31 Days of Halloween: Haunted House of the Day

[BrandonDaCollector]

I know, TV is crammed with countless reality shows lie Real Housewives & Love Island instead of superbly interesting stuff like that I don't know many Haunted Houses so gosh, I never knew about Myrtles Plantation

[packerbacker180]

Lizzie Borden took an axe
and gave her mother forty whacks.
When she saw what she had done,
she gave her father forty-one.



Many are familiar with that rhyme, and the bloodshed that came before it. But sometimes where blood stains the soil with such horrific brutality, the spirits may never rest.



The Lizzie Borden House is notorious for being the home of Lizzie Borden and her family, and it is the location of the 1892 unsolved double murder of Lizzie's father and stepmother Andrew and Abby Borden. It is located on 230 Second Street in the city of Fall River, Massachusetts.









Today, the house is just as it was. The furnishings retain their rightful place, the décor has been painstakingly duplicated, and the original hardware and doors are still intact. Artifacts from the murder case are displayed while memorabilia from the era line shelves and mantel tops. A visitor is literally transported back to that morning when a perfect storm of events culminated in a double murder. If you're of the curious sort, a night in Lizzie's room will run you approximately $300 a night.



But beware if you ever find yourself with the courage to try and stay the night, you may just find more than you axed for...



Andrew Borden now is dead,
Lizzie hit him on the head.
Up in heaven he will sing,
on the gallows she will swing.

[BrandonDaCollector]

Good Post Packer. Oh, now that one I actually know. I would hope most people would know Lizzie Borden because despite how horrific it is/was, it's quite historical

[packerbacker180]

Today's Haunted House of the Day is someplace in the mountains of West Virginia where you would have to be crazy to ever go. Or at least that's how it once was.



The Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, constructed between 1858 and 1881, is the largest hand-cut stone masonry building in North America, and is purportedly the second largest in the world, next to the Kremlin. It was designed by the renowned architect Richard Andrews following the Kirkbride plan, which called for long rambling wings arranged in a staggered formation, assuring that each of the connecting structures received an abundance of therapeutic sunlight and fresh air. The original hospital, designed to house 250 souls, was open to patients in 1864 and reached its peak in the 1950s with 2,400 patients in overcrowded and generally poor conditions. Changes in the treatment of mental illness and the physical deterioration of the facility forced its closure in 1994 inflicting a devastating effect on the local economy, from which it has yet to recover.



Little Lily is one of the most well-known ghosts. This is one of the most prominent versions of Gladys and Lily’s story. Glayds was sent to the asylum when she was supposedly raped by civil war soldiers. When she was admitted she found herself pregnant. Gladys passed during childbirth, leaving her infant left alone. The nurses in the ward immediately took to the little girl, naming her Lily. According to legend, the child only had one home for a very short period of time. When Lily was nine she contracted pneumonia, which ultimatially killed her. Now people like to visit Lily’s room and bring her things like toys, stuffed animals, and candy. Many people state that the toys will sometimes move and even the candy will disappear. Many believe this is Lily way of “playing” with the quest.



Big Jim and David Mason brutally murdered Dean. Both murderers were criminally insane and included in the asylum’s top 10 most dangerous men. The two inmates repeatedly tried to hang Dean but had little success. Sadly, one day Dean’s luck ran out. They forced Dean’s head down under the bedpost, then jumped on the bed, killing him. Dean is known to be a quiet spirit. He has spoken a few times, but any time the shadows of Big Jim and David come around he seems to disappear. It is said that when these two shadows show up, the energy in the room changes, causing some people to feel ill and uncomfortable.

No one knows how the man known as “Slewfoot” got his nickname. Supposedly, he roamed the upper floors and killed and tortured people in the upstairs bathroom. To this day, he haunts the bathroom and the upstairs floor. Some of the residential ghosts considered less hostile are Ruth, The Civil War Soldiers, Nurse Elizabeth, and James.

But perhaps the scariest denizen roams the halls of the 4th floor, an entity know only as the Creeper.





I've known of this place for years as it's been on multiple ghost hunting shows. This past September we were on our way back home from Myrtle Beach when we stopped at West Virginia rest stop where I found this pamphlet.



Maybe one of these trips we'll at least drive by it. I think you'd have to be crazy to go inside.

[BrandonDaCollector]

I never knew about The Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum. That was a great one Packer

[packerbacker180]

Today's Haunted House of the Day isn't even a house, per se. But many spirits do reside there.




