96 Fun Facts About Haunted Places

Which Estes Park, Colorado, hotel inspired the Overlook in Stephen King's The Shining?

The Stanley: the Kings checked in on the eve of its winter closure and found themselves the only guests in the echoing hotel, the night that gave him the novel.

Which 1910 Louisville tuberculosis hospital is billed as one of the world's most haunted?

Waverly Hills Sanatorium began as a two-storey hospital for 40 to 50 patients and closed in 1961, once the antibiotic streptomycin had made tuberculosis hospitals largely unnecessary.

What nickname did the ocean liner now moored at Long Beach earn as a fast WWII troopship?

The Grey Ghost: repainted a dull wartime grey, she was quick enough to sail without a convoy, and her speed and zigzag courses made her almost impossible for U-boats to catch.

Which San Jose mansion did a wealthy widow keep enlarging for decades, reportedly on a medium's advice to appease spirits?

Winchester Mystery House legend has a Boston medium telling Sarah Winchester to build for the ghosts of rifle victims, yet her own letters show she often halted the work for months.

Which former liner and WWII troopship, docked in Long Beach, is called one of the world's most haunted ships?

RMS Queen Mary sliced through her own escort cruiser, HMS Curacoa, in 1942 and, under orders never to stop, steamed on; Long Beach bought the retired liner in 1967.

Which Philadelphia prison, whose 'Pennsylvania System' used separate confinement as rehabilitation, became a museum in 1994?

Eastern State Penitentiary held each inmate alone in a heated, sky-lit cell, but overcrowding forced prisoners to share and the solitary system was officially abandoned in 1913.

Which gangster was sent to Philadelphia's landmark 1829 penitentiary in August 1929 for carrying a concealed weapon?

Al Capone pleaded guilty and drew a year; weeks after his release in March 1930 he headed a widely publicised list as 'Public Enemy No. 1'.

Which Civil War battle site, where three days in July 1863 left about 50,000 casualties, is now famous for its ghost tours?

Gettysburg: it was the costliest battle of the war, and Lincoln came that November to dedicate a national cemetery for its dead.

Which island prison, closed in 1963, is said to echo with the banjo of a gangster from its inmate band?

Alcatraz: the gangster grew so cooperative that he was let into the prison band, the Rock Islanders, which gave regular Sunday concerts for the other inmates.

What nickname was given to the punishment cells 9 to 14 at the end of Alcatraz's D-Block?

The Hole: troublemakers were shut in these cold bottom-tier cells for anything from three to nineteen days, fed in the cell and barred from work.

Which Tower of London tower, built as a water-gate, was originally known as the Garden Tower?

The Bloody Tower, first called the Garden Tower, took its grim name in the 16th century, when it was believed to be where the Princes in the Tower were murdered.

Which Long Island village's Dutch Colonial house did the Lutz family flee in January 1976 after just 28 days?

Amityville: Ronald DeFeo Jr. had shot six of his family in the house 13 months before, and the Lutzes' account of their stay became a bestseller and a run of films.

Which Essex house did ghost hunter Harry Price call 'the most haunted house in England' before it burned in 1939?

Borley Rectory: the Society for Psychical Research later went through Price's reports and rejected most of the sightings as imagined or fabricated.

The Edinburgh Vaults, a ghost-tour fixture, lie beneath which structure completed in 1788?

South Bridge hides about 120 vaults in its arches: taverns and cobblers' workshops used them for some 30 years, then the city's very poorest moved in.

Poveglia, the notorious island in the Venetian lagoon, was long used by Venice as what?

A quarantine station: in 2014 Italy auctioned a 99-year lease on the abandoned island, but a businessman's top bid of 513,000 euros was turned down and the lease never went ahead.

Aokigahara, the forest reputed to be haunted by yūrei, grows on the lava flank of which mountain?

Mount Fuji's lava, poured out by an eruption in 864, lies under the 'Sea of Trees'; the porous rock soaks up sound, which gives the forest its unnerving hush.

