Ghost sightings — United States
Ghost sightings — United States. 20 places in the catalogue, each with coordinates, the story behind it and a danger level from white to black.
Annabelle at the Warrens' museum
The real Annabelle is not the porcelain doll of the films but an ordinary Raggedy Ann of the kind sold by the million in the 1960s. Her history is known solely from the accounts of Ed and Lorraine Warren, who took the doll in 1970 and put it in a glass case in their occult museum in Monroe, Connecticut. There is no independent confirmation of any episode. The museum has been closed to visitors since 2019, but the doll remains one of the most recognisable objects in American popular occultism.
Robert the Doll
A cloth doll in a sailor suit standing behind glass at Fort East Martello in Key West. It was given to the painter Robert Eugene Otto in the early twentieth century, and by family account he talked to it and blamed it for things broken and overturned in the house. The museum now asks visitors to request the doll's permission before photographing it, and the walls around the case are covered with letters from people who did not ask and connect their subsequent misfortunes to that. The doll is real, the museum is real, and there is an admission charge.
The Char Man of Ojai
A Californian bogeyman: a burned man living by Creek Road Bridge in the Ojai Valley, who in one version survived the 1948 wildfire and in another lost his family in it. If you stop on the bridge and call him, the story goes, he answers. Fires in that valley are neither invented nor historical: it burns regularly, and the legend does what local folklore usually does — turns a recurring real danger into a figure with a name.
The Green Man of Pennsylvania
The legend of a glowing green faceless man you can meet at night by an abandoned tunnel outside Pittsburgh. There is a real person behind it: Raymond Robinson, who at nine was catastrophically burned by an electric line on a trolley bridge and lost his face and an arm. He lived until 1985 and walked at night so as not to frighten people — while teenagers drove out specifically to find him. The order of events is worth keeping in mind: first there was a man who was unlucky, and only then the ghost story.
The Black-Eyed Children
In 1996 the Texas journalist Brian Bethel posted an account to an internet mailing list about two teenagers who knocked on his car window in an Abilene car park. They asked for a lift, spoke too smoothly, and kept insisting they would not get in without being invited. When he looked up, both had completely black eyes. That one text created a genre: black-eyed children have been reported across the English-speaking world ever since, and nearly every version keeps the detail about the invitation — borrowed straight from vampire folklore.
Mercy Brown, the Exeter vampire
In 1892 the Brown family of Exeter, Rhode Island, was losing one member after another to tuberculosis. Neighbours convinced the father that one of the dead was feeding on the living, and in March the bodies were exhumed. Two had decomposed; nineteen-year-old Mercy, who had spent the winter in a cold crypt, had not. Her heart was burned, the ashes mixed with water and given to her dying brother to drink. He died two months later. The case is the last and best-documented episode of the New England vampire panic — an attempt to explain an epidemic for which people had no other language.
Resurrection Mary
America's best-known vanishing hitchhiker. Since the 1930s drivers on Archer Avenue outside Chicago have told the same story: a fair-haired girl in a white ball gown asks for a lift, says nothing the whole way, and disappears from the car opposite the gates of Resurrection Cemetery. Attempts have been made to attach the story to several real girls who died young, and none of the versions fits the details. The vanishing-passenger plot is older than the motor car — it is known from tales of horse-drawn carriages — but the Chicago version is fixed to one road and one gate.
Alcatraz
The island prison in San Francisco Bay, in use from 1934 to 1963 for men other prisons could not hold. D Block has its own reputation — the isolation cells known as the hole, where prisoners were kept in complete darkness; most of the guards' accounts of screaming come from there, and from cell 14D, where a man is said to have died in a night after shouting that something was in there with him. The bay tribes considered the island a place of bad spirits long before the prison.
The Queen Mary
An ocean liner moored at Long Beach since 1967. Some forty-nine deaths occurred aboard during her thirty-one years of service, including an eighteen-year-old crewman crushed by watertight door 13. In the war she carried troops and once, on a manoeuvre, cut her escort cruiser in half, drowning over three hundred men; stopping to rescue them was forbidden because of submarines. Stateroom B340 is let separately and has a reputation of its own.
The Crescent Hotel
An Arkansas hotel bought in 1937 by Norman Baker, a man with no medical training who announced he had a cure for cancer and turned the building into a "hospital". People came here to die, at considerable expense; Baker eventually went to prison for mail fraud. In 2019 excavation on the grounds turned up buried jars of human remains. The hotel is still open and sells ghost tours.
The Bell Witch Cave
From 1817 to 1821 the family of John Bell in Tennessee was, by many contemporary accounts, tormented by something: pinches and slaps, bedclothes pulled away, and eventually a voice that argued, quoted sermons and finally promised to kill the head of the household. Bell died in 1820 with a vial of unidentified liquid found beside him. Local tradition holds it the only case in American history of a documented killing by a spirit.
Amityville
In November 1974 Ronald DeFeo Jr shot six members of his family in the house on Ocean Avenue. Thirteen months later the Lutz family moved in and left after twenty-eight days, describing green slime from the walls, a swarm of flies in winter, and a voice telling them to get out. A book and the films made the address a byword; later occupants reported nothing, and one of DeFeo's lawyers eventually said the story had been invented over a bottle of wine.
The Lizzie Borden House
The house in Fall River, Massachusetts where Andrew and Abby Borden were killed with an axe on 4 August 1892. Their daughter Lizzie was tried and acquitted, though public opinion never acquitted her, and the rhyme about forty whacks outlived everyone involved. The house is a museum and guesthouse now, and visitors can book the room where the stepmother's body was found.
The Villisca Axe Murder House
On the night of 10 June 1912 eight people were killed with an axe in this Iowa house: Josiah and Sarah Moore, their four children, and two visiting girls. The killer was never found and the case remains open. The house has been restored to its 1912 condition — no electricity, no plumbing — and can be booked for overnight stays. Those who stay most often report children's voices and objects falling.
Waverly Hills Sanatorium
A tuberculosis hospital in Kentucky, in use from 1910 to 1961. The dead were removed through an underground tunnel some five hundred metres long so that living patients would not see them — it became known as the body chute. Estimates of the death toll differ wildly, from around fifteen hundred in the records to sixty-three thousand in legend. The building has stood empty since 1982 and is among the best-known haunted sites in the United States.
The St. Augustine Lighthouse
A Florida lighthouse where, during construction in 1873, the contractor's two daughters and another girl were killed: the handcart they were riding on the rails to the water ran into the bay. Keepers and visitors have reported children's laughter in the tower and a girl in a blue dress ever since. The place is well enough known that television crews come regularly, and the lighthouse staff keep a log of incidents of their own.
The Gettysburg Battlefield
In three days of July 1863 some fifty thousand men were killed, wounded or lost here — the bloodiest battle in American history. Burials were hasty and many of the dead were never identified. Gettysburg has been called the most haunted ground in the country since; the accounts cluster at Devil's Den and the Rose Farm, where people report hearing orders shouted at night and seeing uniformed figures walking where the lines once stood.
The Stanley Hotel
A hotel in the Colorado Rockies where Stephen King spent a night in room 217 and conceived The Shining. Staff and guests have reported piano notes and children's footsteps in empty corridors for decades.
The Myrtles Plantation
A Louisiana estate billed as one of America's most haunted houses. Its best-known story is of an enslaved woman, Chloe, in a green turban — undocumented, but persistent for well over a century.
Winchester Mystery House
A sprawling Victorian mansion in California, continuously expanded for decades on the belief — held by its owner, Sarah Winchester — that construction kept the spirits of those killed by Winchester rifles at bay. Staircases lead to ceilings; doors open onto walls.