What Is the Most Haunted Place in the World? The Top 20

Five separate buildings right now describe themselves as the most haunted place on Earth, and none of them are able to substantiate their claims. It is a marketing tool, not a measurement. No one measures ghost populations.

What you could do is research which places generate consistent reports from independent sources throughout many decades, and which places have history documented enough to provide explanation of why those stories began. These are two distinct issues, and the places interesting to study are the ones which have both of them solved.

Below are presented twenty such locations, along with their histories, and the point where famous story collapses.

The short summary

There is no universally agreed most haunted place in the world. Tower of London is the answer provided by the vast majority of people because of its nine centuries of executions and imprisonments. Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia gets the biggest number of visitors in regard to paranormal tourism. The only place in the world where official government restriction on visiting after dark exists is Bhangarh Fort in Rajasthan. Each place has its own claim, and it is based on something different.

Selection criteria

There were three criteria for the location to be included in the list.

Firstly, there should be a history of events, not the atmosphere of the place. Real record of deaths, imprisonments, illnesses or violent incidents should be documented and attached to specific building. Many popular haunted houses have been proven fictional when investigated.

Secondly, independent reports over a long period of time should be present. Single viral video does not count. What really matters is strangers reporting the same experience in the same room over many decades, even after the place became famous.

Thirdly, the place should still exist. Borley Rectory was considered the most haunted house in England for a while, but then it was destroyed in 1939.

The twenty at a glance

Place	Country	Why it has the reputation
Tower of London	England	Nine centuries of executions and imprisonment
Edinburgh Vaults	Scotland	Sealed chambers under the city, long abandoned
Ancient Ram Inn	England	A 12th century inn built on older ground
Leap Castle	Ireland	Clan violence and a pit found full of remains
Poveglia Island	Italy	Plague quarantine island, later an asylum
Chateau de Brissac	France	A 15th century murder in the family home
Bhangarh Fort	India	The only site with an official after-dark notice
Shaniwar Wada	India	The murder of a teenage Peshwa heir
Old Changi Hospital	Singapore	Wartime occupation history, now derelict
Monte Cristo Homestead	Australia	A string of deaths in one family home
Port Arthur	Australia	A convict settlement with a heavy death toll
Banff Springs Hotel	Canada	Two long-running staff and guest legends
Island of the Dolls	Mexico	Fifty years of dolls hung in the trees
Eastern State Penitentiary	United States	Solitary confinement built into the design
Waverly Hills Sanatorium	United States	Tuberculosis hospital with a body tunnel
Trans-Allegheny Asylum	United States	Built for 250 people, held nearly ten times that
The Stanley Hotel	United States	The hotel that produced The Shining
Myrtles Plantation	United States	The best known haunted house in the South
Winchester Mystery House	United States	Decades of building with no coherent plan
Villisca Axe Murder House	United States	Eight people killed in one night in 1912

Britain and Ireland

1. Tower of London, England

An easy and quite justifiable response. Tower has served as a fortress, palace, prison and execution ground since the 11th century, and there is an extensive list of those who lost their lives in it. Anne Boleyn was executed by decapitation on Tower Green in 1536, being one of the ghosts who are named at once. Two young princes went missing in 1483, and some remains found near the stairs remain disputable up to now. Lady Jane Grey was executed at the age of seventeen. Yeoman Warders have been collecting witness statements for generations, and what is quite rare is that the majority of witnesses had something to lose.

2. The Edinburgh Vaults, Scotland

It is the network of rooms built under the arches of South Bridge in the late 1780s for storing. Later they got flooded and decayed, and thus they were used for people who had nowhere else to go. They were sealed and forgotten for most of 19th and 20th centuries and opened again only in the 1980s. Tourist groups tell the same stories in the same chambers. Ghost stories from nearby Greyfriars Kirkyard are much more impressive, especially from the Mackenzie Poltergeist, who allegedly made visitors collapse in the Black Mausoleum. Whatever takes place there, it happens to a lot of people.

3. The Ancient Ram Inn, Gloucestershire

It is the timber-framed building in Wotton-under-Edge, some part of which dates back to 1145. In 1968 it was bought by John Humphries, who stayed there until his death and did not make any serious repair. It makes a difference. Most haunted buildings turn into hotels. This one was left to rot and walk into it is the closest way for many people to experience a genuine medieval interior. The ghost stories about it are lurid and mostly unverified. The building itself needs no help.

