Welcome back. Glad you're here.

If you grew up here, somebody told you Rotherwood was haunted long before anybody told you who built it. Halloween is a week from tomorrow, so this week I'm trying something different: the ghost story told straight, then held up against the paper trail. They don't match.

In today's post:

Ten spots. That's it. That's the whole thing.

We cap sponsorships at ten local businesses at any given time, and every one of them is industry exclusive. One coffee shop. One contractor. One realtor. When your category is taken, it's taken.

This newsletter will never be a wall of ads. That's a promise. Which means when your name shows up here, people actually read it.

Spots open up rarely and fill fast. If you want yours, reply to this email and we'll send the rate card.

Rotherwood sits on a rise off Netherland Inn Road, above the Holston, with white columns across the front. It has been a private home for most of its two hundred years. It also carries the best ghost story in Kingsport: a lady in white who walks the grounds at night, a cruel master who died under a swarm of flies, and an enormous black dog that climbed out of his coffin.

So, two versions of the same house. The one we tell, and the one in the paperwork.

The Reverend Frederick Ross builds the mansion in 1818 and gives his daughter Rowena everything. She falls in love, and her fiancé drowns in the Holston before the wedding. She shuts herself inside for years. Eventually she marries someone else and has a little girl. Then one day she walks into the river behind the house and does not come back out. She still walks the grounds in her wedding dress, looking for him.

Ross loses his fortune and sells to Joshua Phipps, whom the story casts as the villain. In 1861 Phipps takes to his bed with a fever, and a swarm of black flies fills his mouth and nose until he stops breathing. At the funeral, a black dog climbs out of the casket. It never left.

That is the version that gets told every October.

Start with the name. Ross named the house for Rotherwood, the Saxon hall in Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe. The young woman raised at Scott's Rotherwood is named Rowena. Ross's oldest child, born September 3, 1824, got the same name.

Ross was not a minor character in this town. In 1818, the year the house went up, he laid out a town on his land called Rossville. In 1822 it joined Christianville to become Kingsport. He led the Presbyterian church here for about twenty-five years.

Rowena married Edward S. Temple of Knoxville on May 23, 1850. They had a daughter, Theodosia, so the legend gets that much right. Rowena died on April 5, 1857, at thirty-two. She is buried in Maple Hill Cemetery in Huntsville, Alabama, under a stone that calls her the daughter of Rev. F.A. Ross of Rotherwood, East Tennessee. The record does not say how she died. It says where she is.

Then there is the house itself. Dr. Lenita Thibault, who bought Rotherwood in 1991 and spent the next thirty years studying it, told WJHL in 2021 that Rowena never lived in the house standing there now. The Ross family lived in the first Rotherwood, a white stucco house across Netherland Inn Road. It burned in 1865. The one on the hill went up in pieces between about 1818 and 1845. The columns in every photo of it were added around 1906, half a century after Rowena died.

Then there is the kind master. The legend needs one, so it hands all the cruelty to Phipps. The record is less tidy. In 1847 Ross sold most of the property to his overseer, Joshua Phipps, and the Phipps family moved into the house on the hill. In 1850 Ross still held twelve people in slavery. By 1855 he was preaching in Huntsville. In 1857, the year Rowena died, he published Slavery Ordained of God, a book-length argument that the Bible sanctioned slavery. It traveled far enough that Abraham Lincoln wrote a private note picking apart its logic.

As for Phipps, the paper trail is a land sale and a family in a house. The flies and the dog live only in the telling.

The later owners make their own list: a farm company run by George L. Carter, then John B. Dennis, who had it wired for electricity by 1921, then the Army, which used it as officers' quarters during World War II, then an Eastman vice president's family for almost forty years. Thibault calls herself a skeptic. She told WJHL the noises are an old house being an old house, and that on her first night there she announced out loud that any ghosts could stay as long as they left her alone. The one story she thinks might hold up is the fiancé. If anything ever leaves wet footprints on those front steps, she figures it's more likely him.

Rotherwood is still a private home. If you drive Netherland Inn Road this week, slow down and look from the road.

