If you’ve read my first novel, you know that both Kevan Renee, my main character, and I are fascinated with abandoned houses. Not just the visual, haunting appeal, but the stories behind them.
I’ve spent many walks, hikes, and vacations seeking out such places. And don’t tell anyone, but I’ve also trespassed just to get a closer look.
But I can’t always visit them in person, so I often have to settle for research, which is what we authors do when we want to get a detail just right for our fictional stories.
I’ve decided that one blog post a month will be dedicated to fascinating houses I’ve found, either in person or through research while working on my novels. I’ll bring you the stories behind them, and I hope you enjoy learning about them as much as I do.
While writing the sequel to my first novel, I searched for plantation homes of the South for inspiration in describing Ivymond in Where Secrets Sleep. Boy did I find a doozie. Although it’s much larger than Ivymond, I couldn’t resist sharing this one with you.
If I tried to invent the spine of a southern gothic novel from scratch, I don’t think I could beat the real history of a mansion just outside Atlanta called Briarcliff. In order, it has been: one eccentric heir’s private fantasy estate, the site of a tragedy nobody quite recovered from, a psychiatric hospital, decades of total abandonment, a horror-movie filming location, and right now, as I’m writing this, a construction zone being converted into a home for the elderly.
Briarcliff was built in 1922 by Asa Griggs “Buddie” Candler Jr., son of the man who built Coca-Cola into an empire. Forty-two acres. A private zoo. Greenhouses, stables, two pools, and a cathedral-sized pipe organ so large it was, at the time, the biggest privately owned organ in the state of Georgia. It was the kind of house built by someone who never expected the party to end.
On the morning of January 18, 1931, it did. Candler’s butler, José Cruz, was found dead in a vehicle on the property, Gladys Frix in his lap, her head resting on his shoulder, his arm still wrapped around her. The conclusion investigators settled on was murder-suicide: Cruz had killed her, then turned the gun on himself. Nearly a century later, the exact story is still stitched together from local lore as much as record, which is, I’ll admit, exactly the kind of half-buried history I can’t leave alone.
The Candlers sold the estate in 1948. What came next is its own kind of haunting. From 1953 to 1997, Briarcliff operated as a psychiatric and addiction treatment facility, first the Georgian Clinic, then the Georgia Mental Health Institute. Decades of patients moved through the same halls where a family once threw parties with an in-house organist.
Then, nothing. The mansion sat empty and rotting for years, ivy pulling at the brick, paint peeling off the ballroom walls. It got so eerie, so convincingly abandoned, that Netflix and the CW came calling: Stranger Things, Vampire Diaries, and Doom Patrol have all filmed inside its ruins.
And now, the newest chapter: Emory University, which owns the land, leased it to a developer called Galerie Living in 2022. Briarcliff is being restored: not as a museum, not as a filming backlot, but as a senior living community.
A house that once held a party, then a tragedy, then decades of institutional silence, then decades of nothing at all, is about to hold people again. On purpose, this time.
That’s the part I can’t stop turning over. Most abandoned-house stories end at the decay. This one doesn’t; it just changes what it’s hiding. A man killed a woman on that property in 1931. Within a few decades, the house was holding people who’d lost their grip on reality. Soon, it will hold people living out their last years, most of whom will never know what happened on that gravel. A house doesn’t need a ghost to be unsettling. Sometimes it just needs a very good memory, and enough people willing not to ask what it remembers.
I don’t know yet exactly where Briarcliff is going to show up in my fiction. But a house that refuses to stay one thing (grand, then violent, then clinical, then feral, then quiet again) is exactly the kind of place that ends up in my notebook. If you’ve read Where Secrets Stay or Where Secrets Sleep, you already know: I can’t resist a house that keeps changing what it’s hiding.
Until next time, remember: the abandoned still has a story to tell. You just can’t be afraid to dig it up.
Want to know when I track down the next one? Sign up for my email list HERE and I’ll send you the first chapter of Where Secrets Stay free, the novel that started as one of these house obsessions.