Sedman House

Montana legislator Charles Bovey placed some eighty endangered structures from across Montana at Nevada City. Now under state ownership, Nevada City is a good place for ghost hunting. The diverse pasts of its buildings raise myriad possibilities. The Sedman House is one of those special places where old energy seems to linger. Sometimes in the mornings when employees open the house for tourists, they find the bedding rumpled in an upstairs bedroom and furniture moved. Paranormal investigators and tourists have taken photographs in the house that include eerie images.  The house sits today at the west end of the main street but it was originally built at Junction City, a few miles away.


Photo by Ellen Baumler

It was the in-town residence of the Sedman family who ranched in the Ruby valley. Oscar Sedman was serving in the 1881 legislative session in Helena when he was fatally stricken with Rocky Mountain spotted fever. Sedman became the first legislator to die during a session. He left a wife and four children. In the next few years, a son and a daughter  died. Clara Sedman died of diphtheria; she was eight years old. Mrs. Sedman eventually remarried and moved to Missoula and the Sedman House became a boarding house. Later it fell vacant, home to chickens and other livestock. Charles Bovey rescued the house and moved it to Nevada City. In recent years, during living history demonstrations, tourists have commented that they really liked the living history at the various buildings throughout the town, especially the little girl in Victorian dress jumping rope on the porch of the Sedman House. But curiously, there is no living history presented at the Sedman House, and there is no little girl.

P.S. A few of my personal encounters with Virginia City ghosts