Josh N
-
Miss B. Haven and the Monkey Island Denver Ghost Story
Almost nobody sets foot on it any more, which is part of why the Monkey Island Denver ghost story has lasted. The island itself…
-
The Birthday Ghost of Medora’s Fudge and Ice Cream Depot
Most ghost stories keep no calendar. The one attached to the Fudge and Ice Cream Depot in Medora, North Dakota, reportedly does: locals say…
-
The Woman in Blue and Trollwood Park’s Buried Cemetery
Trollwood Park in north Fargo reads, at first glance, as unremarkable: twenty-eight acres of mown grass, swings, slides, gazebos and picnic tables on the…
-
Deering Estate: A Stone House With No Stove, and Its Ghosts
Charles Deering lived on this stretch of Biscayne Bay shoreline for only five years, and he died in a bedroom there. Deering Estate ghost…
-
Shadows in the Stacks: Bismarck’s Liberty Memorial Building
Stone, symmetry and a state’s grief: the Liberty Memorial Building in Bismarck was raised in 1931 as North Dakota’s tribute to the men and…
-
The Old Armory in Williston: Built on 200 Shares of Stock
Drill practice in Williston used to happen wherever there was room: a field, an open lot, whatever the weather allowed. That changed in 1916,…
-
The Bloodiest Cabin in Arizona: Brunckow’s Cabin Ghosts
Stories about the Brunckow’s Cabin ghosts were already in print while Tombstone was still a boom town, which makes this crumbling adobe ruin southwest…
-
Jingling Keys in the Lobby: LA’s Silent Movie Theatre
On Fairfax Avenue in Los Angeles, the Silent Movie Theatre spent decades as one of the few places in California where audiences could watch…
-
Sophia Eberlen and the Ghosts of Harvey Public Library
Small-town libraries rarely come with a body count attached to their foundations, but the Harvey Public Library in North Dakota carries a story that…
-
Ax Murder Legend of Mystery Manor in Omaha
The hauntings stretch beyond tricks and gimmicks, and the spirits of William Hall, his unfortunate wife Greta, and her avenging brother John, all remain,…
-
Public Hospital of 1773: Ghosts of America’s First Asylum
Williamsburg, Virginia keeps two versions of the same building: the one that burned and the one that stands today. The Public Hospital of 1773,…
-
A Hand on His Ankle: Inside the Bell Witch Cave
Robertson County holds a modest limestone passage that has picked up an outsized reputation: the Bell Witch Cave, a karst opening on land that…
-
C&O Canal Ghosts: Haunted House Bend to Paw Paw Tunnel
Boat crews on the Grand Old Ditch kept careful track of tolls, waybills and fines, and they also kept a mental map of places…
-
Walrus Heads and a Fifth-Floor Window: Seattle’s Arctic Club
Look up from the corner of Third Avenue and Cherry Street in downtown Seattle and twenty-seven terra cotta walruses stare back. Seattle’s Arctic Club,…
-
Paint Rock Pictographs and the Singing in the Woods
The Paint Rock pictographs sit on a bluff where North Carolina runs out and Tennessee begins, above a bend in the French Broad River…
-
Westminster Abbey of Arkansas: Mount Holly Cemetery, Little Rock
Ten Arkansas governors, seven United States senators and twenty-one mayors of Little Rock are buried within a single square block in the Quapaw Quarter,…
-
A Lift Home That Never Ends: Lydia’s Bridge, Jamestown
Ask around Guilford County long enough and someone will tell you about Lydia’s Bridge, the low span on the edge of Jamestown, North Carolina,…
-
Built for Steamboat Money: The Grand Union Hotel, Fort Benton
The Grand Union Hotel stands on the Fort Benton levee in Montana, a three storey brick pile facing the Missouri River, and it was…
-
Rotten Johnny Reb and the Avilla Death Tree
The Avilla Death Tree story is unusual among American ghost legends because the grisly detail at its centre is not folklore at all: it…
-
Donuts on the Pipes: The KiMo Theatre Ghost Story
Stand on the northeast corner of Central Avenue and Fifth Street in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and you are looking at a stucco building that…
-
Adobe Behind Plantation Columns: The Luna Mansion
Two things about the Luna Mansion refuse to agree with each other. From the street it reads as a Deep South plantation house: white…
-
Patty, Rose and the Ghosts of Langston’s Western Wear
