This is just a short list of some interesting haunted places in America, that I haven’t covered on the site. This is more of a quick snippet about the property for you to research or even visit in person! I will cover more haunted places in the future as well: Enjoy
The LaLaurie Mansion, New Orleans, Louisiana
Early 1800s mansion where serial killer Madame Lalaurie had a torture chamber until an 1834 fire.
The infamous Madame Delphine was born Marie Delphine Macarty. Two of her husbands died of strange causes, yet it was her third marriage that sparked genuine suspicion. Madame LaLaurie’s turbulent third marriage was said to have driven her to madness in the LaLaurie Mansion, which she inhabited with her young and handsome husband. Reports circulated of the abuse which Madame Delphine inflicted upon her slaves and even her own daughters.
In the spring of 1834, LaLaurie Mansion was set ablaze. It revealed the horrific living conditions of a number of slaves who were being tortured, starved, and beaten. The fire was allegedly ignited by a slave who had been chained in the kitchen in an attempt to expose the way that she and others were being treated. Madame Delphine and her family fled the town. Now, it is believed that most of the spirits which haunt the house are those of the deceased slaves.
Soon after the fire, the house was converted into an apartment complex and a tenant was murdered. However, the unusual nature of his death suggested ties to paranormal activity. In the mid-nineteenth century, the LaLaurie Mansion functioned as an all-girls school where students often experienced bizarre and random physical assaults.
It’s no secret that the LaLaurie Mansion at 1140 Royal Street is perhaps the most popular (and feared) house in all of New Orleans.
The Shanghai Tunnels, Portland, Oregon
The Old Portland Underground, better known locally as the Shanghai Tunnels, is a group of passages in Portland, Oregon, United States, mainly underneath the Old Town Chinatown neighborhood and connecting to the main business section. The tunnels connected the basements of many hotels and taverns to the waterfront of the Willamette River. They were originally built to move goods from the ships docked on the Willamette to the basement storage areas, allowing businesses to avoid streetcar and train traffic on the streets when delivering their goods. But with the tunnels comes the bad:
Since the mid-19th century, stories have been told about shanghai practices in Portland. Not only men but women, too were warned to take care against being drugged or kidnapped and hauled off for sale. Women were allegedly shanghaied for use as prostitutes rather than ship’s laborers. Although other ports along the West Coast including San Francisco are said to have been centers of shanghai activity, Portland’s underground tunnels are claimed to have made the practice much more manageable and wide-spread than in other areas.
According to those theories, victims were either drugged, kidnapped while intoxicated or simply knocked out, then dropped or dragged into the tunnels through trapdoors called deadfalls. Once in the tunnels, they were locked in specially designed prison cells and held captive until they were shipped off as slave laborers.
It is said that the spirits that roam the tunnels are the many who that have died from the so-called kidnappings and mob murders of various people.
Eastern State Penitentiary, Philadelphia
The Eastern State Penitentiary, also known as ESP, is a former American prison in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It is located at 2027 Fairmount Avenue between Corinthian Avenue and North 22nd Street and was operational from 1829 until 1971.
Notorious criminals such as Al Capone and bank robber Willie Sutton were held inside its innovative wagon wheel design. James Bruno (Big Joe) and several male relatives were incarcerated here between 1936 and 1948 for the alleged murders in the Kelayres massacre of 1934, before they were paroled. At its completion, the building was the largest and most expensive public structure ever erected in the United States, and quickly became a model for more than 300 prisons worldwide.
Said to house many of ghosts who have died in the cell walls within the building during it’s many years of a prison.
R.M.S. Queen Mary, Long Beach, California
The RMS Queen Mary is a retired British ocean liner that sailed primarily on the North Atlantic Ocean from 1936 to 1967 for the Cunard Line – known as Cunard-White Star Line when the vessel entered service. The ship serves as a tourist attraction featuring restaurants, a museum and a hotel. The ship is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Following Queen Mary‘s permanent docking in California, claims were made that the ship was haunted. In 2008, Time magazine included The Queen Mary among its “Top 10 Haunted Places”. One of the staterooms is alleged to be haunted by the spirit of a person supposedly murdered there. The Queen Mary Hotel promotes suite room B-340, a former third class cabin, as “notoriously haunted”.
The Stanley Hotel, Estes Park, Colorado
The Stanley Hotel is a 142-room Colonial Revival hotel in Estes Park, Colorado. Approximately five miles from the entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park. It was built by Freelan Oscar Stanley of Stanley Steamer fame and opened on July 4, 1909 as a resort for upper class easterners and a health retreat for sufferers of pulmonary tuberculosis.
The Stanley Hotel served as the inspiration for the Overlook Hotel in Stephen King’s 1977 bestselling novel The Shining and as the filming location for the 1997 TV miniseries, also written by King.
A majority of the haunts are known to occur on the fourth floor. From self-opening closets to the giggling and running children, this phantasmal floor of the hotel exhibits a lot of activity.
