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
Washington, DC
Benjamin Henry Latrobe designed Decatur House in 1818 near the White House for naval officer Stephen Decatur and his wife Susan.
Legend
Historic place
Sacramento, CA
Christened in 1927 with its sister ship Delta Queen, the sternwheeler carried overnight passengers between Sacramento and San Francisco before wartime service, abandonment, restoration, and permanent mooring as a hotel and entertainment venue.
Venue marketing
Historic place
Detroit, MI
Opened in 1926, Detroit's vast Masonic Temple combines lodge rooms, theaters, ballrooms, offices, and craft spaces in an ambitious limestone complex.
Legend
Historic place
Montgomery, AL
The parsonage housed twelve pastors from 1920 to 1992 and was the home of Martin Luther King Jr., Coretta Scott King, and their children during the Montgomery Bus Boycott; it also survived racist bomb attacks.
No paranormal claim
Historic place
Gettysburg, PA
The 1776 stone house connects colonial education, civic leadership, antislavery interpretation, Civil War medical history, and modern tavern use.
Legend
Historic place
Charleston, SC
The first purpose-built theater on Dock Street opened in 1736; the present theater occupies the remodeled Planters Hotel and reopened in 1937.
Legend
Historic place
Butte, MT
Built in 1890 and operated as a brothel until 1982, the Dumas preserves small rooms, circulation patterns, and physical evidence of Butte's former red-light district and the women who worked within it.
Venue marketing
Historic place
Omaha, NE
Omaha's 1931 Union Station survives as the Durham Museum, preserving a dramatic Art Deco great hall, passenger-train history, regional collections, and exhibitions about the diverse communities that built the city.
Reported
Historic place
New Castle, DE
The small Dutch House preserves architecture and objects associated with New Castle's early colonial settlement and later preservation movement. Its museum setting and reconstructed garden also reveal how twentieth-century interpreters imagined the town's Dutch past.
Legend
Historic place
Portland, ME
Established in the seventeenth century and expanded over generations, Eastern Cemetery preserves burial, maritime, military, epidemic, and community histories within a layered urban landscape.
Legend
Historic place
Philadelphia, PA
A landmark prison museum interpreting the history and continuing consequences of American incarceration.
Reported
Historic place
Baltimore, MD
Edgar Allan Poe lived in the small West Baltimore house with members of his family during the 1830s, a formative period in his writing life.
Legend