See that house with the Ionic columns on the first floor and the Corinthian ones on the second? That's the Brevard-Clapp House — nine thousand square feet of Italianate and Greek Revival, built in eighteen fifty-seven for a cotton merchant named Albert Hamilton Brevard. Twelve thousand dollars.
Brevard moved in, received his first property tax assessment, and shot himself in front of the door. He was fifty-four and had lived in the house for about two years.
Over a century later, the queen of gothic horror moved in — and the house already had a gothic horror backstory waiting for her. You really can't make that up. Except Anne Rice basically did.
Rice bought this house for nine hundred thousand dollars and made it the home of the Mayfair family of witches in The Witching Hour. That swimming pool in the back garden — same one where her character Michael Curry is found dead on Christmas Day. It's still there.
Her real name was Howard — Howard Allen Frances O'Brien. Her mother named h
er Howard, after her father, because she believed it would give a girl an unusual advantage in the world. Rice hated the name so much that on her very first day of first grade, when a nun asked her name, she said Anne. Just like that — six years old, walked into school, and decided she was somebody else.
At her peak, Rice owned at least four major properties in this neighborhood and employed fort
