Ransom Riggs
The 5 Scariest Buildings in America
by Ransom Riggs - May 20, 2009 - 11:47 AM

What makes a building scary? Its design has something to do with it, certainly. But even the most innocuous looking suburban McMansion can be made scary by tales of terrible goings-on there in years past; it’s things like that that make a house haunted, after all. Some say haunted houses act like “psychic batteries,” soaking up all the negative energy that’s spent inside their walls, then releasing it over time on unsuspecting new occupants. If that’s true, then the bad things that happened at these places make them some of the scariest houses in the country.

Danvers State Hospital

Also known as the Massachusetts State Lunatic Hospital at Danvers, it opened for business in 1878 and closed in the 1990s, a victim of deinstitutionalization policies and budget cuts. Among other things, the staff there specialized in the pre-frontal lobotomy, wherein an ice pick-esque device was inserted into the orbital cavity, and swished around until … well, until you have some very angry ghosts. Abandoned since the early 90s, it became a notorious shell of its former self, a crumbling edifice used in such horror films as the excellent Session 9. It was mostly demolished to make room for an apartment complex in 2006, though the iconic central edifice was preserved.
danvers.jpg

Ed Gein’s house

Locals burned Ed Gein’s house of horrors in 1957, a few months after he was arrested for cannibalistic crimes that would inspire writers to create Leatherface, Norman Bates and (in part) “Buffalo” Bill from Silence of the Lambs. Prior to that, it had truly been a horrific place — isolated in a rural patch of Plainfield, Wisconsin, Ed had lived there alone ever since his brother and mother had died (the former under questionable circumstances), in a rambling farmhouse with no water or power. He used his farm-bred butchering and tanning skills to make “suits” out of women (mostly harvested from the local cemetery), as well as chairs, lampshades and other horrible objects. It was just as well that it burned, too — the rumor was that an entrepreneur planned to open it as a tourist attraction called “The House Of Horrors,” which would’ve been, well, horrible.

gein_home.jpg

The Winchester Mansion

Sarah Winchester was the widow of gun magnate William Winchester, who after the deaths of her daughter and husband in the 1880s, sought the solace of a medium who told her that, in order to expiate the death visited upon the world by her husband’s famous rifle, she had to “build a home for [herself] and for the spirits who have fallen from this terrible weapon.” If she ever stopped building the house, the medium told her, she would die. So she spent the rest of her life doing just that, financed by her considerable wealth from the Winchester Repeating Arms company. It remains one of the weirdest buildings in the country, with more than 130 rooms, stairs that lead to nowhere, doors that open onto walls, and is stocked with details that reflect her peculiar superstitions — like the number thirteen, which appears in everything from the number of candles in candelabras to topiaries in the garden in the shape of the number. The house, near San Jose, can be toured.
winchester-house.jpg

Chicago’s “Murder Castle”

The 2003 best-seller Devil in the White City tells the true-crime tale of Dr. H.H. Holmes, one of America’s first (and still most notorious) serial killers, who lured victims into his custom-designed Chicago hotel during the 1893 World’s Fair — and killed them. But he didn’t just kill them — this place was so fiendishly designed, it had a warren of soundproofed torture rooms in the basement, including a gas chamber, a dissection room and a crematorium. To add insult to injury, he sold the skeletons of several of his victims to medical institutions. Here’s a detailed, shiver-inducing description of what went on there:

Over a period of three years, Holmes selected female victims from among his employees (many of whom were required as a condition of employment to take out life insurance policies for which Holmes would pay the premiums but also be the beneficiary), lovers and hotel guests, and would torture and kill them. Some were locked in soundproof bedrooms fitted with gas lines that permitted him to asphyxiate them at any time. Some victims were locked in a huge bank vault near his office; he sat and listened as they screamed, panicked and eventually suffocated. The victims’ bodies went by a secret chute to the basement, where some were meticulously dissected, stripped of flesh, crafted into skeleton models, and then sold to medical schools. Holmes also cremated some of the bodies or placed them in lime pits for destruction. Holmes had two giant furnaces as well as pits of acid, bottles of various poisons, and even a stretching rack, allegedly in order to create a race of giants. Through the connections he had gained in medical school, he was able to sell skeletons and organs with little difficulty. Holmes picked one of the most remote rooms in the Castle to perform hundreds of illegal abortions. Some of his patients died as a result of his abortion procedure,[1] and their corpses were also processed and the skeletons sold.

