Moss Mansion

Preston Boyd Moss and his wife Martha, called Mattie, moved from Paris, Missouri, to Billings, a rail and cattle town where, the couple reportedly remarked, there was more happening at midnight than at noon. A businessman, he commissioned the New York architect Henry Janeway Hardenbergh, who also designed the original Waldorf-Astoria, the Plaza Hotel and the Dakota in New York, to build a red sandstone mansion on the town’s Division Street. Completed in 1903, it cost about $105,000 when the national average for a house was a few thousand, and had three storeys, 28 rooms, a solarium and decoration that mixed French Rococo with Moorish details.

The Moss family, their six children and three servants lived there from its construction until 1984, when Melville Moss, who insisted that the house stay in the family, died at 88. A community effort saved the building, and in 1986 the nonprofit Billings Preservation Society took it on under a lease from the family. The house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on 30 April 1982 and now operates as a museum with daily tours, weddings and events.

Because the family lived in the house for eight decades, several members died there. A regional write-up counts six family deaths, and the one most often retold is that of a young daughter, Virginia Moss, who died of diphtheria in 1908 at the age of about five or six. Visitors and staff have said that the spirit, if there is one, is a gentle child, and a regional piece mentions a blue orb on the second-floor landing and a 2019 smartphone photograph that appeared to show a child-sized face on the staircase.

The museum itself is cautious. Staff told KTVQ that passers-by often assume the house is haunted, and that they regularly receive calls from people reporting silhouettes in the third-floor windows, where the museum’s offices are. The staff members interviewed said they believe in the presence of the Moss family, the home’s only former residents, though one volunteer coordinator framed it as things in the house “we don’t necessarily understand”. The museum holds flashlight-led ghost tours through October, and its executive director has described how the house seems to “take a big deep breath” after the Christmas season.

Reports include a blue orb on the second-floor landing, a child-sized face in a photo of the staircase, silhouettes in the third-floor windows, and the sense of the Moss family’s presence. The reported spirit is described as friendly; much of the evidence is staff impressions and visitor photos.

The second-floor landing and main staircase, the third-floor windows and offices, and the rooms associated with the Moss children.

The Moss Mansion is Billings’ best-known haunted location, featured in regional ghost round-ups and in the museum’s Halloween programme. Its architect connection to New York’s Plaza Hotel and the Dakota is a regular point of pride.