Famous Haunted Places and the Stories Behind Them

Most famous haunted places share a few ingredients: age, a documented history of suffering or sudden death, and a building that is dark, echoing, cold or hard to find your way around. Add generations of retold stories and, today, a ticketed tour, and a reputation becomes self-sustaining. Staff and visitors report footsteps, cold spots, figures glimpsed at the end of a corridor or a sense of being watched, and each report becomes part of what the next visitor expects.

None of that means the experiences are invented. The people who report them are usually sincere, and some of the places below have produced accounts for centuries. But a haunted reputation is also a story with a history of its own, and that history can be traced: when the first account appeared, who told it, and how it changed in the retelling. It is often as interesting as the ghost. Every place in this article is a public landmark you can visit, which also makes them some of the few haunted sites where researchers have been able to run tests.

The Tower of London has more than nine centuries of imprisonment and execution behind it, and its ghost stories lean on the most famous names. Anne Boleyn, the second wife of Henry VIII, was beheaded inside the Tower on May 19, 1536, and buried in its chapel of St Peter ad Vincula; for generations, guards and visitors have told of a pale woman seen near the chapel. Other stories attach to the two young princes who vanished there in the 1480s and to prisoners held in its towers.

Hampton Court Palace, upriver from London, has the best-known ghost story of Henry's reign. Catherine Howard, his fifth wife, was accused of adultery and arrested in 1541, and executed in February 1542. Legend says that when she heard the news she broke away from her guards and ran down a gallery toward the king to plead for her life, only to be dragged back, and that her screams are still heard there. The corridor has long been known as the Haunted Gallery, and by the early twentieth century it had a reputation for a woman in white and for unexplained cries. There is little evidence that the famous dash ever happened, but the story has shaped how people experience the gallery ever since, and in 2000 it became the setting for one of the first scientific studies of a haunting.

When Edinburgh built the South Bridge across a steep valley in the 1780s, the arches beneath it were enclosed to make a warren of vaulted rooms. The bridge opened to traffic in 1788, and its vaults first housed taverns, workshops and storage, but they were damp, dark and prone to flooding, and the businesses soon moved out. In the nineteenth century some of the poorest people in the Old Town lived in them in crowded, squalid conditions, and eventually the vaults were filled with rubble and largely forgotten.

They were dug out again in the 1980s, and sections are now open for guided tours, many of them ghost tours. Visitors report the classic signs: sudden cold, a touch on the arm, a sense of a presence, unexplained noises, and in some rooms an oppressive mood. The vaults' reputation rests on a real history of poverty and hardship rather than on any single famous death, which makes them a good example of how a setting, rather than a named ghost, can carry a haunting.

Eastern State Penitentiary opened in 1829 as an experiment in reform. Under what became known as the Pennsylvania system, prisoners were held in near-total solitary confinement, each in a cell lit by a skylight, in the hope that isolation and reflection would lead to penitence; the word penitentiary itself carries that idea. Critics, including the novelist Charles Dickens after his visit in 1842, called the isolation cruel. The strict system was abandoned in the early twentieth century, and the prison went on holding inmates, Al Capone among them in 1929 and 1930, until it closed in 1971.

After years of decay the building reopened to the public as a historic site in 1994, with its crumbling cell blocks stabilized rather than restored. Staff and visitors have described footsteps in empty blocks, voices, and shadowy figures in the cells. The setting does a great deal of the work: long corridors radiating from a central hub, failing light, peeling paint and a history of real suffering. It is easy to see why someone walking those corridors after dark would be primed to notice every sound.

In San Jose, California, stands a sprawling Victorian mansion with stairs that run into ceilings and doors that open onto walls. It belonged to Sarah Winchester, widow of William Wirt Winchester, whose father founded the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. She bought a farmhouse there in the 1880s and kept adding to it until her death in 1922. The popular story says a medium told her she was haunted by the spirits of people killed by Winchester rifles and would live only as long as construction never stopped, so she built around the clock to confuse the ghosts.

Historians who have studied her letters and records tell a different story. Mary Jo Ignoffo, whose biography of Winchester was first published in 2010, found no good evidence for the medium or the nonstop building, and points out that Winchester's own letters show she sent workers away for months at a time. Some of the oddities date from repairs after the 1906 earthquake, which badly damaged the house, and others from an owner who designed as she went. Much of the legend, Ignoffo argues, was embellished after Winchester's death to sell tickets. The house is now open for tours, and it is a case study in how a ghost story can outgrow the person it is about.

In 2000 the administrators of Hampton Court invited the psychologist Richard Wiseman to look into why so many people reported strange experiences there, and his team later ran a similar study in the Edinburgh vaults. Hundreds of volunteers, more than 600 at Hampton Court alone, walked through the sites and marked where, if anywhere, they had an unusual experience, while the researchers measured conditions such as lighting, room size and the local magnetic field. The combined results, published in the British Journal of Psychology in 2003, showed that people did report more experiences in the areas with a haunted reputation, and that this held even for participants who did not know which areas those were.

That sounds like support for a ghost, and the authors took it seriously. But where people reported experiences also tracked ordinary physical features, such as variation in the local magnetic field and lighting levels, and the researchers concluded that visitors were most likely responding to real features of their surroundings and interpreting them as a haunting. At Hampton Court, believers in ghosts reported more experiences than disbelievers, and telling volunteers that an area had recently become more active affected believers and disbelievers differently. A dim, drafty corner feels uneasy before anyone tells you its story; once the story is told, it gives the unease a name. Other environmental causes of that feeling, from low-frequency sound to carbon monoxide, are covered in the article on infrasound and haunted feelings.