Bhangarh Fort, often called India's most haunted place, stands in which state?

Rajasthan: the ruins are widely thought haunted, and visitors are forbidden to enter between sunset and sunrise.

Which Romanian castle, once Queen Marie's favourite retreat, is marketed to tourists as 'Dracula's Castle'?

Bran Castle: there is no evidence Bram Stoker knew anything about it, and Vlad the Impaler's ties to it are slight, yet the label stuck.

Roughly how many people's bones lie in the Catacombs of Paris?

6 million: from the 1780s the bones were carted by night from overflowing cemeteries such as the Holy Innocents into the city's old quarry tunnels.

The Island of the Dolls lies in the Xochimilco canals of which capital?

Mexico City: caretaker Julián Santana Barrera hung the dolls from the trees to appease the spirit of a girl he believed had drowned in the canal.

The Myrtles Plantation, a reputedly haunted home built in the 1790s on then-Spanish land, is in which state?

Louisiana: its builder, David Bradford, was a leader of the Whiskey Rebellion who left Pennsylvania when Washington sent in troops and started again as a planter far to the south.

Lizzie Borden's Fall River home, site of the 1892 hatchet murders, is in which state?

Massachusetts: Lizzie Borden was acquitted in 1893 of killing her father and stepmother, and the Fall River house now takes overnight guests as a bed and breakfast.

San Diego's reputedly haunted Whaley House doubled until 1871 as the county's what?

Courthouse: Thomas Whaley rented rooms to the county, in a house built where 'Yankee Jim' Robinson was hanged in 1852, the first ghost he claimed to hear.

Which queen reportedly ran screaming through Hampton Court's Haunted Gallery after being confined to her rooms there in 1541?

Catherine Howard, legend says, broke from her guards and ran down the gallery to beg Henry for her life, only to be dragged back; she was beheaded in February 1542.

Which future president is said to have ridden out to investigate Tennessee's Bell Witch, only for his men to be scared off?

Andrew Jackson: the story of the general's visit comes down through a single letter written in 1894, recalling what the writer's grandfather had told him.

Monte Cristo Homestead, long billed as Australia's most haunted house, stands in Junee in which state?

New South Wales: Reg and Olive Ryan bought the derelict Junee manor in 1963, restored it and for decades showed visitors round 'Australia's most haunted house'.

Which Tasmanian penal colony, begun in 1830 as a timber station, now sells ghost tours of its ruins?

Port Arthur: the only way off the peninsula was a narrow neck of land watched by soldiers and a chained 'dog line', and the water around it was rumoured to be full of sharks.

Which Gloucestershire inn, bought by the Humphries family in 1968, is billed as England's most haunted building, with some twenty ghosts?

The Ancient Ram Inn: the family ran the old pub as a guesthouse until, by its owner's account, guests' unexplained experiences turned it into a venue for paranormal events.

Which Kent village entered the 1989 Guinness Book of Records as Britain's most haunted, with 12 reported ghosts?

Pluckley won its Guinness entry in 1989, but Guinness has since dropped the category, and a Daily Telegraph reporter who visited in 2008 doubted the ghost stories.

The Ohio State Reformatory in Mansfield, now a ghost-hunt venue, was the main location for which prison drama?

The Shawshank Redemption shot most of its scenes in the castle-like prison, which a federal court ruling had closed in 1990; it now runs ghost walks and overnight ghost hunts.

Which asylum in Weston, built for 250 patients, held 2,400 by the 1950s and now sells ghost tours?

Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum: shut in 1994, it was sold at auction in 2007 for $1.5 million to a demolition contractor, who reopened it to visitors.

Which New Orleans socialite's Royal Street mansion was found to hide tortured enslaved people when a blaze broke out in 1834?

Delphine LaLaurie escaped to France as a mob wrecked the house; the mansion pointed out on ghost tours today was rebuilt after she had gone.

The Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel in the Canadian Rockies was opened in 1888 by which company?

