You finally did it! You shopped, perused, toured and painstakingly poured yourselves into the housing market in the area…then you found it - the one. It was perfect, from the scalloped trim work surrounding the top of the porch to the tree swing in the back for little Timmy, happy little Timmy. You’re about to tell the agent that you’ll take it when a foreboding look comes across her face and a collective chill runs down the spines of your huddled, little family. A darkness envelopes the realtor and she says in an otherworldly voice, “In the interest of full disclosure, there’s something I want to tell you about this house…”
To your horror, she begins to tell you the ghastly tale of various murders, suicides and occult rituals that have taken place in the home since its construction. Everything becomes clear in an instant. The four-figure price tag in the middle of a six-figure neighborhood, the fact that there have been twenty different owners in the last three years. And that pesky, ghostly, voice that kept saying “get out” every time you’d come back to look at the house. “Run as fast as you can!”
If this scenario doesn’t scare you, then the homes on this list might just be for you! The Internet is littered with memes of spooky homes asking, “Would you live here for a month for a million dollars?” If your answer is not only “yes”, but that you might even enjoy living at one of these homes, then dive into this list! If you dare…
Yikes! Silence of Lambs Home For Sale!
The 1980s and '90s were rife with some of the most titillating horror films to ever cut an evil swath across the silver screen. Some were horrifying, some gory, others were downright cheesy but then there were the standouts. The movies that when you close your eyes you could feel the psychological scars being ripped across your fragile psyche as you watched them. Who can forget the quiet in the theater after the movie Seven? What’s in the box? Not popcorn, Mr. Pitt. But none from that time period has been quoted more, talked about more and reproduced more than Silence of the Lambs. It was a movie with so many twists, turns and even more ghastly twists that by the end, your brain and soul felt like they’d been through a meat grinder.
The movie’s list of antagonists was long, but none were more reviled that Buffalo Bill. Not the loving kid’s show host from the early eighties, no. The “hey your skin is positively radiant, but I think it would shine more with a light bulb under it” Buffalo Bill. His basement shenanigans scared moviegoers to no end, and now, the house of horror where he worked on his best dance moves is on the market.
The 1910 Princess Anne construction is situated on over 1.5 acres and offers a spacious 2,400 square feet of living space. Beautiful craftsmanship throughout the home, an in-ground pool and a vintage caboose used as a pool house are just a few of the happy reasons why the home is worth the $300,000 asking price. A price that has certainly been cut to the bone.
The Silence of the Lambs movie home is just a stone’s throw away from Pittsburgh, so you won’t be too far from the big city life. Or, help if you need it. We’re fairly sure the pit is gone from the basement. Fairly sure…
No one is sure what it means. Some people think it is a signal to the space creatures. A light that guides their spaceships to the Arizona desert. Or, maybe it doesn't mean anything. Just a freak of nature. Whatever it might be, it started over a thousand years ago when the boulder people first began living there.
In 1974, a young family from Washington was looking for a good place to build their dream home. For some strange reason they were intrigued by an ad they found for land in the high Sonoran Desert near Scottsdale, Arizona that read, “Does anyone want to buy my pile of rocks?” They bought it and planned to build a contemporary home next to the mysterious pile of ancient rocks. But something made them change their minds. They decided to build their new home inside the boulders. Behind the billion-year-old rocks from the Precambrian era. About the same time that hard-shelled life forms first showed up on earth.
During the construction, the couple was excited to find evidence that they weren’t the first people to live in the boulders. Pottery shards and rock carvings they discovered were dated back as far as one thousand years. Then they found something even more astonishing - a Stonehenge-type phenomenon that occurs on both the spring and fall equinoxes. A six-inch wide beam of light that starts in the glass between two boulders and slowly works its way across the floor and up the wall to a 36” spiral petroglyph. When the sun hit its mark, the stone projections light up like diamonds.
A dream home for archaeologists, historians, artists or mystery lovers, the Boulder House is for sale at $4.2 million. Located on nine acres next to the Phil Mickelson Whisper Rock Golf Course, the home includes 4,380 square feet, three bedrooms, two and a half baths, a great room with massive fireplace, Douglas fir-beam ceilings, guest quarters, library with built-in bookcases, kitchen with high-end appliances and polished concrete floors tinted to blend with the natural stone color. The exterior has multiple terraces on different levels and large areas both inside and out for entertaining friends, relatives or space people on a grand scale.
The Dakota Building!
John Lennon moved into The Dakota in 1973 and lived there until he was murdered outside the building’s 72nd Street entry in 1980 by a deranged fan. The building’s exterior was filmed as the home of Mia Farrow’s devil-mama character in Rosemary’s Baby. Some people say it is the scariest building in New York City with a long history of ghosts and hauntings.
