Haunted Houses & Mansions

Haunted houses are the heart of ghost lore: family homes, mansions and plantation houses where the story of a family seems never to have ended. The Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California, built and rebuilt by the widow Sarah Winchester from 1886 until her death in 1922, is famous for a legend – that she built to appease ghosts – that historians now doubt. Amityville, New York, became a byword after the DeFeo murders of 1974 and the Lutz family’s claims, later called a hoax by William Weber, DeFeo’s defence lawyer, who had worked on the story with them. In New Orleans, the LaLaurie Mansion’s ghost stories rest on a real atrocity: the abuse of enslaved people discovered when the house caught fire in 1834.

Houses also show how ghost stories can mislead. At several famous Southern plantations, tour stories about enslaved people have turned out to have no basis in the records, while the true history of slavery on the property went untold. In other cases, the real cause of a haunting was in the walls: in a case published in the American Journal of Ophthalmology in 1921, a family’s footsteps, apparitions and dread were traced to carbon monoxide from a faulty furnace.

Many famous haunted houses are private homes. We give only the town for those, never a street address, and ask readers not to disturb the people who live there. Where a house is a museum or offers tours, we say so.