- Home
- Haunted Places
Haunted places in America
Fifty houses, asylums, prisons, hotels, ships and roads where something terrible happened, and where people have been reporting strange things ever since. The history in each story is checked against the record. The hauntings are told the way witnesses describe them. What you believe about the footsteps on the stairs is up to you.
The Villisca Axe Murder House
The last good evening the Moore family ever had ended with applause. It was Sunday, June 9, 1912, and the Presbyterian church in Villisca, Iowa, was holding its Children’s Day program — a…
Read case No. 001 · 8 minThe Winchester Mystery House
There is a staircase in San Jose that climbs seven steps and ends at the ceiling. There is a door on the second floor that opens onto nothing — a sheer drop to the garden below.
Read case No. 002 · 7 minWaverly Hills Sanatorium
The tunnel begins in the basement and goes down. It runs for roughly five hundred feet beneath the hillside, a long concrete throat with a set of stairs on one side and a sloped track on…
Read case No. 003 · 7 minThe Bell Witch
It started with an animal in the corn. One day in 1817, a farmer named John Bell was walking his rows along the Red River in northern Tennessee when he saw something sitting among the…
Read case No. 004 · 7 minThe Lizzie Borden House
Almost every word of that playground rhyme is wrong. It wasn’t an axe; it was almost certainly a hatchet. Abby Borden wasn’t Lizzie’s mother; she was her stepmother.
Read case No. 005 · 8 minEastern State Penitentiary
The first prisoner walked through the gates of Eastern State Penitentiary on October 25, 1829, with a hood over his head.
Read case No. 006 · 6 minThe LaLaurie Mansion
On April 10, 1834, fire broke out in a mansion on Royal Street in New Orleans. What the people who rushed inside found in the attic made Delphine LaLaurie the most notorious woman in the city’s history.
Read case No. 007 · 6 minThe Stanley Hotel
On the night of October 30, 1974, a young writer and his wife checked into a grand white hotel in the Rocky Mountains on the last night before it closed for the winter.
Read case No. 008 · 6 minRMS Queen Mary
There is a door in the engine room of the Queen Mary that the crew still call Door Thirteen. It is a heavy steel watertight door, the kind designed to slam shut in an emergency and seal…
Read case No. 009 · 6 minTrans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum
The building is a quarter of a mile long. You see it first from the highway, rising above the little town of Weston, West Virginia: a vast Gothic Revival fortress of blue-gray sandstone…
Read case No. 010 · 6 minThe Amityville House
Some houses are haunted because of what happened inside them. The Dutch Colonial on Ocean Avenue in Amityville, Long Island, may be the only house in America that became world-famous for…
Read case No. 011 · 7 minThe Lemp Mansion
Before there was Anheuser-Busch, the beer of St. Louis was Lemp. In the 1890s, the William J. Lemp Brewing Company was one of the largest breweries in the United States.
Read case No. 012 · 6 minThe Whaley House
In 1852, in the dusty Mexican-era town that would become Old Town San Diego, a sailor named James Robinson was hanged for stealing a rowboat.
Read case No. 013 · 5 minOhio State Reformatory
If you’ve seen The Shawshank Redemption, you’ve seen it. The towering stone castle at the end of a long approach road; the turrets and gables and arched windows; the vast cell block where…
Read case No. 014 · 6 minWest Virginia Penitentiary
Across the street from the West Virginia Penitentiary, there is a hill that isn’t a hill. It rises about sixty-two feet out of the flat land of the Ohio River valley: a perfectly rounded…
Read case No. 015 · 5 minThe Myrtles
There is a mirror in the front hall of the Myrtles, a long, gilded antique that has hung in the house since the 1800s. If you look at it closely in the right light, guests say, you can see…
Read case No. 016 · 6 minThe Sallie House
Atchison, Kansas, is a quiet river town on a bluff above the Missouri, best known as the birthplace of Amelia Earhart. It’s a place of brick streets, old churches, Victorian homes and…
Read case No. 017 · 5 minHotel del Coronado and Kate Morgan
She checked in on Thanksgiving Day. It was November 24, 1892, and the Hotel del Coronado was only four years old: a vast, red-roofed Victorian resort on a strip of sand across the bay from…
Read case No. 018 · 5 minGettysburg
In the summer of 1863, Gettysburg was a market town of about 2,400 people, with a college, a seminary, and a dozen roads that met in its center like spokes on a wheel.
Read case No. 019 · 7 minSt. Augustine Lighthouse
The lighthouse at St. Augustine is striped like a barber’s pole — black and white bands spiraling up a tower 165 feet tall, topped with a bright red lantern room.
Read case No. 020 · 5 minAlcatraz
From the cell blocks of Alcatraz, on certain nights, the inmates could hear the city. San Francisco is only about a mile and a quarter away across the bay.
Read case No. 021 · 6 minBobby Mackey’s Music World
For more than forty years, a country music bar on the banks of the Licking River in northern Kentucky had one of the strangest reputations of any business in America.
Read case No. 022 · 5 minFranklin Castle
From the street, Franklin Castle looks like the house a child would draw if you asked for a haunted mansion. It is a four-story mass of dark sandstone in Cleveland’s Ohio City…
Read case No. 023 · 5 minPennhurst State School and Hospital
In 1968, a young television reporter named Bill Baldini walked into a state institution in the countryside outside Philadelphia with a camera crew.
Read case No. 024 · 5 minBachelor’s Grove Cemetery
You reach it on foot. There’s no road anymore. From a turnout on the busy Midlothian Turnpike, southwest of Chicago, a gated, overgrown gravel path leads into the woods, past a chain…
Read case No. 025 · 5 minResurrection Mary
Every big city has its vanishing hitchhiker. The story goes something like this. A young man is driving home late at night on a lonely road.