The Canadian Pacific Railway built it to tempt wealthy travellers onto its new line through the Rockies, a scheme driven by its boss, Cornelius Van Horne.

The Hotel del Coronado stood in for the 'Seminole Ritz' in which 1959 film?

Some Like It Hot passed the hotel off as a Florida resort; its own ghost story is Kate Morgan, a guest found dead on the beach steps in 1892, five days after checking in alone.

What weapon killed eight people in one night in a Villisca, Iowa, house in 1912, a crime never solved?

An axe: six members of the Moore family and two visiting girls died in the night, and the house now takes overnight guests as the Villisca Axe Murder House.

The Sallie House in Atchison, whose ghost is said to scratch male visitors until they bleed, is in which state?

Kansas: legend says Sallie was a young girl who died there when a doctor began operating on her appendix before the anaesthetic had taken hold.

Which serial killer stayed at Los Angeles's notorious Cecil Hotel during his 1985 spree?

Richard Ramirez, the 'Night Stalker', lodged at the Cecil for some weeks, a hotel clerk recalled; in 2021 the notorious building reopened as affordable housing.

Which Northumberland castle's best-known ghost is the 'Blue Boy', said to haunt its Pink Room?

Chillingham Castle: its owners tell of a 'blue (or radiant) boy'; Sir Humphry Wakefield bought the neglected fortress in 1982 and set about a painstaking restoration.

At Ireland's Leap Castle, what is the room called where an O'Carroll killed his priest brother?

The Bloody Chapel: tradition says one brother burst in and cut the priest down at the altar as he said Mass, in a feud over who should lead the clan.

Glamis Castle, famed for its legends of a hidden monster, was the childhood home of which royal?

Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother grew up there as Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon; when Glamis became a hospital for wounded soldiers in the First World War, the teenager helped to run it.

Which husband of Mary, Queen of Scots, died a prisoner at Denmark's Dragsholm Castle?

The Earl of Bothwell, Mary's third husband, died at Dragsholm in 1578 after years in appalling conditions; a pillar he is said to have been chained to is still shown.

Folklore says Houska Castle in Bohemia was built over what?

A gateway to Hell: in the legend, prisoners condemned to death were offered a pardon to be lowered into the pit, and the first began screaming within seconds.

The Enfield poltergeist case of 1977–79, dramatised in The Conjuring 2, centred on which family?

The Hodgsons' daughters Janet and Margaret were at its centre; investigators Maurice Grosse and Guy Lyon Playfair believed them, but a ventriloquist judged the ghost's gruff voice a vocal trick.

Which thinker's tomb, topped by a giant bronze bust, is the best-known monument in London's Highgate Cemetery?

Karl Marx: the tomb survived two bomb attacks in the 1970s, the decade when tales of a 'Highgate Vampire' drew a mob of would-be vampire hunters to the cemetery.

The Javanese nickname of Semarang's reputedly haunted Lawang Sewu building means what?

A thousand doors: the old Dutch railway offices have row on row of tall doors and about 600 large windows, though it is unlikely there are truly a thousand.

Moosham Castle was the administrative centre of the Zaubererjackl witch trials, which executed 139 people under the prince-archbishops of which city?

Salzburg: the hunt for a fugitive young beggar known as Jackl turned on the street children said to follow him, so most of those executed were boys and young men.

Ballygally Castle, called one of the most haunted places in Ulster, was built in 1625 by a settler from where?

Scotland: James Shaw came over as a tenant of the Earl of Antrim, and his tower house was strong enough to beat off repeated attacks during the 1641 rebellion.

Which Edinburgh street, built over in 1753 and sealed beneath the City Chambers, now draws visitors with its ghost stories?

Mary King's Close: it stayed partly lived-in beneath the new building, and its last resident, Andrew Chesney, did not leave until 1902.

Charles Boyington, hanged in Mobile in 1835, vowed that what would grow from his grave to prove his innocence?