At least 26 people met their ends in the basement of Holmes’ “Murder Castle,” which burned in a mysterious fire in 1895. (Holmes himself was apprehended in 1894 and hanged two years later.) The Castle’s site is now occupied by a post office — perhaps the least scary of buildings, atop one of the most horrific blocks in the country. The “castle” as it looked in the 19th century:
holmes_castle.gif

The Crenshaw House

Better known as the “Old Slave House” of Southern Illinois, the Crenshaw House was built by John Crenshaw, one of the only slaveholders in the history of the state of Illinois. As the owner of a salt mining operation in which “no free men could be found to work,” he was granted an unusual slaveholding license in what was otherwise a free state. Not only did he use that license to his full advantage, owning more than 700 slaves at one time, but he participated vigorously in something known as the “Reverse Underground Railroad,” in which free blacks would be kidnapped and enslaved by him. His house had a very unusual feature to facilitate this: a carriage door in the back, so his victims could be brought into the house without being seen.

But that wasn’t the only chilling feature of the house. From Prairie Ghosts:

Located on the third floor of Hickory Hill are the infamous confines of the attic and proof that Crenshaw had something unusual in mind when he contracted the house to be built. The attic can still be reached today by a flight of narrow, well-worn stairs. They exit into a wide hallway and there are about a dozen cell-like rooms with barred windows and flat, wooden bunks facing the corridor. Originally, the cells were even smaller, and there were more of them, but some were removed in the past. One can only imagine how small and cramped they must have been because even an average-sized visitor to the attic can scarcely turn around in the ones that remain. The corridor between the cells extends from one end of the room to the other. Windows at the ends provided the only ventilation and during the summer months, the heat in the attic was unbearable. The windows also provided the only source of light. The slaves spent their time secured in their cells, chained to heavy metal rings. There are still scars on the wooden walls and floors today and chains and heavy balls are still kept on display.

The screams and cries of the slaves he tortured in those attic cells can supposedly still be heard by visitors today, and in the 1920s, the family who owned it started charging tourists admission to see the “haunted” upstairs. The house is currently closed to the public, but may reopen one day.
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Comments (32)

  1. one of the places that should have been listed here is EASTERN STATE PRISON in Philadelphia.

    It is supposed to be one of the most haunted places in America and they do a awesome haunted house there around Halloween

    I have toured it during the day and the haunted house and it is acutally SCARRIER during the day !

    posted by Scott T. on 5-20-2009 at 11:56 am

  2. The best time to go on a Winchester Mystery House tour is on Halloween or on a Friday the 13th because tours after dark are carried out IN the dark with only flashlights to illuminate the way.

    posted by Sarah in CA on 5-20-2009 at 12:34 pm

  3. Another Philadelphia icon of insanity is the (former) Byberry State Mental Hospital. It closed in 1987 and have since been demolished. There was a network of underground tunnels there (one can only wonder why?). The place was scary as hell in broad daylight, I can’t imagine what it would have been like at night.

    posted by Sue G. on 5-20-2009 at 1:05 pm

  4. Don’t forget Waverly Hills Sanitorium, near Louisville Kentucky.

    posted by dammitjanet on 5-20-2009 at 1:08 pm

  5. One place that is never on any of the lists because of the small town location is in Statesboro, GA, not far from the campus of Georgia Southern University. The Meat Packing Plant is allegedly so haunted that the hauntings expand beyond the grounds of the plant and to Packinghouse road, and are so severe many people won’t even go down the road. I’ve felt hands on me before going down that road when I could see everyone else’s hands in the car. If you want the full story just type “Packinghouse Haunted Statesboro” in a search engine and you’ll find stories on it. Scary place that doesn’t get the national attention some do.

    posted by GoF on 5-20-2009 at 2:18 pm

  6. Sorry, Ransom and Sarah-

    I’m calling BS on the WMH. As a San Jose native, I’ve been to the house about 29432948324 times, each year the tours get more and more restricted/ generally lame. I’ve also been on a flashlight tour, it’s completely bogus. I do agree, however, in theory, that the story of Sarah Winchester is unsettling/ bonkers. The house is certainly lovely to look at, though, as evidenced by the fact that it still manages to take attention away from millionaire-haven Santana Row, which is directly across the street.

    posted by hilly on 5-20-2009 at 2:37 pm

  7. I’m with Scott…Eastern State Penn is the scariest building ever. Second scariest: the old jail in Jim Thorpe. *shudder*

    posted by Jenn on 5-20-2009 at 3:22 pm

  8. All horrible stories about what happened at these houses. But I don’t believe the bad karma outlives the people who died there.