The R.M.S. Queen Mary spent three decades transporting the rich and famous across the Atlantic before retiring in 1967. She survived the Great Depression and World War II, and managed to avoid the tragic fate of her cousin, Titanic. But under the glitz and glamour, this haunted ship is hiding several dark secrets.



It was sunny day in 1936 when the Queen Mary departed from England on her maiden voyage. She offered all the finest amenities: exquisite dining rooms, swimming pools, daily radio broadcasts, a kennel for the passengers’ dogs, a children’s nursery — even a hospital. And she was fast. Boasting a top speed of 32 knots, she could travel from England to New York in four days. The R.M.S. Queen Mary dominated transatlantic travel, holding the Blue Riband from 1938 to 1952, and welcoming celebrities, politicians — even royalty.

But the world was in turmoil.

At the outbreak of World War II, the famed ocean liner became a military transport ship, hauling between 5,000 and 15,000 soldiers across the world. And that’s when things took a dark turn.



At least 47 people died aboard the Queen Mary during her time at sea. A young crew member named John Pedder was crushed by a door during an emergency drill. Another died after drinking gin that turned out to be cleaning fluid. The rest died of natural causes. But hundreds of others are said to have died on (or at the hands of) the Queen Mary prior to her retirement.

She was stripped of her fine decor and amenities in order to create more space. Her bright smokestacks were painted navy grey and her portholes were blacked out and welded shut. The transformation earned her the nickname “Grey Ghost.”
In the summer, soldiers slept shoulder-to-shoulder above deck and took turns sleeping in bunks below deck. The lack of airflow made the cabins suffocatingly hot. Some soldiers died from heat exhaustion. Others jumped ship. The Mary was no longer a luxurious cruise ship; it was hell. Legend says the staff went half-crazy too. One rather gruesome rumor is that galley crew locked the chef in his own oven one night, roasting him alive.

In October of 1942, the famed ship accidentally collided with the HMS Curacao, a much smaller cruiser that was escorting her around the Irish coast. The Curacao was zig-zagging in front of the Mary, hoping to throw off any potential missile attacks, when the 82,000-ton ship mistakenly plowed into it, breaking it in half. Some of the crew died instantly. Others drowned or succumbed to hypothermia in the freezing water. The Mary never stopped to rescue them, as it would have compromised the thousands of soldiers on board, and an estimated 329 men died as a result. The truth of what happened was sealed until the war ended — three years later.



By then, the Queen Mary had undergone a 10-month renovation that erased any remnants of military life. Paintings, fine china, and art deco furniture were returned to the cabins and dining rooms. She was ready to dazzle the rich, famous, and powerful once again. But all of the expensive decor in the world couldn’t bury what had happened during the war. The Queen Mary was a haunted ship.



The ship is reportedly haunted by over 100 spirits, the most infamous being the spirit of Stateroom B340, where paranormal activity is so frequent and intense that some members of the crew refuse to go inside. In 1948, a third class passenger named Walter J. Adamson mysteriously died there. Is it his ghost that haunts the place, or was he killed by the ghost? Another theory claims staff locked a man in his third class room after he murdered two women in the 1960s. During the night, he began beating on the door, screaming to the guard outside that something was in the room with him. When they opened the door in the morning, they found his bloody, mangled body. He had been ripped apart. When the ship was retired in 1967, three third class rooms were combined with to create a larger hotel room — B340.



Not long after, guests began reporting odd things. One woman said she was woken when the bedcovers were ripped off of her in the middle of the night. She then saw a man looming over the end of the bed. Others heard phantom voices and complained that the faucets turned on by themselves. The ship received so many negative reports throughout the 1970s that B340 was closed to the public for over 30 years. It was reopened as a “haunted attraction” in 2018, though the key comes with a fierce warning.







So if you're ever in California, come sail away. You'll need no Jolly Roger to board this real life ghost ship.

[BrandonDaCollector]

Yeah but as long as people stay on ships you could count it like that I had no clue about The Queen Mary Another good one PB

[packerbacker180]

Well, it's said that water is a conduit for paranormal energy, so with that in mind let's travel east of the Queen Mary to the Great Lakes to the mistake on the lake known as Cleveland.



