Hauntings

Picture it: May 19, 1536. Anne Boleyn, second wife of Henry VIII and the woman who turned England's religion upside down to marry him, kneels on a scaffold at the Tower of London and is beheaded on charges most historians now believe were fabricated. Three years earlier she'd walked those same grounds in triumph, dressed for her coronation. That whiplash is basically catnip for a ghost story.

And oh, has she delivered. Anne is widely considered the most frequently sighted ghost in Britain. Guards and visitors describe her gliding silently across Tower Green, sometimes leading a procession of lords and ladies from the green to the Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula, where her body is actually buried. Sightings have been logged inside the buildings and out on the lawn for centuries.

The most dramatic reported encounter comes from 1864: a sentry on duty spotted a headless white figure approaching, panicked, and lunged at it with his bayonet. The blade passed clean through. He fainted on the spot, and (legend insists) was later cleared of neglecting his post because witnesses backed up his story. Other Yeoman Warders over the years have claimed to see the same silent, headless procession crossing the green at night.

Whether you buy the ghost stories or not, the history alone is chilling enough to visit for.

Can you visit? Yes — the Tower of London is open daily for tours, and Tower Green and the Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula are part of the standard visit.

• hrp.org.uk
• hauntedrooms.co.uk

The Queen Mary sailed the Atlantic in glamour through the 1930s, then spent WWII hauling troops as the gray-painted "Grey Ghost." Since 1967 she's been permanently docked in Long Beach as a hotel and museum — and, according to just about everyone who's worked there, she brought some passengers along who never checked out.

The best-known haunting centers on the first-class pool, drained and closed for decades, where visitors report the sound of splashing and children's laughter, plus wet footprints appearing on dry tile. The story attached to it involves a young girl named Jackie said to have drowned there, though the historical record on the drowning itself is thin — it's very much legend-tier at this point, repeated by tour guides more than verified by ship records.

Stateroom B340 has the more consistently reported activity: guests describe bedcovers yanked off in the night, faucets switching on by themselves, and knocking from inside the walls with no plumbing behind them. The room's reputation is strong enough that the hotel reportedly stopped booking it as a regular guest room.

Whatever you believe about spirits, the ship's WWII service alone (troop-carrying, occasional onboard accidents) gives the legends some genuinely grim scaffolding to hang from.

Can you visit? Yes — the Queen Mary operates as a hotel and museum in Long Beach and runs dedicated ghost and paranormal tours.

• ghostcitytours.com
• legendsofamerica.com

The Myrtles Plantation has been marketed for decades as one of the most haunted houses in America, and its headline ghost is Chloe: a servant, so the story goes, who had an affair with the plantation owner, was banished to the fields when he moved on to someone else, and poisoned a birthday cake in revenge — only for the plan to go wrong and kill the wrong people, after which she was hanged by fellow enslaved people in a panic.

It's a gripping story. It also doesn't hold up. There's no record of the Woodruff family owning anyone named Chloe, and the family members the legend says were poisoned actually died of yellow fever, a documented epidemic risk of the era. Historians who've dug into the plantation's actual ownership records trace the Chloe character to Marjorie Munson, who owned the house in the 1950s and appears to have built the legend from a vaguer local story about a 'woman in a green turban.'

None of that has slowed the sightings down. Guests and staff still report a woman in a green head wrap drifting through hallways and standing near windows, and the house leans hard into the legend on its tours — with a wink, since the plantation itself now acknowledges the story is more folklore than fact.

It's a good reminder that the spookiest story isn't always the true one — but the Myrtles' actual history, sitting on land tied to slavery and multiple real deaths, is unsettling enough without embellishment.

Can you visit? Yes — the Myrtles operates as a bed-and-breakfast in St. Francisville and offers mystery and history tours, including evening ghost tours.

• en.wikipedia.org
• myrtlesplantation.com

Long before Stephen King ever checked in, Room 217 had its own history. In 1911, head housekeeper Elizabeth Wilson was making her rounds lighting acetylene lamps when a gas leak in the room ignited, blowing out the floor beneath her and dropping her into the dining room below. She survived — and, according to the hotel's own lore, never really left, with guests reporting their belongings mysteriously unpacked or rearranged when they return to the room.

The Stanley's fame really exploded (sorry) after Stephen King and his wife spent a night there in 1974, near the end of the hotel's season when they were nearly the only guests. King had a nightmare about his young son being chased through the corridors by a fire hose, woke up, and by the time he'd finished a cigarette on the balcony had the bones of The Shining worked out.

King's book — and Stanley Kubrick's film, though it was shot on a soundstage and not at the actual hotel — turned the Stanley into a pilgrimage site for horror fans and ghost hunters alike. Staff report cold spots, phantom piano music from the ballroom, and children's laughter in empty hallways.

The hotel now leans fully into its reputation, complete with a stay-if-you-dare marketing push and its own paranormal investigation package.

