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Monte Cristo Homestead: The Widow Who Sealed Herself In and the House That Lights Itself

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In 1963 a young couple named Reg and Olive Ryan drove out from Junee, in the wheat country of New South Wales, to look at a derelict mansion on a hill. It had stood empty for the better part of fifteen years. The windows were broken, the roof was going, and the power had been disconnected so long ago that the wiring was a museum piece. As they came up the road in the dusk, the house was lit up. Every window, blazing. They sat and looked at it. Then the lights went out, all at once, and Monte Cristo was a black ruin on a black hill, exactly as derelict as the agent had promised. Reg and Olive bought it anyway. They spent the next fifty years of their lives inside it. The Man Who Built the Hill Christopher William Crawley came up in the world the way men did in colonial New South Wales — land, sheep, and the railway. When the line came through Junee it came through his acreage, and Crawley became rich enough to do the thing that rich men in that time and place always did, which was...
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The Whaley House: The Man Who Watched a Hanging and Then Built His Home on the Gallows

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Most haunted houses are accidents. Someone builds a home, and then something terrible happens inside it, and the terrible thing stays. The sequence matters: first the house, then the horror. The family is a victim of its own address. The Whaley House in Old Town San Diego reverses that order, and the reversal is the whole story. The horror came first. Thomas Whaley stood in the crowd and watched it happen with his own eyes. And then, four years later, he bought the ground it happened on and raised his family's roof directly over the spot. He knew. That is what nobody ever quite absorbs about this house. He was not an innocent buyer who discovered the history afterward. He was a witness who came back with money. The Hanging of Yankee Jim In the summer of 1852, a drifter named James Robinson — everyone called him Yankee Jim — stole a rowboat in San Diego Bay along with two other men. It was a pilot boat, worth a few hundred dollars. They were caught almost immediately. What hap...
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The Queen Mary: The Grey Ghost of Long Beach and the Escort She Cut in Half

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Of all the things human hands make, only one is baptized. We do not christen bridges. We do not give cathedrals a name and a gender and break a bottle across their brow. We build them, we use them, and when they fail we blame the engineering. But a ship — a ship is launched the way a child is delivered. She is named. She is she . A crowd gathers, wine is broken over the bow, and the hull slides into the water for the first time while grown men weep on the slipway. Every seafaring culture that ever existed has done some version of this, and none of them can quite tell you why. The RMS Queen Mary is moored permanently at Long Beach, California. She has not moved under her own power since 1967. And she is, by a wide margin, the most thoroughly haunted object in the state. The Ship They Named for a Queen She was born on the Clyde, at the John Brown shipyard in Clydebank, and her birth was very nearly a stillbirth. Construction began in 1930, and then the Depression fell on Britain and...
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The Stanley Hotel: The Sick Man Who Built a Palace to Breathe and the Guests Who Never Checked Out

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There is a particular kind of building that comes into the world already carrying a debt. Not a mortgage — something older than money. A debt of the sort that gets paid in decades rather than dollars, and never quite gets paid in full. The Stanley Hotel sits at seven thousand five hundred feet in Estes Park, Colorado, white as a bone against the dark shoulder of the Rockies. It looks like a wedding cake somebody left out on a mountain. And it exists for one reason, which is stranger and sadder than any of the ghost stories that have grown over it like ivy: a dying man built it because the air up there let him keep breathing. The Man Who Was Sent Away to Die Freelan Oscar Stanley was a New England Yankee of the old, flinty, tinkering kind. He and his twin brother Francis had already made themselves rich twice over — first by inventing a dry-plate photographic process they sold to George Eastman, then by building the Stanley Steamer, an automobile that ran on boiling water and could ...
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Eastern State Penitentiary: The Quakers Who Invented Solitary Confinement and the Silence That Broke Men

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In the middle of Philadelphia, surrounded by rowhouses and coffee shops and people walking their dogs, there is a fortress. Thirty-foot walls, battlements, arrow slits — a full medieval castle, built in 1829, in a country that had never had a castle and had just finished throwing off the kind of people who built them. Inside the walls there is no keep. There is a hub, and radiating out from it, like the spokes of a wheel, eleven long stone corridors lined with cells. Walk down one of them today and the roof is mostly gone; there are trees growing out of the cellblocks and the light comes down in shafts through the collapsed vaulting, and it is one of the most beautiful ruins in America, and every square inch of it was designed with love, by good people, to do something unspeakable. Eastern State Penitentiary is where solitary confinement was invented. Not discovered, not stumbled into — invented , deliberately, as a reform, by Quakers, out of tenderness. The Gentlest Idea Anyone Ev...
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The Winchester Mystery House: The Widow Who Built for Thirty-Eight Years and Never Let the Hammering Stop

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In San Jose, California, hemmed in now by a shopping center and a freeway, there is a sprawling Victorian mansion that makes no sense. It has one hundred and sixty rooms. It has forty bedrooms, two ballrooms, forty-seven fireplaces, and forty staircases. It also has a staircase that climbs seven steps and stops at the ceiling. It has doors on upper floors that open onto a two-story drop. It has a cabinet that opens into half an inch of space, and another that opens into thirty rooms. It has chimneys that rise four floors and stop short of the roof, and windows set into interior floors, and a room with no way in but a window from another room. Sarah Winchester built it, and she never stopped building it for thirty-eight years, and the story everyone tells about why is one of the great American ghost stories. It is also, almost certainly, wrong. And the truth — which took a librarian and a few stubborn historians a very long time to dig out — is stranger and sadder than the legend, an...
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The Lizzie Borden House: Forty Whacks, an Acquittal, and the Bed and Breakfast Where You Can Sleep in the Murder Room

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Every American child knows the rhyme, and almost none of them know they are reciting a libel. Lizzie Borden took an axe / and gave her mother forty whacks. / When she saw what she had done / she gave her father forty-one. It is not true in a single particular. It was not forty whacks; it was nineteen. It was not forty-one; it was ten or eleven. Abby Borden was not her mother but her stepmother. And Lizzie Borden was tried for those murders in 1893 and acquitted by a jury of twelve men in a little over an hour, and never charged again, and lived in Fall River for another thirty-four years as a free woman. The rhyme was made up by schoolchildren while the trial was still going on. It is one of the most successful pieces of character assassination in American history, and it worked so completely that the verdict of the court has never once, in a hundred and thirty years, been the verdict of the public. The house where it happened stands at 230 Second Street in Fall River, Massachuset...
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