Franklin Castle was built in the 1880s by Hannes Tiedemann, a wealthy German immigrant. Sorrow quickly followed. On January 15, 1881, Tiedemann's fifteen-year-old daughter Emma succumbed to diabetes. The property saw its second death not long afterwards when Tiedemann's elderly mother, Wiebeka, died. During the next three years the Tiedemanns would bury three more children, giving rise to speculation that the castle was cursed.



To distract his wife, Louise, from these tragedies, Tiedemann began extensive construction on the home, adding a ballroom which runs the length of the house on the fourth floor of the manor. Also during this building, turrets and gargoyles were added to the edifice's facade, giving the house an even more pronounced "castle" appearance.



Louise Tiedemann died from a liver disease on March 24, 1895, at the age of fifty-seven. The next year, Hannes sold the house to the Mullhauser family, and by 1908 he and the entire Tiedemann family were dead, leaving no one to inherit his considerable personal wealth.



Reports of hauntings, however, didn’t begin until the 1960s. By then, a family with six children moved into the house. Soon after they found themselves battling ghosts. The hauntings allegedly began right away. On the day they moved in, two of their children said they’d encountered a crying girl in white on the third floor. Soon, the family started hearing haunting organ music and heavy footfalls. Two of the older children woke up one night to find something yanking the blankets off their bed. And the mother once awoke to find herself screaming on her bedroom floor, with an unseen presence screaming beside her.

[BrandonDaCollector]

See, there we go again with Ohio There is so much in that state I didn't know this however Packer

[packerbacker180]

Yes, strange things are afoot in the Buckeye state, but let's go back to Cali...Cali...Cali..



The Whaley House looks very unassuming from the outside, but this haunted house in Old Town, San Diego is fraught with heartache and terror.



The property was infamous amongst the community as the site where horse thief Yankee Jim Robinson was publicly executed. Thomas Whaley was nevertheless unfazed by the location’s grim history and continued to build his dream home. It wasn’t long after the Whaley family moved into the home that sadness and despair were thrust upon them when their young son Thomas, who was only 18 months old, died of scarlet fever inside the house.



Baby Thomas, who’d been the first in the family to pass away, had always stayed close by, as reported by many who have visited the home. They could hear tiny footsteps, the sounds of him crying, even giggling when no one was in sight. Thomas, Anna and several other spirits have also been felt within the home, on the stairwells and on the property. Mists, lights turning on and off by themselves, and crystals in the parlor room’s lamp swinging without any prompt are all signs that the Whaley House still belongs to the many who called it home over the years.



On January 5, 1882, Violet Eloise Whaley and Anna Amelia Whaley were both married in Old San Diego. Violet married George T. Bertolacci and Anna Amelia wed her first cousin, John T. Whaley, son of Henry Hurst Whaley inside the family home. Unfortunately for Violet, just shortly after the nuptials her new husband revealed to her in a letter his sordid past. Bertolacci was a con artist, who only married Violet in the hopes of inheriting some of the Whaley family fortunes. Bertolacci vowed to prove his worthiness but Mr. and Mrs. Whaley would try to sever all contact. Suffering from melancholy, Violet committed suicide by shooting herself in the chest with Thomas's 32-calibre on August 19, 1885. She was then 22 years of age. Her suicide note reads thus:

Mad from life's history, swift to death's mystery; glad to be hurled,
anywhere, anywhere, out of this world.



Now, I spoke about this previously, but we honeymooned in San Diego and this place, called the most Haunted Home in America by the US government, was one of the reasons (besides the beaches) that we wanted to go. The place looks exactly as it would've over 100 years ago. Many of the rooms are plexiglassed off so you can't enter them, but on the second floor you can go into one room, and while in that room my wife was having trouble breathing, so we left the room and she was fine. A few years later, one of the ghost shows were at the Whaley House, and the psychic on the show went into the same room and said they were having trouble breathing!



Believe what you like when it comes to the spirit world. I can't disprove what my wife experienced, and when a psychic medium had a similar experience, it really was a freaky moment. Sadly, we caught nothing in our photographs, and had no other experiences to report, but then again...we went there in the daytime!



The Whaley House is said to be haunted by the ghosts of the Whaley family members who died inside the house. Visitors have reported seeing the ghost of Thomas Whaley on the upper landing, and Anna Whaley in the downstairs rooms or garden. Other Whaley family members who have been seen include baby Thomas Jr., Violet, Francis, George, and Corinne Lillian Whaley. Workers on site and guests who’ve toured the house have reported many unusual and spooky encounters, such as seeing a figure looking out the upstairs window long after the house has closed for the day.