4. Leap Castle, County Offaly, Ireland

This building is distinguished by the darkest physical detail of all listed buildings. The workmen, who cleared the oubliette beneath the Bloody Chapel (where the prisoners were thrown down) in the early 20th century found cartloads of human bones. The Bloody Chapel is where one of brothers murdered another during the feud between members of O Carroll clan, the owner of the castle. The castle is privately owned and inhabited at present days, and this fact usually surprises people.

Continental Europe

5. Poveglia Island, Italy

A small island in the Venetian lagoon used as a quarantine station during outbreaks of plague and later, from the 1920s to the 1960s, as a hospital for the mentally ill. It has been shut down and out of bounds for decades, which explains much of its notoriety. You’ll be told that half of the island consists of human ashes. No one proved it and no one measured it. The documented history is gruesome enough without it.

6. Chateau de Brissac, France

The tallest chateau in France, still in the hands of the same family, and the place where the Green Lady lives. The legend goes back to the 15th century and the murder of the mistress in her bedroom at the hands of her husband. Her ghost is depicted in the same manner by the unrelated witnesses as the lady in green dress with a disfigured face always staying in the tower room. What makes Brissac different from most of the haunted places in France is the fact that the family has never covered it up nor exploited. On the contrary, they rent out the rooms and let the people decide on their own.

Asia

7. Bhangarh Fort, Rajasthan, India

It’s the strongest claim on the list for one simple reason – it has an official document attached to it. The Archaeological Survey of India issued a notice of restricted access to the site after sunset and before sunrise. Irrelevant of the reasons for it, nothing like that has ever been done by any other government in the world. The Bhangarh fort goes back to the 16th century and is associated with the sorcerer, a princess and a curse which led to the abandonment of the town. This legend, coupled with the official notice is what gives the place its notoriety.

8. Shaniwar Wada, Pune, India

The Peshwa seat of power built in the 1730s and largely burnt down in 1828 with only the walls and the gates remaining. In 1773 the teenage heir Narayanrao was murdered in the palace during the family struggle for the power and his scream when chased through the palace halls is the thing claimed by the visitors to hear there. It’s the true murder of a true child in a true building which is something few places on the list can boast.

9. Old Changi Hospital, Singapore

The British military hospital erected in the 1930s and left abandoned since the late 1990s. It became notorious for the events that took place there during the Japanese occupation in the Second World War, though some of the stories concerning it are disputed by historians. The building is one of the most popular subjects for photos of abandoned buildings in Asia though visiting it is strictly forbidden and prosecuted.

Australia

10. Monte Cristo Homestead, Junee, New South Wales

The most famous haunted house in Australia is a Victorian homestead built in 1885 by Christopher Crawley. Throughout its working life, there have been quite a few strange deaths there, including falls, a fire and a stable death, and the family who purchased it in the 1960s has run it as a tour house ever since, living there as well. The last detail is a curious one indeed. They stayed.

11. Port Arthur, Tasmania

A prison settlement functioning from 1830 to 1877, with many men worked to death there. Now a World Heritage site, it runs established evening tours related to the convict era. Moreover, the place was a scene of mass shootings that occurred in 1996, during which 35 people were killed, still within the living memory of some of the victims and their families who live in the area. This place does not feature this event as a part of its ghost tour and nobody writing about it should either.

Canada and Mexico

12. Banff Springs Hotel, Alberta, Canada

A grand railway hotel located in the Rocky Mountains that opened in 1888 and has had two stories going along with it for over a century. One of the stories is of a bride who had a fall on the stairs on her wedding day and the other one is about Sam, the bellman, believed to have kept working after his death and who is supposedly associated with room 873, sealed by the hotel for good. Both of these stories are typical of hotel lore and the hotel has never tried to sell them as historical facts. They are told really well, that’s why.

13. Island of the Dolls, Xochimilco, Mexico

This place is not a haunting place per se but one man’s fifty years’ response to one. Julian Santana Barrera has found a girl who was drowned in the canal near his property and started hanging dolls in the trees in order to keep her spirit calm. In time, there have been thousands of dolls hung there in the sun-bleached and half-decayed state. Mr. Barrera passed away in 2001, allegedly in the same canal. The place is not scary because of its haunting. It is scary because of what grief did to a man for five decades.

The United States

14. Eastern State Penitentiary, Philadelphia

Opened in 1829, the building was based on one idea only: solitary confinement. Prisoners were hooded while being moved so that they would not see the building and kept alone for years. After the visit there Charles Dickens had written that the system was even more cruel than physical punishment. The prison was closed in 1971 and now is a museum attracting the largest number of paranormal tourists in America. The point of this place is that the harm done was architectural and not accidental.