The Dakota is a mix of French Renaissance, German Gothic and English Victorian architecture with steep-pitched roofs, dormers, balconies, pavilions, demented gargoyles and a mysterious Indian figure watching over the building's main entrance. Legend is that it was named “The Dakota” because it was built in 1884 in the boondocks, far away from the most popular areas of Manhattan. A long history of ghastly stories surround The Dakota including tales of worker's arms forced into lights to burn them, ghostly children roaming the halls, former music legends in the foyer and tenants having metal bars thrown at them in the building’s basement.
The Dakota has been home to many New York celebrities including Maury Povich, who describes the building as “very haunted.” Lauren Bacall, Leonard Bernstein, Rosemary Clooney, Jason Robards, Judy Garland and Roberta Flack were longtime residents. John Lennon not only saw ghosts there during his Dakota days, even naming one “the crying lady,” but has reportedly become one himself. Yoko Ono still lives at The Dakota where she once found John playing their white piano and told Yoko, “Don't be afraid, I am still with you.”
There are 65 apartments at The Dakota - every unit is different - with prices ranging from $4 million to over $30 million. The late Lauren Bacall's residence recently sold for about $23 million and Robert Flack's unit, next door to Yoko Ono, is for sale at $9.5 million.
Currently for sale at The Dakota is a corner unit with ten spacious rooms spread out over 4,500 square feet, four bedrooms, six fireplaces and something called a “shaving closet.” Rooms range in color from mustard yellow to burnt orange and completely black. The home has been on and off the market for the past eight years, now reduced from $19.5 million to $14.5 million. There are no reports that the apartment is haunted.
Neverland Ranch's Michael Jackson Ghost!
The Ferris wheel is gone, the music is nothing more than muted notes on the wind and the laughter of children has died away…but yet something still remains. Out of the corner of your eye as you walk by the bathroom, was that a man in the mirror? The chills running up your spine, is that something bad you sense near you and your loved ones? Even though the King of Pop hasn’t lived in the home since 2005 (he died in 2009), there are many who say Michael Jackson's spirit still haunts the halls today. Visitors and workers at the Neverland Ranch have reported a ghostly presence they are sure is Michael.
The estate, now named the Sycamore Valley Ranch, has danced its way back onto the real estate market. The centerpiece of the estate, the 12,000-square-foot main house, is situated on nearly 2,700 acres of land. The home has undergone a full-scale remodel bringing it back to its original glory when it was constructed in 1982. Features include large, formal rooms for entertaining guests, a 50-seat movie theater with its own private balcony, two-level master suite complex, a two-room guest house and a myriad of other amenities.
Remember all of the exotic animals Michael kept? Well, all of those facilities to house and care for the animals (barns, animal shelters, corrals and even a maintenance shop to help with upkeep) are still on the property. Perfect for anyone who wants to have animals and turn the place into what Michael always wanted it to be - a family ranch.
Neverland Ranch (Sycamore Valley Ranch) is for sale at $100 million. Haunted or not, it is a Thriller.
In the 1950s and early 60s, Miami Beach was the most popular vacation destination in the United States. A glamorous town of upscale oceanfront hotels such as the Fontainebleau, Eden Roc and Deauville (where the Beatles made their first American performance on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1964) and nightclubs where the biggest celebrities including Frank Sinatra and Jackie Gleason partied and performed. Gambling was tolerated, A-list strippers kept the conventioneers happy and the five New York crime families declared it to be “open territory” where anything was tolerated.
By the late 1970s, Miami was a wasteland of drugs and murder. So many people were robbed and killed that travelers were advised to avoid South Florida. In 1980, the city had 573 murders. Things were so bad, the county morgue couldn't handle the workload and rented a refrigerated truck to store the excess of dead bodies. South Beach was mostly flop houses and senior citizens trying to escape the wide-open drug gang wars. Some people said the Magic City had become the devil's playground.
In 1983, Oliver Stone wrote the script for Scarface at the same time he was fighting off his own cocaine addiction. For those viewing the film in the majority of the country, it was just entertainment, but for those who lived in the Miami area, it was the frightening truth. Tony Montana, Al Pacino’s character, was as realistic as they came. The famous chainsaw scene, filmed at the Sun Ray Apartments on South Beach's Ocean Drive, was close to the real thing.
Although most of the film was shot in Miami and Miami Beach, the Miami Tourist Board was afraid of a negative reputation that would drive even more tourists away. That prompted some scenes to be shot in California, such as Tony's trophy house, known as the El Fureidis Estate, in Montecito, California. It was Tony’s palatial trophy home that was a big part of the movie carnage when Tony killed over 20 assassins in his final desperate stand.
