Top Ten Most Haunted Places #6: Congelier House

Congelier House
Pittsburgh, PA

This house is the former most haunted house in america.

Built by Charles Wright Congelier, a wealthy carpet bagger in the 1860s (he moved from Texas with his wife, Lyda, and his servant girl, Essie), the house has a long history of murder, human experimentation, and gruesome death.

After a few months of living in the mansion, Charles began to have an affair with Essie (it is uncertain if she did it willingly or not.)  For several months Lyda was unaware, until one day, when she heard panting and moaning coming from Essie's quarters.  She immediately went downstairs and grabbed a meat cleaver and a butcher knife and hurried upstairs to await her husband.  When he opened the door, he was greeted by a large meat cleaver entering his forehead.

When a friend of Charles noticed he hadn't seen him, he went to the house to investigate.  He found Lyda sitting in a rocking chair with a swaddled item in her hands, murmuring a lullaby.  When the man examined the item, he found it to be not a baby, but Essie's decapitated head.

The house remained empty after the incident until 1901, when it was bought by Adolph C. Brunrichter, an aspiring doctor. Nothing seemed to happen for several months.  But on August 12th, a fire broke out in the house.  Suspecting that Brunrichter was still in the house, fire marshals enter the blaze and found a most grisly sight.  In an upstairs bedroom, lying on a bed, was the decapitated, decomposing body of a young woman.   The head was found soon after, in a makeshift labratory in the basement.  What they failed to find, however, were any remains of Brunrichter.

In 1927, a New York street vagrant was arrested for public drunkenness.  He stated that he was Adolph Brunrichter, and admitted to the murder.  He spoke of lavish parties where he enticed women into spending the night, and how he would use their heads for experiments in immortality.  He was sent to prison for a month, then released and deemed harmless.

In 1920 the house was abandoned, gaining it a more fearsome reputation as being "too evil to live in."  This attracted one of the greatest mind in America: Thomas Edison.  He was attempting to create a device that could communicate with the dead, and thought of Congelier house as the perfect place to test it.  There is no record of what happened in the house, but some say that he actually communicated with the dead.

In the late 20s, the house was converted into a living space for Italian immigrants, working on a natural gas storage nearby.  One night 14 men were sitting around a table, laughing and having fun.  One went into the kitchen with a stack of dirty dishes, but never returned.  One worker noticed his prolonged absence and went to check the kitchen.  When he saw what was there, he let out a scream which attracted the others.  The basement door yawned open, revealing a dark abyss.  Scared, but determined, several workers headed down the stairs, but they never got to the bottom.  At the foot of the stairs was the missing worker, impaled through the chest with a splintered board.  A few steps above him was the screamer, hanging from a board by an electric cable.  The men left that night.

Years later, several tanks in the storage facility exploded, leaving 28 dead, but destroying the house for good.

At least, that's the myth...

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Top Ten Most Haunted Houses # 7: Franklin Castle

Franklin Castle
Cleveland, OH

The house was built in 1865 by architects Cudell & Richardson for Hannes Tiedemann, aGerman immigrant.^[4] On January 16, 1881, Tiedemann's fifteen-year-old daughter Emma succumbed to diabetes. The house 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 there was more to the deaths than met the eye.

To distract his wife, Luise, from these tragedies, Tiedemann began extensive construction on the home, adding a ballroom which runs the length of the house in 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.

It is rumored that there were hidden rooms and passageways that were used for bootlegging during Prohibition. Though rumored, none of these rooms or passageways exist other than a small stairway used by servants from the kitchen to the front door.

Luise Tiedemann died from a liver disease on March 24, 1895, at the age of fifty-seven. Hannes sold the house to the Mullhauser family, and by 1908 he and the entire Tiedemann family were dead,^[5] leaving no one to inherit his considerable personal wealth.

Rumors of crimes committed in the house by Tiedemann (including sexual indiscretions and murder) have contributed to Franklin Castle's reputation as a haunted house.

