them out. Mortgage interest rates were now twice the rates we were pre-approved for while castle-shopping.
But by now, we were now securely settled in a new dream home. a beautiful French-style villa (in much better shape) on ten acres of mature gardens and forests, which we bought right before rates soared. One day I opened up Zillow, and looked up the Castle. There it was – same $1.5M price tag, the same pictures from the twenty-year-old Architectural Digest article and the listing date “magically” changed to reflect it only being on the market for the past six months.
And you know what? I for one am thrilled that it’s not ours.