Now for sale, the 10-acre Scarface estate was designed as a Roman villa in the early 1900s by architect Bertram Goodhue. He and the owner, James Waldron Gillespie, a wealthy New Yorker, traveled to the Middle East and Europe for a year looking for inspiration. That resulted in adding Persian touches such as the gardens and fountains and accents like a Byzantine-style sitting room with an 18-foot domed ceiling decorated with a floral hand-painted, gold and blue design in 24k gold-leaf recreating a scene of Alexander the Great conquering Persepolis.
Ironically, it was Scarface along with the 1980's hit TV series Miami Vice that were largely responsible for resurrecting Miami Beach giving millions of viewers a look at the ocean, beach and architecture that once made it the most popular vacation city in the United States. The dumpy building where the Scarface chainsaw scene was filmed is now a restaurant near South Beach's most expensive strip of Art Deco hotels that recently sold for $12.4 million.
At 10,000 square feet, the mansion has four bedrooms, nine bathrooms, a library, sitting room and a lounge. A large rooftop terrace provides 360-degree views of the Pacific Ocean, mountains and Channel Islands and makes an excellent venue for large scale entertaining.
Montecito estate used as Tony Montano’s lavish killing mansion in the film Scarface is for sale at $35 million.
The Sowden House!The history of a home can reflect many things. It can encompass the lives of those that have lived there, the architect whose deft skill built the home and even in some cases, the mysteries that surround the dwelling. The Sowden House in Los Angeles hits home on all three fronts.
An architectural marvel, the Sowden House is the brainchild of noted architect Lloyd Wright, son of Frank Lloyd Wright. Seen as one of Wright’s most important works, the 5,600-square-foot home with four bedrooms, four full bathrooms and two half bathrooms is a landmark wreathed in luxury and unique style. The home’s design is reminiscent of ancient architecture from South America given over to a Mayan motif. Its wide open rooms and beautiful interior would give a warm and welcoming feeling if it weren’t for the fact that if you step on the wrong patio paver, you could set off a spike trap.
The home has many features that make it well worth the asking price. Lush walls of vegetation, pool with center patio, modern kitchen with stainless appliances and angry tribesmen with poison dart guns waiting in the bushes are just a few of the highlights of this home. Though it was conceived and built in the 1920s, a renovation where the owners poured in over $2 million dollars bring the home into the modern era.
What’s truly unique about the home is a macabre history of rumors and stigma. Stories swirl around this home like moths around a flame (a flame from a fire that you could be relaxing by on the patio) about the previous owner, Los Angeles Doctor George Hodel, and his involvement in the Black Dahlia Murder in 1947. Many people, including his son, believe that Hodel was behind the brutal killing, mutilation and dismemberment of Elizabeth Short. Elizabeth was sliced in half by someone with the skilled hands of a surgeon and then the blood was drained from her body.
Time may have removed some of the stain from the home’s dark history, but it still has seen visits from TV shows such as Ghost Hunters and Paranormal America, even an American Express commercial shot there: “Don’t leave your spooky home without it.”
Whatever your belief in the afterlife or history of the Dahlia murder, the home is a beautiful estate, a bargain at the asking price of $4,799,000. Still on the market, somebody will snatch this place up quickly, so don’t wait for the price to be sliced in half.
The House on Haunted Hill, The House at the End of the Street, Last House on the Left,… all terrifying names that make the hair on the back of your neck stand on end. The house on Richmond Road…as far as foreboding names go, doesn’t quite have that King-esque ring to it, certainly. But what the home lacks in a scary address, it more than makes up for in its strange history and spooky ambiance.
The Gustav Mayer House, a landmark mansion built in 1855 by New York Militia commander David Ryers, changed hands in 1889 to Mr. Mayer. The home would be owned by Gustav (one of the original 114 bakery owners that made up Nabisco) and his family until the 1980s. His daughters, who in their later years were so reclusive that they refused to leave the home, lowering baskets out of windows to collect groceries, laundry and the mail were the last of the Mayer family to live in the home.
The house was chipped and fading when its future owner, Bob Troiano, saw it as a young man and fell in love with the estate known as the Staten Island Grey Gardens. It wasn’t until the 1990s when Mr. Troiano finally purchased the 7,700-square-foot, 10-bedroom home. He immediately remodeled the first floor into a stylish and trendy living space that paid homage to the past in style. His family began the renovation of the upstairs when people began to get shot there, and that stopped everything.
The shooting was done by photographers from all over the fashion map, as the home’s eerie decay became a fashion hotspot for high-end magazines. From the first-floor chic to the second floor shriek, the home couldn’t be more different. This attracted high-fashion names like Elle, Vogue, Fossil, W and even one of the Olsen twins did a photo shoot behind the crumbling upstairs walls.