An oak tree: one did grow from his plot in the potter's field, and the Boyington Oak still stands just outside the wall of Church Street Graveyard.

Who is said to have imprisoned Margaret Pomeroy, Berry Pomeroy Castle's White Lady?

Her jealous sister Eleanor, the legend says, shut Margaret Pomeroy in the dungeon out of envy of her beauty; the Devon ruin also has a Blue Lady said to lure passers-by to her tower.

Which London theatre is haunted by the 'Man in Grey', a ghost whose appearance is said to bring a show good luck?

Theatre Royal, Drury Lane: legend makes him the ghost of a stabbed man whose skeleton was found in a walled-up side passage in 1848; he appears in a tricorne hat and cloak.

Which queen, beheaded at the Tower of London in 1536, is said to walk there carrying her head under her arm?

Anne Boleyn lies in the Tower's church of St Peter ad Vincula, and the haunting inspired the 1934 comic song 'With Her Head Tucked Underneath Her Arm'.

At Ireland's Loftus Hall, what revealed a card-playing stranger as the devil?

A cloven foot: in the tale, Anne Tottenham stooped under the card table for something she had dropped, saw it, and never recovered from the shock.

Which national treasure was kept at Cornwall's Bodmin Jail in 1918–19?

The Domesday Book was sent from London with other state papers late in the First World War and sat out 1918 and 1919 in the Cornish jail.

Two Englishwomen claimed in 1901 to have seen Marie Antoinette's ghost where?

The Petit Trianon: Charlotte Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain published their 'time slip' in 1911 as An Adventure. One later theory is that they had wandered into a costume party given by the poet Robert de Montesquiou.

Larnach Castle, said to be haunted by the politician who built it, overlooks which New Zealand city from the Otago Peninsula?

Dunedin: William Larnach, facing bankruptcy, shot himself in a committee room at Parliament in 1898; castle visitors report cigar smoke and a bearded Victorian gentleman.

Okiku, the servant ghost said to rise from a well at Himeji Castle, is heard counting what?

Plates: Okiku was accused of losing one of her master's ten precious dishes, so her ghost counts from one to nine and then shrieks for the missing tenth.

Shaniwar Wada, where a murdered Peshwa's ghost is said to cry 'Uncle, save me' on full moon nights, is in which city?

Pune: Narayanrao was cut down by guards in 1773 in a plot by his uncle Raghunathrao, the very 'Kaka' his ghost is said to call on.

Workers who died building the Manila Film Center in 1981 were buried under what?

Quick-drying cement: the Marcos government sealed the site and kept rescuers and ambulances out until an official statement was ready. The building was being rushed up for a film festival.

Resurrection Mary, a vanishing hitchhiker in a white dress, is picked up along Archer Avenue outside which city?

Chicago: since the 1930s drivers have told of giving the young woman a lift, only for her to vanish as they near Resurrection Cemetery in suburban Justice.

Bobby Mackey's Music World, billed as America's most haunted nightclub, stood just across the river from Cincinnati in which state?

Kentucky: singer Bobby Mackey bought the Wilder roadhouse in 1978, and legend tied it to Pearl Bryan, murdered nearby in 1896, whose head was never found. The building came down in 2024.

The Gothic penitentiary at Moundsville, a ghost-tour fixture modelled on Joliet, stands in which state's northern panhandle?

West Virginia: its turrets and battlements copy the Illinois prison at half the scale, and the electric chair on show, 'Old Sparky', was built by one of its own inmates.

Missouri State Penitentiary opened in March 1836, the same month as which event?

The fall of the Alamo came that same March. The prison's most notorious escape was James Earl Ray's in 1967, hidden in a bakery truck a year before he shot Martin Luther King Jr.

Which Florida city's reputedly haunted lighthouse stands where the Spanish kept a watchtower from the late 1500s?

St. Augustine: with the sea eating at the old tower, a new one went up in the 1870s, and the original crashed into the waves in 1880.

Which royal reportedly fainted on seeing Lincoln's ghost at the White House in 1942?