    The former owner of my brother’s house had a bad case of MS and committed suicide by exhaust fumes in his garage. In the 20 years my brother has lived there, nothing unusual has ever happened.

    posted by Stew on 5-20-2009 at 3:34 pm

  9. Scott and Jenn… saying that the ESP is the scariest place on earth is not good for me. I’m going there next week!

    posted by Allison on 5-20-2009 at 4:09 pm

  10. back to ESP – it should say something in the fact that BOTH Ghost Hunters & Most Haunted have shows there & if i am not mistaking one of them did a full live 24 hour show there a few years back !

    As far as Byberry State Hospital, it is/was known for (at least Philly area) for its hauntings, supposedly satanic riutals after it was condemned & the origional Prom Night movie was shot there.

    posted by Scott T. on 5-20-2009 at 6:54 pm

  11. Don’t forget about the Lizzie Borden Bed and Breakfast. I’ve been on a tour of that and it is really scary!

    posted by Rebecca on 5-20-2009 at 6:54 pm

  12. I was born and raised in Danvers, Mass, and what was the most terrifying part (to me) about Danvers State Hospital was two things. One, when they closed it down they left everything in there, and I mean gurneys in the hallways, electroshock machines, medical supplies, everything! It was never an “empty” building. You can see photos that people have taken (the windows were boarded up but people just broke in) and there are big empty hallways and ballrooms with like, cast iron bedframes and gurneys there. Two, most people outside of Massachusetts don’t know this, but they’ve excavated areas on the hospital grounds and have found unmarked graves of former patients who died in the 40′s/50′s/60′s with no family members. Just random graves found in the woods with no markings. It’s 2009 and THEY STILL HAVEN’T FOUND ALL OF THE PEOPLE THAT SUPPOSED WERE BURIED. So if you want a mind fuck, go up there at night around midnight (when all us kids tried to be brave) and realize that you can break into a former mental hospital that still has instruments of torture in it, and that all of the “undead” might still be around because they can’t locate all the graves. The scariest place I have ever visited.

    posted by scorzi on 5-20-2009 at 7:09 pm

  13. My grandmother used to work at Danvers, up until it was closed. She still has some skeleton keys from the building. A mysterious fire in 2007 swept through some of the newly built appartment buildings on the property and I haven’t heard if the cause was ever determined.

    posted by V on 5-20-2009 at 8:50 pm

  14. I went to the Winchester Mansion a few years ago. It was really interesting, but I kind of agree with hilly – it wasn’t particularly scary (except for how touristy it is now). My family and I enjoyed our visit though.

    I noticed that the Midwest is well-represented on this list…

    posted by Lynne on 5-21-2009 at 1:31 am

  15. You left out Waverly Hills Sanatorium. It was an old T.B. hospital in Louisville Ky. It’s the home of the infamous “Death Tunnel”. It is believed that over 10,000 patients lost their lives there. Some estimate 60,000 plus! It’s been on a ton of television shows and is listed as one of the worlds most haunted places.

    posted by thaddeus on 5-21-2009 at 5:29 am

  16. Um…just so you know, electro-shock therapy is still being used. It was suggested as a treatment for severe depression and I was sixteen–yes, sixteen. (My mother signed off on it, but that’s another story for another time.) It was fourteen years ago–I still remember the surrounding events with terror, and yes, it is torture and it is horrible. I was ‘properly’ sedated, but it is my understanding that they failed to sedate many who received the same treatment in the past–which is unthinkable. I cannot even go to the dentist without valium and nitrous oxide just to have my teeth cleaned–normal doctors appointments? Forget about it. I’m considering haunting the psychiatrist that recommended it, if given the chance ;)
    P.S. Lest the interwebz worry, I am doing much better thanks to psychotherapy and proper psychiatric drugs.
    ReCaptcha: Fembach Bistro. (If I ever have a lesbian cafe, I will name it this.)

    posted by 8* on 5-21-2009 at 10:34 am

  17. Quick note of Waverly Hills Sanatorium: When talking about Danvers above, someone mentioned that there were unmarked graves that still exist. The land surrounding Waverly Hills has been sold in the past for development. However, development could not occur as all of it has been used for mass graves. The sanatorium was the center for TB in its time and people from all over the US came for treatment. Many never returned home, even for burial.

    posted by S on 5-21-2009 at 11:37 am

  18. Thumbs up to whoever mentioned the jail in Jim Thorpe, PA. The place is nuts, especially the dungeon in the basement!

    posted by Pazuzu on 5-21-2009 at 2:50 pm

  19. My wife and I went to Cali for our honeymoon in 2004. We took a chance and visited the Wincester house one day. It was a lot of fun – but not as creepy as I thought it would be. Sure, it was a little creepy, but because of modern fire codes, they had to have pipes run throughout the house, which obviously take away from the mystique of the home. Plus, the bright colors kinda make it look more like a fun house. The story was much more creepy than the house.

