Documented places and attributed folklore
Historical haunted places
Research-led guides to real American places associated with ghost lore. Each page identifies what is documented, what is reported, and what remains legend.
329 historic places
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Historic place
Annapolis, MD
Maryland's official museum of African American heritage occupies the former Mount Moriah African Methodist Episcopal Church, a nineteenth-century landmark adapted to preserve community, civil rights, religious, and cultural history.
No paranormal claim
Historic place
Wilmington, NC
Commissioned during World War II, USS North Carolina served in the Pacific and later became a state memorial interpreting naval service, technology, labor, combat, and remembrance.
Reported
Historic place
Newport, RI
Richard Morris Hunt designed Belcourt for Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont; construction began in 1891, and the property later became closely associated with Alva Vanderbilt Belmont.
Legend
Historic place
Wilmington, NC
Built on the eve of the Civil War for physician and planter John D. Bellamy, the mansion and surviving urban slave quarters document architecture, enslaved labor, family history, occupation, and preservation.
Legend
Historic place
Nashville, TN
Belle Meade developed as a plantation and thoroughbred operation whose wealth depended on enslaved labor before the Civil War and paid labor afterward.
Legend
Historic place
Louisville, KY
Launched in 1914 as Idlewild, the vessel later became Avalon and then Belle of Louisville; it is a National Historic Landmark and an operating river steamboat.
Legend
Historic place
St. Louis, MO
Established during the rural cemetery movement and dedicated in 1850, Bellefontaine combines landscape design, monuments, architecture, horticulture, and the graves of generations of St. Louis residents.
Legend
Historic place
Nashville, TN
Belmont Mansion was the elaborate nineteenth-century home of Adelicia Acklen and later became part of a women's school and the campus now occupied by Belmont University.
Legend
Historic place
Philadelphia, PA
The house interprets Betsy Ross, upholstery work, household life, and the powerful national tradition connecting her to the first flag.
Legend
Historic place
Asheville, NC
George Vanderbilt, architect Richard Morris Hunt, landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, craftspeople, laborers, and estate staff created Biltmore House and its working landscape between 1888 and the house's opening in 1895.
Legend
Historic place
Tombstone, AZ
Opened in December 1881, the Bird Cage combined theater, saloon, gambling, and sex work during Tombstone's mining boom. Its surviving stage, balcony boxes, furnishings, and altered fabric are interpreted today as a commercial museum.
Venue marketing
Historic place
Honolulu, HI
Founded in 1889 by Charles Reed Bishop in memory of Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop, the museum preserves royal heirlooms and extensive cultural, archival, scientific, and natural-history collections from Hawaii and the Pacific.
Reported