Walk into Langston’s Western Wear in Oklahoma City and you are shopping inside a building that spent its first years as a saloon, a…
-
The Six Diablos and Other Alamo Ghost Stories
Alamo ghost stories have been circulating in San Antonio, Texas for nearly as long as the building has been famous, and most of them…
-
The Bancroft Building Stands Empty: New Hampshire State Hospital
Eight years of stalled bills, postponed resolutions and one inconclusive statewide vote stood between a governor’s plea and the opening of the New Hampshire…
-
General Wayne Inn Ghosts: A 1704 Tavern Turned Synagogue
Stories about the General Wayne Inn ghosts have outlived the tavern itself. The building at 625 Montgomery Avenue in Merion Station, Pennsylvania, opened as…
-
Two Armies in Five Days: Gettysburg’s Sachs Covered Bridge
Sachs Covered Bridge crosses Marsh Creek on the western edge of the Gettysburg battlefield in Adams County, Pennsylvania, a hundred feet of latticed timber…
-
Abel Blood’s Pointing Hand: Pine Hill Cemetery, New Hampshire
Pine Hill Cemetery is a small New Hampshire burial ground with an outsized reputation, better known to teenagers and ghost hunters by the nickname…
-
Emo’s Crypt and Lily Gray: Salt Lake City Cemetery
Laid out on a bench of ground above The Avenues, the Salt Lake City Cemetery is both a working municipal burial ground and one…
-
The Lady in Red and the Mizpah Hotel of Tonopah
Tonopah sits in the high desert between Reno and Las Vegas, a town that exists because someone found silver there, and the Mizpah Hotel…
-
The Photograph in the Fire: Haunted Stagecoach Inn
A fire photograph is the strangest exhibit attached to the haunted Stagecoach Inn, a restored 1876 wayside stop in Newbury Park, California, that now…
-
Queen of the Mines: The Haunted Geiser Grand Hotel
Two reputations run side by side inside this eastern Oregon landmark. One is documented in newspapers, postcards and the National Register: a mining-boom palace…
-
Five Floods and Four Ghosts: Keosauqua’s Mason House Inn
The Mason House Inn stands in Keosauqua, a small bend-in-the-river town in southeast Iowa, and it has been taking in travellers since 1846. It…
-
Gold Rush Doorway: Inside Seattle’s Cadillac Hotel
Brick, four floors, and a long memory: the Cadillac Hotel in Washington has spent more than a century watching the Pacific Northwest reinvent itself,…
-
Room 904 and the Marble Bar: Denver’s Brown Palace Hotel
A wedge of sandstone and red granite sits where 17th Street, Broadway and Tremont Place refuse to meet at right angles, and inside it…
-
Older Than Springfield: Ball Cemetery and Its Angry Man
Ball Cemetery sits on a rise of old farmland outside Springfield, Nebraska, and it is older than the town it belongs to. The burial…
-
No Wood, No Fire: The Breakers Mansion and Alice’s Ghost
Cornelius Vanderbilt II wanted a house that could not burn. The Breakers mansion, standing on the cliffs above Easton Bay in Newport, Rhode Island,…
-
Bathtub Gin and Spirits: Haunted Arnold’s Bar and Grill
Talk of a haunted Arnold’s Bar and Grill sits alongside talk of bathtub gin and mob money, and all three legends belong to the…
-
Haunted Attmore-Oliver House: New Bern’s 1790 Landmark
Reputation outruns evidence at the haunted Attmore-Oliver House, a white three-story frame building on Broad Street in New Bern, North Carolina. The documented history…
-
Hair Tugs in the Dark: The Philipsburg Theatre, Montana
Granite County’s main street still carries the shape of a mining boom, and the Philipsburg Theatre is the piece of it that never stopped…
-
Phantom Drums on High Street: Haunted Harpers Ferry
Two rivers collide at a rocky point where three states almost touch, and the town wedged into that gap has been shelled, burned, flooded…
-
Cigar Smoke at Riverside: Inside Montana’s Daly Mansion
The smell of cigar smoke in an empty room is the story people repeat most often about the Daly Mansion, the summer house that…
-
The Purple Lady of the Rio Grande Depot, Salt Lake City
Trains stopped calling at the Rio Grande Depot decades ago, but the stories did not leave with them. The vast brick and stone terminal…
-
Seven Steeples: Ghost Stories at Central State Hospital