The legend never lets Rowena leave Rotherwood.

Neither does her headstone.

Many parents blamed themselves, or their kids, for the hours lost to the feed. But legal claims allege social media companies built in psychological triggers on purpose: intermittent rewards, endless scrolling, toxic social comparison, and recommendation engines that pull kids into content rabbit holes.

Now families are filing legal claims against platforms like Instagram and TikTok.

You may be eligible if:

ClaimsHero checks whether you qualify for a claim and gets your family justice. Nothing upfront. We only get paid if your claim is successful.

Check Your Eligibility

A few things worth getting off your couch for:

Witches Night Out | Friday, Oct. 23, 5 to 8 PM | Downtown Kingsport Shopping, tastings, music, and Halloween specials across downtown, with a passport that runs through twenty-one stops from The Laboratory to Tales & Taverns. Tickets are sold ahead through the Downtown Kingsport Association. Details

Harvest Tea Party | Saturday, Oct. 24, noon to 2 PM | Netherland Inn, 2144 Netherland Inn Rd. Tea and seasonal food in the inn's 1818 dining room and drawing room, on the same road as this week's story. Seats are limited, so book ahead. Details

Richard Marx with Symphony of the Mountains | Saturday, Oct. 24, 7 PM | Toy F. Reid Eastman Employee Center The orchestra opens with Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture, then backs Marx on the songs you already know the words to. Tickets run $40 to $100. Details

Presented by In the Tri. See every Kingsport event this weekend.

One group doing the work.

Appalachian Miles for Smiles Five mobile units take dental, vision, and medical care out to rural parts of Upper East Tennessee and Southwest Virginia. The patients are uninsured or underinsured, and they pay nothing. In ten years, that has added up to more than $10 million in dental and vision care across the region. Give

675 Willowcrest Place, Kingsport, TN | 3 bed, 2 bath

This one has a shorter paper trail.

It went up in 2008 in the Willowbrook neighborhood, brick and vinyl with a covered front porch, and everything is on one level. About 1,900 square feet with an open floor plan, hardwood and ceramic tile underfoot, and a gas log fireplace.

The kitchen has a big island, a pantry, stainless appliances, and a double oven, which starts to matter around Thanksgiving. The primary suite gets a tray ceiling, a walk-in closet, and a walk-in shower. Two more bedrooms, a separate laundry room, and a two-car attached garage round it out. The seller is including a one-year home warranty.

Out back there's a deck, and a sunroom that looks out over green space. The neighborhood has a pool, a playground, and a tennis court.

And the HOA takes care of the lawn and the shrubs.

You get the view. Somebody else gets the mower.

See the full listing for 675 Willowcrest Place, then come back and vote.

What do you think they're asking for 675 Willowcrest Place

Vote down below

SPONSORED BY SELLING STATELINE

Selling Stateline is a team of REALTORS with 10 years of experience across Tennessee and Virginia, bringing five times the personality, expertise, and heart to help Tri-Cities families buy, sell, and invest in the place they call home. sellstateline.com

Every week this newsletter lands in the inbox of Model Citizens who chose to put it there. No algorithm decided it for them. No feed buried it under somebody's vacation photos. They opened it because they want to know what is happening in this town.

That is a different thing than reach. Reach is a number you rent. This is attention, and it belongs to people who live here, shop here, hire here, and vote here.

Community Partners get named in front of that audience every single week. Not in a wall of banners, because we cap the whole thing at ten businesses and keep every category exclusive. One contractor. One realtor. One coffee shop. When yours is taken, it's taken.

There are openings right now.

If you run something local and you are tired of buying impressions from people who will never walk through your door, reply to this email. I'll send you the audience numbers, the rate card, and what's still open.

This newsletter works best when it's a conversation. If you know a story that needs to be told, a person doing something interesting, or a place in Kingsport that matters to you, send it my way. Every documentary, every feature, every post starts with someone saying "you should look into this."

That's it for this week. Thanks for trusting me with your inbox. Let's tell some stories.

Talk soon,

Ryan