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Thornhaven Manor is the tenth episode of Season 8 of Ghost Adventures. Zak, Nick and Aaron are summoned to the Midwest to investigate reports of paranormal activity in a house built in 1845. Thornhaven Manor in Newcastle, IN, has been abandoned since the 1970s, and this once palatial mansion is now overgrown and rundown, looking every bit the haunted house it is rumored to be.

Preliminary Investigation[]

Thornhaven was built in 1845 by Simon T. Powell on land purchased from the State o f Indiana in 1821. Simon Powell married in 1842 Elizabeth (Hoover) Thornburg, b. (1807) the widow of Jacob Thornburg who’d passed to his reward in 1840. Jacob Thornburg had come to Indiana in the early days with his parents, Walter and Mary Thornburg, from the Lost Creek neighborhood near Knoxville, Tennessee. They settled around Economy, Indiana in Wayne County. Jacob and 16-year-old Elizabeth Hoover were wed Nov. 17, 1825 in Economy. Elizabeth was a daughter of David and Catherine Yount Hoover of near Richmond. David had come to Indiana from North Carolina and settled on land north of Richmond the year before Elizabeth’s birth. An original Wayne County settler, Hoover was considered a well-educated man, a writer of good, plain hand and a reader of the French language.

Elizabeth Thornburg bore Jacob eight children: Hiram, David, Oliver, William, twins Edwin and Calvin, ohn and Jacob. Oliver and the twins died in infancy. Hiram, born in April of 1827, became the first child born within New Castle corporate limits. His parents by that time were well-honored and respected citizens, and they educated Hiram as best they could in the New Castle that still was a wilderness. But Jacob died when Hiram was 12. By the time he was 15, Hiram apprenticed with local tanner John Powell and remained a tanner for 14 years. Afterward, Hiram dabbled in boot and shoe-making and the grocery trade. He passed in 1888. Two years after Jacob’s death, Elizabeth married Simon T. Powell and set about bearing him children. By 1850, Henry, 7, Orlistus, 5, and Ester Catherine, 2, had joined the brood.

Jacob, (the son, Simon Powell’s stepson) Thornburg was now 10 and also lived at the manor. As an adult, Jacob became one of the Darr-McDowell parties to reach Pike’s Peak in 1859. He died of typhoid returning from that trip in Nebraska later that year, and is buried at South Mound Cemetery. At the beginning of 1851, the Powell’s welcomed their last child, Lizzie, who passed away unexpectedly at the manor in March of 1853. In 1869, Ester Catherine was married in 1869 to William Elliott, and passed away in Thornhaven six short years later. Simon and Elizabeth were living in New Castle at this time.

Noted in Elizabeth’s 1881 obituary was mention that Ester Catherine “was a loving and affectionate woman, possessing all the noble virtues belonging to womanhood, (who) surrendered her young life into the hands of its Creator but a few short years ago, beneath this same roof, surrounded by a host of devoted relatives and friends, who vied one with the other to smooth the pathway of her departure to that home not made with hands eternal in the heavens.” When Elizabeth Thornburg Powell died in 1881, Simon and her son Henry were the only relatives left nearby. Many stories have been written about the tragedies that befell this family, including the death of their son Orlistus, whom Simon found in a mass grave during the Civil War at Chickamauga battlefield. Simon brought Orlistus’s remains home to New Castle to be buried in the family plot. Family legend also says that the home served as a stop on the Underground Railroad.

In 2012 the building was purchased by Steven C. Miller and he began to restore the property. The house has four staircases, seven doors that lead to the outside, four chimneys, two actual bedrooms and approximately 6,000 square feet. The back side of the house was once used as a restaurant owned by the Bells and later the kitchen was attached to the main house. There is no commercial power to the complete house however Miller uses extension cords to supply some power for bare necessities and paranormal groups.

Lockdown Evidence[]

  • Residual Noises: Noises

  • Word Database Voices (Ovilus): "CLEANSING", "REVEREND", "FLOWER", "BEACH"
  • Physical Contact: The Ovilus detects a change of temperature
  • Residual Noises: Footsteps, Door Slamming, Fidgeting Noises, Knocking, Dragging Sounds, Thrown or Falling Object
  • PX Device Voices: "questions", "here", "action", "hide spirits"
  • Spirit Box Voices: "Lizzie", "Emily"
  • Physical Harm: Zak felt a shock coming up through his leg
  • Apparition: A ball of light appeared moving away from Zak
  • Physical Contact: The Vibe device picks up a vibration when nobody is in the house
  • Physical Contact: The X camera focused in and out, moments later the X camera lost signal
  • Physical Contact: The teddy bear lighten up to its maximum power 
  • Equipment Malfunction: Zak's walkie talkie keep making a very loud noise
  • Apparition: The X camera caught a shadow going right to left
  • Apparition The full spectrum camera caught a mist

  • []

    Season 8 Episodes
    Pioneer SaloonBlack Swan InnTuolumne General HospitalMissouri State PenitentiaryYost Theater & Ritz HotelHaunted Victorian MansionExorcist HouseAlcatrazMustang RanchThornhaven ManorBattle of Perryville
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