Queen Wilhelmina, the story goes, answered a knock at her bedroom door, saw Lincoln in frock coat and top hat, and fainted; a later Dutch account has her simply watching the figure vanish.

The Marfa lights, often blamed on ghosts, glow near a town in which US state?

Texas: in 2004 physics students from the University of Texas at Dallas spent four days tracking the lights and found they kept pace with car headlights on U.S. 67.

Kuldhara, a village its people are said to have cursed and abandoned overnight, lies in the Thar Desert near which 'Golden City'?

Jaisalmer: legend blames its minister Salim Singh, whose designs on a village girl drove the Paliwal Brahmins out; historians point instead to wells running dry or an earthquake.

The Lemp Mansion in St. Louis, site of three family suicides, was built on what fortune?

Brewing: Lemp's Falstaff beer led the St. Louis market until Prohibition shut the brewery, which was auctioned off in 1922 to the International Shoe Company.

Franklin Castle, called the most haunted house in Ohio, is in which city?

Cleveland: Hannes Tiedemann buried a daughter, his mother and three more children within a few years, and the run of deaths set the neighbours talking.

The Sorrel-Weed House, probed on Ghost Hunters' 2005 Halloween special, is in which city?

The Sorrel-Weed House stands on Madison Square in Savannah, Georgia; the Greek Revival mansion, built around 1840, was one of the first two houses in Georgia named a state landmark, in 1954.

Which actor bought a pyramid tomb in New Orleans' St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 in 2010?

Nicolas Cage bought the empty pyramid as his own future tomb, in the small cemetery where the voodoo priestess Marie Laveau is believed to lie.

Austin's grand Driskill Hotel was built in 1886 by a baron of which trade?

Cattle: Jesse Driskill sank his fortune into 'the finest hotel south of St. Louis' and had sold it by 1888, within two years of the opening.

The Hollywood Roosevelt, where Marilyn Monroe lived for two years, hosted the first ceremony of which awards in 1929?

The Academy Awards were handed out at a private dinner in the Blossom Room that lasted about 15 minutes; the winners had been announced three months earlier.

Which future president recruited cavalry volunteers in the bar of San Antonio's Menger Hotel in 1898?

Theodore Roosevelt first came to the Menger in 1892 to hunt javelina, and returned in 1898 to sign up his Rough Riders over drinks at its bar.

Rufina Cambaceres, the ghost of Buenos Aires' Recoleta Cemetery, met what fate in 1902?

Buried alive, the story goes: noises were heard from her vault after the funeral, and the coffin was found moved, its lid scratched from the inside.

Which country star, who kept a holiday home in Jamaica, recorded a ballad about Annie Palmer, the 'White Witch' of Rose Hall?

Johnny Cash put 'The Ballad of Annie Palmer' on a 1973 album; investigators have since found the tale of her three murdered husbands to be fiction.

Legend says 180 criminals were hanged from a beam inside which Welsh inn?

The Skirrid Inn is said to have doubled as a courtroom, with the condemned hanged over its stairwell; none of it is documented, and the building dates mainly from the 17th century.

Dublin's Hell Fire Club lodge was built around 1725 with stones taken from what?

Prehistoric tombs: stones from two passage tombs on the summit went into the lodge, and when a storm tore off its slate roof, locals called it the Devil's revenge for disturbing the cairn.

Overtoun Bridge near Dumbarton earned its 'Bridge of Death' nickname for what leaping from it?

Dogs: at least 300 are recorded as having jumped from the bridge since the 1950s, and the estate's owners blame the scent of mink and pine martens below the parapet.

The Gray Man of Pawleys Island, South Carolina, is said to appear just before what?

Hurricanes: those who see him are said to find their homes spared, as a couple told Unsolved Mysteries after Hurricane Hugo wrecked their neighbours' houses in 1989.

Which prime minister, who chose to live there rather than at The Lodge, was fatally stricken at Canberra's Hotel Kurrajong in 1951?