Can you visit? Yes — the Stanley Hotel is a working hotel in Estes Park and runs public night and history tours, including specifically of Room 217.

• stanleyhotel.com
• ghostcitytours.com

Sarah Winchester, heir to the Winchester rifle fortune, had construction crews working on her San Jose mansion nonstop from 1884 until her death in 1922. What resulted is a genuinely bewildering 160-room house full of staircases that dead-end at ceilings, doors that open onto sheer drops, and windows set into floors.

The popular explanation is that Sarah, wracked with grief after losing her infant daughter and then her husband within a few years of each other, consulted a Boston medium who told her the house needed constant construction to confuse and appease the spirits of everyone ever killed by a Winchester rifle. It's a fantastic story. It's also traceable to a single 1967 book of 'prominent American ghosts,' with essentially no supporting evidence from Sarah's own lifetime — some historians think it was popularized as a way to paint a wealthy, eccentric widow as an easy villain during the Great Depression.

What is documented: profound personal loss, an architecturally chaotic house built without an actual central plan, and a woman who kept to herself and let the rumors fly.

True believers still say they've heard hammering and footsteps in empty wings after hours — which, given the house's construction history, might be the most fitting haunting of all.

Can you visit? Yes — the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose offers daily daytime tours and seasonal flashlight/ghost-themed evening tours.

• winchestermysteryhouse.com
• history.com

Eastern State Penitentiary opened in 1829 as a radical experiment in solitary-confinement-based reform — total isolation, hooded transport, silence enforced so completely inmates weren't even supposed to hear each other. It didn't work the way reformers hoped, and by the time it closed in 1971, it had cycled through more than a century of overcrowding, harsh conditions, and infamous residents.

Chief among them: Al Capone, who did eight months there in 1929, in a cell so comfortable — oil paintings, a radio, real furniture — that it's still displayed as a curiosity. Guards reportedly claimed Capone would scream at night for someone named 'Jimmy' to leave him alone, a detail popularly tied to Jimmy Clark, one of the men killed in the Saint Valentine's Day Massacre that Capone allegedly ordered — though this is guard folklore, not a documented medical record.

The rest of the prison has its own reputation: guests report an apparition in a guard tower, disembodied laughter and voices in the cellblocks, and a robed figure nicknamed 'the Soap Lady' seen so often in one cell that staff gave her the name themselves.

Today it operates as a museum, and — fittingly for a place built to punish through isolation — one of the most visited attractions in the country every October.

Can you visit? Yes — Eastern State Penitentiary is a museum in Philadelphia with daytime tours year-round and a large Halloween haunted-house event.

• ghostcitytours.com
• americanghostwalks.com

In 1852, a horse thief known as Yankee Jim Robinson was convicted of grand larceny in Old Town San Diego and hanged at the public gallows there. Five years later, businessman Thomas Whaley built his family home on that exact site — reportedly unbothered by the site's history, which in hindsight is a bold choice.

It didn't take long for the Whaleys to notice something off. Thomas himself wrote in his journal about hearing heavy footsteps pacing upstairs when no one was there, footsteps he came to believe belonged to Yankee Jim. The family told the local newspaper the same thing not long after moving in.

The house collected more sorrow over the decades: the Whaleys' daughter Violet, humiliated after her husband abandoned her shortly after their wedding, died by suicide inside the home at just 22. Between the hanging, Violet's death, and the family's own long residence there, the Whaley House has more layered, well-documented grief behind it than most 'most haunted' claimants.

It's now billed as America's Most Haunted House, and it leans into that title hard, especially around Halloween.

Can you visit? Yes — the Whaley House Museum in San Diego's Old Town offers daytime and evening haunted tours.

• trolleytours.com
• ghostcitytours.com

On September 19, 1936, two photographers from Country Life magazine, Captain Hubert Provand and his assistant Indre Shira, were shooting Raynham Hall's grand staircase for a feature story. Shira reported seeing a 'vapoury form' taking the shape of a woman gliding down the stairs toward them and told Provand to take the shot immediately — cap off the lens, trigger the flash.

The resulting image, published in Country Life that December, shows a translucent, veiled figure on the staircase and is widely believed to depict Lady Dorothy Walpole, an 18th-century mistress of the house nicknamed 'the Brown Lady' for the brown brocade dress she's said to wear.

It became — and remains — one of the most reproduced and argued-over ghost photographs in history. Skeptics have proposed double exposure, a trick of light, or an outright hoax by the photographers, but no one has definitively replicated exactly how the image was produced, which is part of why it's stayed famous for nearly ninety years.

Other reported sightings of the Brown Lady at Raynham Hall stretch back well before 1936, including accounts involving King George IV, giving the image a longer legend to sit inside rather than standing alone.

Can you visit? Raynham Hall is a private residence and not generally open to the public, though it occasionally allows limited group tours by arrangement.