Read case No. 026 · 5 minThe Mothman
On the night of November 15, 1966, two young married couples were driving around an abandoned World War II munitions plant outside Point Pleasant, West Virginia, looking for something to do.
Read case No. 027 · 6 minThe Jersey Devil
In the southern half of New Jersey, between the suburbs of Philadelphia and the casinos of Atlantic City, there is a forest most Americans have never heard of.
Read case No. 028 · 5 minThe Perron Family Haunting
In January 1971, Roger and Carolyn Perron packed up their five daughters and moved from New Jersey to a farmhouse in the Rhode Island countryside.
Read case No. 029 · 5 minThe Smurl Haunting
West Pittston is a small, tidy town on the Susquehanna River in northeastern Pennsylvania’s coal country. In the 1970s, it was the kind of place where people knew their neighbors, went to…
Read case No. 030 · 5 minThe 1886 Crescent Hotel
In the summer of 1937, a man in a white linen suit, a lavender shirt and a purple tie arrived in the little Ozark mountain resort town of Eureka Springs, Arkansas, and bought its grandest…
Read case No. 031 · 5 minThe Bird Cage Theatre
In 1882, the New York Times reportedly called it the wildest, wickedest night spot between Basin Street and the Barbary Coast.
Read case No. 032 · 5 minJerome Grand Hotel
Jerome, Arizona, clings to the side of a mountain. The town is built on the steep slope of Cleopatra Hill, more than five thousand feet above sea level, its houses and shops stacked on top…
Read case No. 033 · 4 minThe Driskill Hotel
The Driskill Hotel was built to be the finest hotel in Texas, and for a long time it was. It rises four stories over Sixth Street in downtown Austin, a massive Romanesque pile of brick and…
Read case No. 034 · 5 minThe Congress Plaza Hotel
In the spring of 1893, Chicago threw a party for the whole world. The World’s Columbian Exposition, held to mark four hundred years since Columbus reached the Americas, transformed the…
Read case No. 035 · 5 minThe Old Charleston Jail
Charleston, South Carolina, is one of the most beautiful cities in America: pastel row houses, wrought-iron balconies, church steeples, cobblestone streets and gas lamps flickering under…
Read case No. 036 · 6 minThe Shanghai Tunnels
In the waterfront saloons of nineteenth-century Portland, Oregon, a sailor who drank too much might wake up at sea. That was the fear, anyway.
Read case No. 037 · 5 minRolling Hills Asylum
Before Social Security, before unemployment insurance, before nursing homes and food stamps and public housing, there was the poorhouse.
Read case No. 038 · 5 minThe Sorrel-Weed House
Savannah, Georgia, may be the most haunted city in America. That’s not my claim; it’s the city’s own boast, and it has the tour companies to prove it.
Read case No. 039 · 4 minThe Brown Mountain Lights
On a clear autumn night in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina, people park their cars at an overlook on Highway 181, bundle up against the cold, and stare out into the dark…
Read case No. 040 · 5 minThe Marfa Lights
Nine miles east of the town of Marfa, in the high desert of far West Texas, there’s a roadside rest stop with a difference.
Read case No. 041 · 4 minSkinwalker Ranch
In 1994, a rancher named Terry Sherman and his wife, Gwen, bought a 480-acre property in the Uintah Basin of northeastern Utah and moved their cattle onto it.
Read case No. 042 · 5 minThe Flatwoods Monster
It was a little after seven o’clock on the evening of Friday, September 12, 1952, in the small town of Flatwoods, West Virginia.
Read case No. 043 · 5 minThe Hopkinsville Goblins
On the evening of August 21, 1955, a young man named Billy Ray Taylor walked out to the well behind a farmhouse in the tiny community of Kelly, Kentucky, to get a bucket of water.
Read case No. 044 · 5 minThe Dover Demon
Dover, Massachusetts, is one of the wealthiest towns in New England — a quiet, leafy place of old stone walls, horse farms and large colonial houses, about fifteen miles southwest of Boston.
Read case No. 045 · 4 minStull Cemetery
Stull, Kansas, is barely a town at all. It’s a scattering of houses, a church and a few farm buildings at a crossroads in the rolling prairie about ten miles west of Lawrence, the home of…
Read case No. 046 · 4 minUSS Hornet (CV-12)
On July 24, 1969, the eyes of the world were on an aircraft carrier in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. A few hours earlier, the Apollo 11 command module, carrying astronauts Neil…
Read case No. 047 · 4 minOld Idaho Penitentiary
The Old Idaho Penitentiary sits at the foot of the hills on the eastern edge of Boise, behind high sandstone walls the color of dry bones.
Read case No. 048 · 5 minLake Lanier
On a summer weekend, Lake Lanier is one of the busiest lakes in America. It sprawls across nearly forty thousand acres of the foothills north of Atlanta, its long fingers reaching into the…
Read case No. 049 · 5 minPoint Lookout
At the southern tip of Maryland’s western shore, the land narrows to a flat, sandy point between two great bodies of water.
Read case No. 050 · 4 minNothing in the files matches that. Try another name or town.
All 100 stories in one book. Free.
American Dark, Volume I collects every case on this site into a single 561-page ebook, with a case file for every story and full sources at the back. Read it offline, on a road trip, in a tent, or out loud around the fire.
- PDF for phones, tablets and computers
- EPUB for Kindle, Apple Books and e-readers
- No email, no sign-up, no catch
- Full table of contents and sources