15. Waverly Hills Sanatorium, Kentucky

This is a tuberculosis hospital outside Louisville, opened in 1710 and rebuilt in 1926, used to treat a disease which could be cured by antibiotics only. It features a tunnel that was built in order to carry supplies and dead bodies up and down without the patients seeing anything. One can find a figure of 63,000 deaths everywhere. However, there is nothing to support such information and more serious estimates are closer to six or eight thousands. It is still an immense number of people who have died in the same building and such numbers do not add anything to its reputation.

16. Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, West Virginia

This is a vast hand-cut stone building in Weston, started in 1858 according to the Kirkbride plan stating that light, air and space were capable of treating mental illnesses. The building was supposed to accommodate 250 patients. In the 1950s it held close to 2,400 of them. Everything that went wrong there happened because of that. The building was closed in 1994 and is hosting tours now. However, the most impressive feature of the place is not its ghost stories, but admission records telling of reasons for committal that would not survive just five minutes in nowadays.

17. The Stanley Hotel, Estes Park, Colorado

A hotel opened by F.O. Stanley in 1909 and featured on every list of haunted places because of one guest only. Stephen King stayed in room 217 in 1974, near the end of the season when the hotel was almost empty, and left with his novel The Shining. Worth knowing: Kubrick has not filmed there, therefore, the image you have in your mind is not the building itself. In 1997 the TV series was filmed on-site. The hotel has embraced all of it and has become the most comfortable place on the list.

18. Myrtles Plantation, Louisiana

This is the most famous haunted house in the American South and the place with the biggest difference between the legend and the record. The typical story tells of an enslaved woman called Chloe, of the poisoned cake and of ten murders that took place there. However, historians have never managed to verify any of it. There is no proof of existence of Chloe. There was only one murder confirmed to take place there in 1871, committed on William Winter. The house is real and the grounds are the burial place for enslaved people, which is a heavy fact compared to the ghost story that is being sold there.

19. Winchester Mystery House, California

In 1886 Sarah Winchester, widow of the rifle fortune, has purchased an unfinished farmhouse in San Jose and kept building it for years. There are stairs ending at ceilings and doors opening into the drop in the house. The popular version of the story tells of the medium advising to build without stopping or the spirits of the victims of Winchester rifles would have taken her. That is not quite true: the story came mainly from newspapers and later owners. The more likely version is that of a very rich, very private and very grieving woman having no architect and no reason to stop.

20. Villisca Axe Murder House, Iowa

The smallest building here and, measured by what actually happened in it, the worst. Eight people were killed in a single night in June 1912 in a 1,200 square foot house in a small Iowa town. Six of them were children. Nobody was ever convicted. The house has been restored to its exact 1912 condition, without electricity or plumbing, and runs overnight stays. The full story is covered in detail here.

Two places you will see elsewhere that are not on this list

Aokigahara in Japan appears on almost every list of this kind. It should not. It is a real place where people go to end their lives, it is not a haunted attraction, and treating it as one is indefensible.

Borley Rectory in Essex held the title of most haunted house in England for decades on the strength of Harry Price’s investigation in the 1930s. Price’s methods and some of his evidence were later seriously challenged, and the building burned down in 1939. It belongs in the history of ghost hunting rather than on a list of places.

So which one is actually the most haunted

If you want a single answer to most haunted place in the world, the honest one is that the question does not have a winner, because there is no unit to measure it in.

If you want the place with the strongest official acknowledgement, it is Bhangarh Fort, because a government agency put up a sign. If you want the longest unbroken record of reports from people with nothing to gain, it is the Tower of London. If you want the place where the documented history is worst relative to its size, it is Villisca.

And if you want my actual view, the reputation usually follows the history rather than the other way round. Places where a great many people suffered in a confined space produce these stories, and places where nothing much happened do not, no matter how old and creaking they are. That is a statement about how human memory attaches itself to buildings and objects, which is the same thing that keeps people writing letters to a doll in Key West. It does not require anything supernatural, and it is not less interesting for that.

Visiting any of these

Most of the twenty are open to the public in some form, several run overnight stays, and a few are private homes or illegal to enter. Check before you travel, because access and prices change constantly and several sites limit numbers.

One thing worth carrying into all of them. Fourteen of these places are on the list because a large number of real people died badly there, and at several of them descendants are still local. Go, look, stay the night if you want to. Just do not treat the dead like set dressing.

Frequently asked questions