Ben Chifley made the modest hotel his Canberra home and suffered a fatal heart attack in his room after turning down that evening's ball at Parliament House.

Federici, the ghost of Melbourne's Princess Theatre, collapsed in 1888 as a trapdoor lowered him into 'hell' in which role?

Mephistopheles: Federici had a heart attack as he sank through the stage at the end of Gounod's Faust, yet the cast are said to have insisted he took his bows with them.

The Jersey Devil, said to be a cursed 13th child born in 1735, haunts which landscape?

The Pine Barrens: in the usual telling, Mother Leeds cursed her unborn child in frustration, wishing it a devil, and the newborn unfolded wings and flew off into the wild.

The Chase Vault, famed for its 'moving coffins' in the early 1800s, is on which island?

Barbados: the heavy lead coffins were said to have shifted each time the sealed vault was reopened, but the story first saw print in 1833 and investigators doubt it ever happened.

São Paulo's Joelma Building is said to be haunted after a 1974 disaster of what kind?

A fire: a faulty air conditioner set the 25-storey tower ablaze, killing at least 179; thirteen people who fled into a lift were never identified.

Harriet, the child ghost of Ireland's Charleville Castle, is said to have died how?

Falling on a staircase: Harriet, a young daughter of the third Earl of Charleville, is said to have fallen to her death in 1861 while trying to slide down the banisters.

Puck, a ghost said to show up in visitors' photos at Malahide Castle, was what in life?

Puck was the castle jester, found stabbed one snowy night still in his cap and bells; he is said to have sworn to haunt Malahide until a Talbot lord married a commoner.

Robert, a reportedly haunted doll that visitors write letters of apology to, sits in a fort museum in which Florida city?

Key West: the doll belonged to the artist Robert Eugene Otto, and the museum pins up the letters from people who blame their bad luck on having slighted him.

Dublin's St. Michan's Church draws visitors down into its limestone vaults to see what?

Mummies: the dry air of the vaults preserved them for centuries, among them an 800-year-old 'Crusader' whose head was stolen in 2019 and who was destroyed when the crypt was set alight in 2024.

Kellie's Castle, a British rubber planter's mansion left unfinished when he died in 1926, stands in which country?

Malaysia: William Kellie-Smith died of pneumonia on a trip to Lisbon and his widow left Malaya for good, so the Moorish-style castle in Perak was never finished.

Gonjiam Psychiatric Hospital, the abandoned asylum behind a hit 2018 found-footage horror film, stood in which country?

South Korea: CNN Travel named it one of the 'seven freakiest places on the planet' in 2012, and the building was torn down in 2018, the year the film made its name.

The Palace of Linares, by legend Spain's most haunted place, stands in which city?

Madrid: rumour fills the palace on the Plaza de Cibeles with the ghosts of the first Marquis and Marchioness of Linares and of a girl said to be their daughter; it now houses the Casa de América.

Borgvattnet's haunted 1876 vicarage, where visitors can sleep over, is in which country?

Sweden: a chaplain who moved into the vicarage in 1945 kept a journal of the strange things he saw there, and overnight guests later earned a certificate for lasting the night.

The abandoned Sanzhi 'UFO houses', pod-shaped holiday homes said to be cursed, stood on the coast of which island?

Taiwan: work stopped in 1980 after money ran short and several deaths, which rumour blamed on a dragon sculpture cut in two to widen the road; the pods came down from 2008.

Aradale, a vast 19th-century asylum at Ararat that closed in the 1990s, is in which Australian state?

Victoria: commissioned alongside sister asylums at Kew and Beechworth, Aradale opened in 1867 and held up to 1,000 patients until the state moved them into community care in the 1990s.

Manhattan's haunted Morris–Jumel Mansion was home to Eliza Jumel, ex-wife of whom?

Aaron Burr married the wealthy widow in her parlour in 1833; she filed for divorce the following year, and it was granted on the very day he died in 1836.