Hello and welcome to me in the episode 248 of Real Life Ghost Stories and I have one

spooky story for you today and the story comes from December 21st 2022 and today's story comes from Sarah.

I was born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri, basically smack dab in the middle of America.

There's a lot of crazy cool history in and around the city that doesn't get

talked about very often because no one gives much thought to Casey from abroad or even in the US.

A lot of our history surrounds the American Civil War as Missouri was a slave state, so part of the Confederacy and Kansas was a free state and a brand new state around the start of the war.

There were a lot of guerrilla fights between people who were abolitionists and slave owners on the borders of these two states, C. John Brown.

These history lessons are important I promise.

Inside of Kansas City is a neighborhood called Westport. It was one of the money starting trails for settlers heading west, so hence Westport.

Because it was a bustling trading post, a lot of farms sprouted up around to sell their goods and make their fortunes off of the settlers.

One such opportunist was John Warnel, a Kentucky man who purchased the land where he had set up a farmstead in 1843.

He was a slave owner who built an opulent home for his farm in 1858 on the backs of his enslaved people who were the only ones with skills to do so for miles around.

John married Matilda Pulk in 1851 when the house that stands now was still just a cabin. Matilda died the same year that they married.

He remarried three years later in 1854 to Eliza Johnson, the daughter of a reverend who founded the Shawnee Methodist Indian Mission that went on to become the namesake of the next county over.

Together John and Eliza would have seven children but only two would survive past the age of three. Those kids were Frank and TJ.

It's crazy to think that they had TJs back then. They built the Grand Manor house that still stands today but sadly Eliza would die after giving birth to TJ due to childbirth complications.

One year later John would marry again to Eliza's first cousin, Roma Johnson. Roma had two sons and one stillbirth on the property. Roma outlived John but would sell the house and acreage in 1909.

The Warnel House would go on to become the founding of the most ridiculously expensive and hoity-toity school now known as Pembroke Hill in Kansas City.

Apparently Roma had called feet about selling because she repurchased the house in 1911 after modern utilities had been added kicking the school out. Roma lived there until her death in 1933.

Dozens upon dozens of enslaved people and servants lived on this property throughout the Warnel family tenure.

And perhaps the most crucial bit of information is that during the Battle of Westport the Warnels evacuated their home as the Union Army moved in and burned down a lot of the slave owner homes in the area before the battle began.

The Warnel House was heavily looted but miraculously never burned and served as a field hospital during the Battle of Westport.

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