A broad, empty lawn on the west side of Indianapolis is the most honest monument Central State Hospital has. It marks the footprint of…
-
The Woman Who Never Returned: Mackay Mansion Ghosts
Virginia City sits on a hillside in Nevada that was hollowed out from below, and the houses that survived the boom years are mostly…
-
Coin Press No. 1 and the Ghosts of the Carson City Mint
Silver from the Comstock Lode paid for the Carson City Mint, and the building has outlasted the coining operation by well over a century.…
-
A Steamboat on Dry Land: Ghost Tales at Shelburne Museum
Shelburne Museum is a place where the buildings themselves are exhibits. Set on 45 acres near Lake Champlain in Shelburne, Vermont, it holds more…
-
The Blue Lady of Story Inn: Indiana’s Village-Sized B&B
Guests at Story Inn do not just book a room in an old building. They book a room in a whole village, and if…
-
The Step You Cannot Count: Indiana’s 100 Step Cemetery
Indiana keeps some of its best-known folklore at the end of gravel roads, and the 100 Step Cemetery is one of them. It sits…
-
Chamber Pots and Ouija Boards: The Lizzie Borden House
Few addresses in Massachusetts carry as much weight as the Lizzie Borden House, a plain frame building at 230 Second Street in Fall River…
-
No Bodies in the Concrete: Hoover Dam Ghost Stories
Most Hoover Dam ghost stories begin with a number rather than an apparition. The concrete arch-gravity dam that plugs the Black Canyon of the…
-
The Empty Pool at St. Ann’s Retreat in Logan Canyon
Eight and a third miles up Logan Canyon, on national forest land in northern Utah, a fenced cluster of cabins and lodges sits around…
-
Pioche Boot Hill Cemetery and Nevada’s Deadliest Silver Camp
Pioche Boot Hill Cemetery is the burial ground of a silver camp that killed people faster than it could bury them. The graves sit…
-
Six Webcams and a Grey Lady: Willard Library, Evansville
Few public libraries in the country keep a camera pointed at a stairwell in case a dead woman walks past it. Willard Library in…
-
Cobra Lamps and Pharaohs: The Coos Bay Egyptian Theatre
Walk south along Anderson Avenue in Coos Bay and the marquee gives it away before the architecture does: the Coos Bay Egyptian Theatre is…
-
Anna’s Window: The 17 Hundred 90 Inn Ghost in Savannah
Ask around the squares of Savannah, Georgia, about which building holds the city’s most durable ghost story and the answer tends to arrive with…
-
The Perron House in Burrillville: Behind The Conjuring
Eight and a half acres of field and stone wall outside Burrillville hold one of the most photographed private houses in New England. The…
-
‘I Told You I Was Sick’: Inside Key West Cemetery
Key West Cemetery occupies nineteen acres at the foot of Solares Hill, the highest ground on an island in Florida that barely rises above…
-
The Attic Spirit at Major Graham’s Mansion, Wythe County
Step into Major Graham’s Mansion, a Virginia estate that seamlessly blends history and the paranormal. Known for its Greek Revival architecture and tales of…
-
The Ball at the Curve: Croisan Creek Road in South Salem
Follow the road south out of Salem’s grid and the city thins fast: fewer streetlights, a creek running below the shoulder, oaks and firs…
-
Blood Money Beneath the Sidewalks: Portland’s Shanghai Tunnels
Portland’s Shanghai Tunnels run under the older blocks of Oregon’s largest city, a patchwork of brick-lined basements, connecting passages and hatchways that once let…
-
Dolley Madison House Ghost and the Porch That Vanished
Every account of the Dolley Madison House ghost places her in the same spot: seated in a rocking chair on the west side of…
-
Copper Canisters and Cuckoo’s Nest: Oregon State Hospital
Few American institutions carry as much documented weight as the Oregon State Hospital in Salem, Oregon: a Kirkbride Plan asylum that has been admitting…
-
Rose Perfume on the Upper Floors: Portland’s Pittock Mansion
Pittock Mansion sits a thousand feet above Portland, Oregon, a French Renaissance chateau of Tenino sandstone with the whole city laid out below it.…
-
Three Fires and a Confederate Cemetery: Fort Washita
Twelve miles of prairie separate the town of Durant, Oklahoma from the limestone shells of Fort Washita, a frontier post that the United States…