Thriller

Darkness falls across the land
The midnight hour is close at hand
Creatures crawl in search of blood
To terrorize your neighborhood
And whosoever shall be found
Without the soul for getting down
Must stand and face the hounds of hell
And rot inside a corpses shell
The foulest stench is in the air
The funk of forty thousand years
And grisly ghouls from every tomb
Are closing in to seal your doom
And though you fight to stay alive
Your body starts to shiver
For no mere mortal can resist
The evil of the THRILLER!

Top Ten Scariest Movies #10: The Shining

It's no wonder that this movie based on the hit Stephen King novel made the list of scariest movies of all time.

A family heads to an isolated hotel for the winter where an evil and spiritual presence influences the father into violence, while his psychic son sees horrific forebodings from the past and of the future.


Rated R


Famous Quote: "Here's Johnny!"


Starring: Jack Nicholson, Shelly Duvall, Danny Lloyd


Based off of a real Hotel called the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, CO

Local Lore...

Heard about this place in Chesterfield called Zombie road.  Sounds interesting.  I might go check it out.

Top Ten Most Haunted Houses #8 : Hull House

Hull House was constructed by Charles J. Hull at Halsted and Polk Streets in 1856 at a time when this was one of the most fashionable sections of the city. After the Chicago Fire of 1871. In the 1880's, Hull House was surrounded by factories and tenement houses and soon after, became one of the most famous places in Chicago!

Hull House received its greatest notoriety when it was alleged to be the refuge of the Chicago "devil baby". This child was supposedly born to a devout Catholic woman and her atheist husband and was said to have pointed ears, horns, scale-covered skin and a tail. According to the story, the young woman had attempted to display a picture of the Virgin Mary in the house but her husband had torn it down. He stated that he would rather have the Devil himself in the house that the picture. When the woman had become pregnant, the Devil Baby had been their curse. After enduring numerous indignities because of the child, the father allegedly took it to Hull House.

After being taken in by Jane Addams, staff members of the house reportedly took the baby to be baptized. During the ceremony, the baby supposedly escaped from the priest and began dancing and laughing. Not knowing what else to do with the child, Jane kept it locked in the attic of the house, where it later died.

Rumors spread quickly about the baby and within a few weeks, hundreds of people came to the house to get a glimpse of it. How the story had gotten started, no one knew, but it spread throughout the west side neighborhood and was reported by famous Chicago reporter Ben Hecht. He claimed that every time he tried to run down the story, he was directed to find the child at Hull House. Many people came to the door and demanded to see the child, while others quietly offered to pay an admission. They believed the wild story to be absolutely true!

Each day, Jane turned people away and tried to convince them that the story was fabricated. She even devoted 40 pages of her autobiography to dispelling the stories. Even though most of the poorly educated immigrants left the house still believing the tales of the Devil Baby, the stream of callers eventually died out and the story became a barely remembered side note in the history of Hull House.

As the years have passed, some people still maintain the story of the Devil Baby is true... or at least contains some elements of the truth. Some have speculated that perhaps the child was actually a badly deformed infant that had been brought to Hull House by a young immigrant woman that could not care for it. Perhaps the monstrous appearance of the child had started the rumors in the neighborhood and eventually led to Hull House.

Regardless, local legend insists that at some point, there was a disfigured boy that was hidden away on the upper floors of the house. The stories also go on to say that on certain nights, the image of a deformed face could be seen peering out of the attic window.... and that a ghostly version of that face is still seen by visitors today!

HULL HOUSE is located at 800 South Halsted Street in Chicago and is open to the public as a historic site. The West Side Levee District no longer exists but was once bounded by Madison Street on the south and running north to Lake, east to Halsted and west to Center Street (now Racine Avenue). The bordellos and saloons have been replaced by loft apartments, parking lots, a few ethnic restaurants and Oprah Winfrey's HARPO STUDIOS on Washington Boulevard.

Hull House
Devil Baby