The most notable by far is room 428, where a ‘friendly’ cowboy often sits on the corner of the bed waiting to greet you. The grand stairway in the lobby has also been a huge site for seeing the apparitions of the hotel — a sort of vortex for the spirits to move from the main lobby all through the halls.
Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, Weston, West Virginia
The Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, subsequently the Weston State Hospital, was a Kirkbride psychiatric hospital that was operated from 1864 until 1994 by the government of the U.S. state of West Virginia, in the city of Weston. Weston State Hospital got its name in 1913 and was changed back to its originally commissioned. The hospital’s main building is claimed to be one of the largest hand-cut stone masonry buildings in the United States.
Built by architect Richard Andrews, it was constructed from 1858–1881. Originally designed to hold 250 people, it became overcrowded in the 1950s with 2,400 patients.Patients began to starve, which only contributed to their declining mental health. By 1938, the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum was six times over capacity.
The patients whom the orderlies deemed “unable to be controlled” had been locked in cages in open spaces, in an attempt to make more bedrooms available for less worrisome patients.
By the time the asylum would close, the graveyard had been expanded to an eerie 666 acres to make room for the rapidly dying patients.
Winchester Mystery House, San Jose, California
The Winchester Mystery House is a mansion in San Jose, California, that was once the personal residence of Sarah Winchester, the widow of firearm magnate William Wirt Winchester. Located at 525 South Winchester Blvd. in San Jose, the Queen Anne Style Victorian mansion is renowned for its size, its architectural curiosities, and its lack of any master building plan.
Since its construction in 1884, the property and mansion were claimed by many to be haunted by the ghosts of those killed with Winchester rifles. Under Winchester’s day-to-day guidance, its “from-the-ground-up” construction proceeded around the clock, by some accounts, without interruption, until her death on September 5, 1922, at which time work immediately ceased.The contractors who worked on the house reported Winchester having daily seances with local mediums, in an effort to reach “good spirits.” These “good spirits” were reportedly consulted to find out how to best appease the spirits whom she was allegedly building the house for. These spirits are reportedly what called Winchester to make so many illogical additions to the home.
Read More About this house it’s interesting, Ill do a full post on it one day soon…
Poinsett Bridge, Greenville, South Carolina
Poinsett Bridge is the oldest bridge in South Carolina and perhaps in the entire southeastern United States. Named for Joel Roberts Poinsett, it was built in 1820 as part of a road from Columbia, South Carolina to Saluda Mountain. The stone bridge, which includes a 14-foot Gothic arch and stretches 130 feet over Little Gap Creek, may have been designed by Robert Mills, architect of the Washington Monument. Though no longer in use, the bridge remains largely intact.
According to local folklore, Poinsett Bridge was built on the site of an old Indian burial ground dating back to when Cherokees were the only inhabitants of the mountains of the Carolinas, Georgia, and Tennessee.
Perhaps the strange happenings that go on at night come from the unrest of Indian souls that were quite literally trampled underfoot of the white man as he took control of the land in the late 1700s and early 1800s and subsequently began building the State Road over one of the natives’ sacred sites.
“As the legend states, an Indian burial mound was located nearby the site of the bridge and was destroyed in order to build the bridge,” writes Talmadge Johnson in Ghosts of the South Carolina Upcountry.Go at night to see the strange happenings…
Masonic Temple, Detroit
The Detroit Masonic Temple is the world’s largest Masonic Temple. Features many hidden floor compartments, secret passageways, secret staircases and ghosts! Located in the Cass Corridor of Detroit, Michigan, at 500 Temple Street, the building serves as a home to various masonic organizations including the York Rite Sovereign College of North America. The building contains a variety of public spaces including three theaters, three ballrooms and banquet halls, and a 160 by 100 feet clear-span drill hall.
Recreational facilities include a swimming pool, handball court, gymnasium, bowling alley, and a pool hall. The building includes numerous lodge rooms, offices, and dining spaces, as well as a hotel section.
The Detroit Masonic Temple was designed in the neo-gothic architectural style, using a great deal of limestone. The ritual building features 16 floors, stands 210 feet tall, with 1,037 rooms.
Lizzie Borden Bed & Breakfast, Fall River, Massachusetts
The Lizzie Borden House is where Lizzie Borden and her family lived. It is located on 230 Second Street in the city of Fall River, Massachusetts.
From 1874 to 1892, the house was the property of Andrew Borden, Lizzie’s father, who was a member of Fall River high society. After Lizzie’s trial and acquittal of murdering her father and stepmother with an axe, Lizzie and her sister Emma did not return to the house. Instead, Lizzie bought another house located at 7 French Street that she named ‘Maplecroft’. Lizzie lived there until her death on June 1, 1927. The house number of 92 Second Street was changed to 230 in 1896.
According to Martha McGinn, the room where Lizzie’s stepmother Abby Borden was found murdered is the “most requested room” only because it’s the most haunted in the house.