The Most Haunted Places in America
Ghost stories are cheap and old buildings are not, so rank these haunted places by what standing in them is like. Everything here is a single site in the United States, and anyone can book a way inside: a ticketed tour, an admission, a room, a table. Bookability settles the famous cases. The LaLaurie Mansion is absent because the ghost tours there stop on the pavement outside a private house, and the Amityville house is absent because it is a private home with nothing on sale at all. A town is not a site, so Salem and Gettysburg qualify nobody by themselves. Tier one is the places that sell the haunting themselves: a ghost tour, a ghost hunt, a Halloween attraction or another programme on the haunting, on sale under the operator's own name. Tier two is everything else that clears the gate. The order inside each tier is yours to settle.
Eastern State Penitentiary is #1 on “The Most Haunted Places in America”.
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Eastern State Penitentiary
Cell blocks emptied in 1971, and the site opened to the public for history tours in 1994. It attracts "close to 220,000 visitors each year" and has National Historic Landmark status. Guided and self-guided audio tours run daily on an admission ticket. Halloween Nights, once called Terror Behind the Walls, is run by Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site, Inc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_State_Penitentiary - 2
Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum
Weston, West Virginia lost a hospital and gained a tourist attraction. Joe Jordan paid $1.5 million for the building at a 2007 auction and reopened it for tours in March 2008, and a Fall Festival with historic and paranormal tours has run each October since 2007. It became a National Historic Landmark in 1990. Ghost Adventures and Paranormal Lockdown filmed inside, and Jayne Anne Phillips set her 2023 novel Night Watch here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Allegheny_Lunatic_Asylum - 3
The Stanley Hotel
Estes Park's "140-room Georgian Revival hotel" gave Stephen King the Overlook for his 1977 novel The Shining, and the 1980 film followed. The building and the structures around it are on the National Register of Historic Places. Alongside the historic walk, the hotel sells Stanley Ghost Tours under its own name, and a room upstairs books like any other.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Hotel - 4
Waverly Hills Sanatorium
Tuberculosis patients filled the wards above Louisville, and the building joined the National Register on 12 July 1983. The Mattinglys, who own it, hold ticketed tours inside the building and host a haunted house attraction each Halloween, with the proceeds going toward restoration. Ghost Hunters put the place on television.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waverly_Hills_Sanatorium - 5
Winchester Mystery House
Sarah Winchester died in 1922 and the mansion opened as a tourist attraction nine months later. The myths about why she moved west are attributed to the author Susy Smith, in her 1967 book Prominent American Ghosts. National Register listing followed on 7 August 1974, reference 74000559. The house runs a Flashlight Tour of its own, an evening walk through the dark halls with the haunted history, at "$49.99 Adults, $29.99 Children (ages 5-12)".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winchester_Mystery_House - 6
RMS Queen Mary
Long Beach has held this liner since her working life ended, and she "opened her doors to tourists" on 8 May 1971. The National Register listed her in 1993. The ghost stories date from the 1980s, when she was already a floating hotel, and the ship sells them itself: a cabin aboard is an ordinary booking, and the Paranormal Ship Walk a separate ticket.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RMS_Queen_Mary - 7
Lizzie Borden House
Fall River, Massachusetts still trades on the 1892 double murder of Andrew and Abby Borden. Overnight guests have booked rooms here since 1996, when Martha McGinn and Ronald Evans, who inherited it, were the owners. Lance Zaal bought it for $2 million in 2021, and his company US Ghost Adventures sells ninety-minute Lizzie Borden Ghost Tours nightly with a two-hour Ghost Hunt after them. Maureen Wood and Ron Kolek wrote up a night here in The Ghost Chronicles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lizzie_Borden_House - 8
1886 Crescent Hotel
Norman Baker was a radio personality who called himself a doctor without any medical training and claimed cures for cancer. The building at 75 Prospect Avenue went on the National Register in 2016. Ghost Hunters filmed here in 2005 and the cast claimed "a full-body apparition" on a thermal camera. The Crescent Hotel Ghost Tour, published under the hotel's name, ends in Baker's morgue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crescent_Hotel - 9
Ohio State Reformatory
Mansfield's prison is better known as a film set, since most of The Shawshank Redemption was shot inside it. The National Register took the building on 14 April 1983 and it is open to tourists now. The reformatory sells ghost tours alongside the ordinary daytime ones.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio_State_Reformatory - 10
The Myrtles Plantation
Clarence John Laughlin printed the ghost story in 1948, in Ghosts Along the Mississippi, and the historian Tiya Miles wrote in 2015 about how the house sells it. David Bradford built it in 1796. The house has been on the National Register since 1978, and owners John and Teeta Moss keep it open for daytime history tours, overnight guests and evening Mystery Tours that work through the ghost tales.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myrtles_Plantation - 11
Bird Cage Theatre
Tombstone kept its variety hall after the silver ran out. The walls were riddled with gunshot holes while the place ran, on and off, from December 1881 to 1894. Ghost Hunters came in 2006 for a Tombstone episode. Phantoms of the Bird Cage Theater is the building's own night ghost tour, and a seat on it costs "$35.00 per person".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_Cage_Theatre - 12
St. Augustine Light
Karen Harvey, a local preservationist and author, got the tower a National Register listing in 1981. It was built in 1874. The museum "is open to the public 360 days a year", and its ticket store sells a Dark of the Moon ghost tour plus a Lighthouse Ghost Tales evening. Syfy's Ghost Hunters has filmed at the lighthouse, and so has Most Terrifying Places in America.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Augustine_Light - 13
Merchant's House Museum
Manhattan keeps a merchant family's home at 29 East Fourth Street in NoHo, made a landmark in 1965 and added to the National Register on 15 October 1966. The museum runs guided, self-guided and neighborhood tours by day. Candlelit ghost tours run through the year, and since 2006 they have included vignettes of the Tredwell family. The ghost the museum names is Gertrude's.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchant%27s_House_Museum - 14
Mizpah Hotel
Tonopah sits out in central Nevada, and its hotel reached the National Register on 7 July 1978. Fred and Nancy Cline bought the shuttered building in 2011, renovated it and reopened that August. Ghost Adventures ran the Lady in Red story in season five, episode two. Ghost tours go on sale through the hotel's own site, and the rest of the year it is "47 rooms, a bar, and two restaurants".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mizpah_Hotel - 15
Emily Morgan Hotel
Ralph Cameron designed the block in 1924 as the Medical Arts Building, thirteen storeys of Neo-Gothic that rose 205 feet and was then the tallest thing in San Antonio. Offices took it over in 1976 and a 1984 remodel made it a hotel. The hotel calls itself haunted on its own site, but what is on sale is a bed across from the Alamo.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Morgan_Hotel - 16
Palmer House Hotel
Sauk Centre is Sinclair Lewis's home town, and the Palmer House is still open there as a hotel, restaurant and pub. The National Register added the building in 1982. Ghost Adventures came for season eight with Dave Schrader, and The Dead Files followed in season nine. The hotel held its first paranormal seminar in January 2008, with Chris Fleming and Patrick Burns among the guests, and the booking on offer now is a bed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmer_House_Hotel_(Sauk_Centre,_Minnesota)
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