    I would have included the Borden House on this list. Now THAT is a creepy place.

    posted by Ian on 5-23-2009 at 8:50 am

  20. They’re actually building a 55+ community on the grounds of the Byberry State Hospital. I can’t believe that they’re even getting anyone to buy. It seems like that would be an age group that would have some seriously bad associations with that particular piece of land.

    posted by ljae on 5-26-2009 at 3:13 pm

  21. The Lalaurie House og New Orleans. click on my link for a full history. It’s unthinkable…like Doctor Frankenstein type stuff…

    posted by Jen on 5-19-2010 at 9:40 am

  22. Broke into Danvers one night with a couple of friends in college (2003-04ish?). We were expecting creepiness, we were not expecting to break directly into the children’s ward. Tiny beds, peeling murals of Disney characters, faint giggling in the distance (OK I made that one up). We tried to go down into the basement, but none of us were willing to go so far as to lose sight of the stairs.

    posted by NateH on 5-19-2010 at 10:55 am

  23. I live in the back bayous of Louisiana, in a place that is widely known to have been an “unofficial” graveyard during the 1800s. Once we had a flood, and when the waters receeded, there was a coffin with the bones of child sticking out of the bank. It was neat, in a creepy way. My friends and I discovered an unmarked graveyard near my house, and we used to play in it all the time–the tombstones were there, but no names were on them, having been worn away by weather and time. Anyway, some developers came in and bulldozed the whole thing into the bayou, so I always say that when the undead arise to take their revenge, they’re coming for those contractors–but not us, we used to bring them flowers! :)

    posted by Heather on 5-19-2010 at 10:58 am

  24. just to add to the crenshaw house story – another tale about the upstairs holding area is that it also held slave women for the sole purpose of impregnating them by another slave known as ‘Big Jim’. that’s what the house was originally known for and, I believe, the source of the horror atmosphere.

    posted by Jenn H on 5-19-2010 at 11:26 am

  25. @Jeri,
    That was a good link. Some of that stuff was…
    *shudder*

    That stuff puts Hostel to shame.

    Im going to repost the site in my name as well. Thanks Jeri.

    posted by Chrystani on 5-19-2010 at 12:27 pm

  26. Wasn’t the Winchester House also one of the inspirations for the movie “Rose Red”?

    posted by Lori on 5-19-2010 at 1:21 pm

  27. I’m surprised no mention of The Ridges in Athens, Ohio.

    posted by marmarohio on 5-19-2010 at 1:58 pm

  28. I often drive past the Westboro State Hospital in MA. That place creeps me out, not because it’s particularly scary, but because of the faceless institutionalised appearance of the place. It’s so inoffensive to look at that I find it really unnerving to think that there are locked wards there.

    posted by Willow on 5-19-2010 at 5:34 pm

  29. I was a tour guide at the WMH in college, and it’s incredibly lame. When I was a kid, the guides would tell the tours all the spooky ghost stories and superstitions and it was really cool.
    Then the building was bought by some corporation and registered as a historic monument, and they completely changed the tour to give the place more “dignity.” By the time I was a guide, we weren’t allowed to tell any of the great stories; it was all just “And this is the room where they kept blocks of ice, and this doorway leads to a brick wall because she added another room without bothering to remove the door, and here is where she held seances…” Sooooo boring.

    posted by Kristin on 5-20-2010 at 12:22 am

  30. Haha! People thought of my ideas already.

    @Jen I was going to suggest 1140 Rue Royale (The Lalaurie House) as well, but my research into it has shown that most of the worst stories about it were apocryphal at best.

    @marmarohio I was going to suggest The Ridges too, not just because I’m from Athens–it’s similar to the above story of Danvers but with the addition of a few oddities like The Stain (look up the story on that one, it’s cool! I’ve been to see it and the pictures don’t do it justice(

    I’ve been to the Winchester house and didn’t find it to be at all scary. Very cool yes, but more of just a neat old house with a few oddities than anything else.

    posted by Katarina Navane on 10-14-2010 at 12:31 pm

  31. Everytime I read about Kirkbride and his buildings, I say a bit of a thank you to his principles…odd as they seem now, he really was attempting to give the mentally ill a chance at recovery.

    posted by helenann on 10-14-2010 at 3:15 pm

  32. I went to the WMH in July.Actually I read about it on here once and went on vacation across country to see it. So not scary…..interesting, but not scary

    posted by King Randy on 10-14-2010 at 9:55 pm

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