• countrylife.co.uk
• en.wikipedia.org

John Bell moved his family to a farm in what's now Adams, Tennessee, in 1804. Starting around 1817, the family began experiencing strange disturbances — scratching, knocking, unseen hands pulling hair and pinching skin, concentrated especially on Bell himself and his daughter Betsy. Eventually, witnesses claimed, the entity began speaking aloud, holding conversations, quoting scripture, and hurling insults at John Bell specifically.

The haunting grew infamous enough that neighbors, and reportedly even Andrew Jackson, came to witness it for themselves — though the Jackson connection is one of the legend's more folklore-heavy details, added and embellished in later retellings.

John Bell died in December 1820, and local legend holds that the entity took credit for his death, supposedly having poisoned him. The primary source most historians point to for the story's early shape is an 1894 book by newspaper editor Martin V. Ingram, compiled decades after the events — meaning much of what we 'know' about the Bell Witch comes from that one retelling rather than contemporary documentation.

It's often called America's most famous ghost story for a reason: a haunting that allegedly spoke, argued, and is blamed for a death, all tied to one real, named family and a farm you can still visit today.

Can you visit? Yes — the Bell Witch Cave near Adams, Tennessee, is open for tours, and the site hosts an annual fall festival tied to the legend.

• en.wikipedia.org
• tnmuseum.org

Poveglia sits in the Venetian lagoon between Venice and the Lido, and for centuries it served as the city's dumping ground for its most feared problem: plague. Ships arriving in Venice were required to stop at Poveglia for inspection, and any sailor showing symptoms was quarantined — and often buried — there. Venetian historians estimate more than 160,000 people were interred on the small island across the 18th and 19th centuries alone.

As if that weren't enough, Poveglia later became home to a mental hospital, which operated with the era's typically brutal methods before closing in 1968. The island has been uninhabited ever since, and its combination of plague pits and asylum history has made it a magnet for paranormal-themed television and ghost tourism, including a prominent Ghost Adventures episode.

Here's the honest caveat: while the plague-quarantine and asylum history is well documented, the specific ghost stories attached to Poveglia — screaming patients, restless plague victims — are largely modern additions with little historical sourcing behind them, as Venetian historians themselves have pointed out.

The island isn't legally open to casual visitors, which somehow makes it spookier — a haunted place you mostly have to take on faith, or a boat tour that circles but doesn't land.

Can you visit? Not really — Poveglia is largely off-limits to the public, though some boat tours pass by and occasional special-access visits have been arranged.

• historicmysteries.com
• cnn.com

South Bridge, completed in 1788, was built with a warren of storage vaults underneath its arches — space that was initially used by shops and tradesmen above ground. As the area declined through the 19th century, the vaults became home to some of Edinburgh's poorest residents and, reportedly, its criminal underworld: smugglers, illicit drinking dens, and worse.

The vaults were eventually abandoned, filled in, and largely forgotten until they were rediscovered and excavated in the 1980s and '90s. What tour guides found waiting, they say, was a ghost known as 'the Watcher' or 'Mr Boots' — a tall figure in a dirty coat and heavy boots, said to announce himself with echoing footsteps and, according to some visitors, a growled order to get out.

Other reported presences in the vaults include a spirit nicknamed 'the cobbler,' associated with sudden pinching or grabbing sensations, and generally colder-than-explainable patches throughout the tunnels.

Because the vaults' actual history — poverty, disease, crime, crowding into damp underground rooms — is so well documented and genuinely grim, they're one of the rare 'haunted' sites where you don't need the ghosts to feel the weight of the place.

Can you visit? Yes — several Edinburgh tour operators run regular daytime and evening tours through the South Bridge Vaults.

• mercattours.com
• haymarket-hotel.co.uk

Catherine Howard was Henry VIII's fifth wife and, like her cousin Anne Boleyn before her, was accused of adultery and executed for it, in February 1542. Legend holds that when she learned in 1541 she was about to be arrested at Hampton Court Palace, she broke away from her guards and ran down what's now called the Haunted Gallery, screaming and trying to reach the king in the chapel to plead for mercy, before being caught and dragged back.

Whether that dramatic dash actually happened as described isn't verifiable — it comes down to us through later retellings rather than contemporary eyewitness record. What is well documented is that the gallery has carried her name and reputation for a very long time, and that reported phenomena there include a running, screaming figure and a sudden, localized drop in temperature.

The palace itself notes that recorded ghost sightings didn't really pick up until the 19th century, around the same era that faked double-exposure 'ghost photograph' postcards were being sold as souvenirs — a reminder that some of a haunted site's reputation gets built up well after the events themselves.

Even so, staff and visitors keep reporting the same thing: in 1999, two separate visitors on different tours reportedly fainted in the exact same spot in the gallery, on the same evening.

Can you visit? Yes — Hampton Court Palace is open to the public, and the Haunted Gallery is part of the standard visitor route, with seasonal ghost tours as well.

• hrp.org.uk
• hrp.org.uk