Its amazing history, fashion-friendly décor, view of Raritan Bay and fixer-upper status (if you want to take away the money making potential) are well worth the $2.31 million price tag. Just be aware that most in the fashion industry would love to see this home stay “as is” and not turned into “some clean yuppie mansion.”
Colorado Ghost Town!Colorado was the home base for some of the Wild West's most notorious outlaws. Robbing banks and highjacking the stage coach payroll was all in a day’s work for bandits such as Butch Cassidy, who got his start in Telluride, Colorado as a horse thief before graduating to robbing banks in Denver. Butch and many of his fellow crooks had hideouts in the Rocky Mountains where they had an eagle-eye view of any approaching posses on their trail. A place like Uptop, Colorado – a former ghost town now for sale at a bargain price of $1 million.
The town was established in the 1870s shortly after the Denver & Rio Grand Railroad carved out the “Railway Above the Clouds” - the world's highest elevation train tracks at over 9,300 feet. Uptop later became a coal mining town and tourist attraction until a new highway in the 1960s brought an end to the good times. By the late 1990s, everyone was gone.
The Lathrop Gang, two green-horn sisters from Boston, bought the town in 2001 and began to renovate the deteriorating buildings. The sisters brought the 42-acre town back to life restoring a train depot, dance hall, saloon, chapel, meeting hall and large log cabin.
A frightening good deal, the town is now free of ghosts and cowboy outlaws and on the National Historic Register for sale at $1 million.
The JP Morgan Great Camp!
John Pierpont “JP” Morgan was bigger than Warren Buffett and Steve Jobs combined, the financial genius of the late 1800s and early 1900s creating General Electric and U.S. Steel. He was the nation's banker providing loans in both 1895 and 1907 to keep the government afloat. Morgan was a huge man who suffered from several facial issues that left him with a grotesque purple nose such that children and even some adults were afraid to look at him. He was scheduled to sail on the ill-fated Titanic but canceled at the last minute.
While no one has claims to have seen JP Morgan's ghost, there are several disturbing incidents surrounding the family. Morgan's former Long Island mansion is said to be haunted by his daughter who is sometimes seen walking the corridors in a long black dress. The late comedian Joan Rivers claimed that her New York home was haunted by Morgan's niece who would visit her every night at 3 a.m.
If there is a JP Morgan ghost, he would probably be found at his vacation compound, Great Camp Uncas, on secluded Mohegan Lake in Upstate New York. Built in 1895 by William West Durant, the camp was in the hands of the Morgan family for half a century. It is one of the country's best examples of rustic vacation-camp compounds built in the late 1800s for America's wealthiest families. The kind of landscape usually seen in horror movies with soaring tree shadows, never-ending walking trails, stark cabins and quiet nights except for the hooting owls and the occasional chop of an ax murderer.
This linchpin of what Durant called “America’s most beautiful trio” is the main house at Great Camp Uncas. Selling fully furnished and decorated, perfect for anyone who loves the outdoors, the main lodge and guest cabins on 4.6 acres with 1,700 feet of lake shoreline, surrounded by tens of thousands of acres of state-owned forest preserve, are for sale at an asking price of $2.95 million.
When singer John Mayer penned lyrics to his song 83, he created a song dripping with nostalgia that tugged at the heartstrings of his fans. One line in particular he sings, a phrase that would make the most hard-hearted individual yearn for their childhood home, is especially poignant: That’s my plastic in the dirt.
The line refers to things he left buried in the yard in his youth either by his own doing, or covered over by time. Such a sweet sentiment hits most of us and leaves a smile on the face. That is, most of us. There are others…others with more sinister intent that left things buried in the dirt. Things that make nightmares play in the shadows of our minds when forced to deal with the fact that they really occurred - not just a horror film scene.
Such is the case with Jeffery Dahmer and his childhood Ohio home which has been on and off the market for several years. The home is where Dahmer killed and dismembered his first victim, scattering the remains about the woods and burying parts under the porch. Dahmer had just turned 18.
The home is 2,170 square feet with gleaming hardwood floors, high-end appliances and lush landscaping. It was even featured in a 1953 Akron Beacon Journal article along with multiple home photos – very similar to Better Homes and Gardens. While beautiful, it is the epitome of a “tough sell.” The most recent agent has said of the home that, “It is a tough sell, but not impossible. Even stating of it, “The home never killed anyone.” While that is true, maybe not something you’d usually list as a selling point.
There has been interest in the home including PETA that wanted to turn the home into a vegan restaurant (because God knows the stigma surrounding the place wouldn’t allow you to have a steak house) but they were turned down due to zoning restrictions. The most recent asking price was $295,000.
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