13 Abandoned Mansions

We’re starting out strong with this doozy. Lennox Castle in Scotland was built in 1812 for John Lennox Kincaid Lennox. He was supposedly a distant relative of the Clan Kincaid, who were descendants of some of the notable ancient Earls of Lennox. Long story a little shorter, the castle was home to an important Scottish family—until it was converted into an asylum for the mentally ill in the 1930s and a hospital during WWII, when the existing mentally ill patients were transferred to other buildings on the property.

Apparently, fights among the patients were common, and in one particularly bad fight, much of the staff (along with uninvolved patients) ran from the hospital. But the rioters were locked inside and, in the end, they significantly damaged the ward. The hospital was vacated by the 1980s and officially closed in 2002. There’s now talk of converting the building into flats.

Oooh, how the mighty have fallen. To say Lynnewood Hall is massive would be a massive understatement. Indeed, it’s the twelfth largest historic house in the U.S. It features a whopping 110 rooms (like a ballroom that can accommodate 1,000 guests) outfitted in neoclassical architecture, and it once held the most important private art collection of European masterpieces in the country.

Unsurprisingly, it’s from the Gilded Age. It was built in 1900 for Peter Arrell Brown Widener, a businessman who became wealthy from investing in public transit and meat packing, among other things. He had three sons (one of whom died on the Titanic) and lived in the house until he passed in 1915. His son Joseph inherited the mansion and lived there until he died in 1943 and no surviving members of his family, even his children, wanted to take on the responsibility of the place. By 1945, Widener’s estate was valued at $98,368,058!

A developer later tried to sell Lynnewood, but the only taker was a fundamentalist preacher, Carl McIntire, who bought the home in 1952 for $192,000. It went into foreclosure in 2006 when the McIntire organization couldn’t pay the mortgage.

Built in the 1920s by David T. Abercrombie, the co-founder of Abercrombie & Fitch, this Ossining, New York mansion sits on a whopping 50 acres. Abercrombie’s wife, Lucy Abbot Cate, was the architect behind the home, and she decided to name it after their four children, Elizabeth, Lucy, David, and Abbott. Right after it was completed in 1928, a series of tragedies struck the family: First, their daughter Lucy died in an accident at her dad’s factory, and then the patriarch himself passed away from rheumatic fever in the home, at which point Lucy Sr. moved with her eldest daughter until her own death in 1955.

Left alone, Elda soon fell into disrepair. Strangely enough, part of it was designed to look like the ruins of a Medieval castle. So perhaps the stately home has a mind of its own and is simply determined to fulfill its fate as a place of decay. Little is known about the home’s history between then and now, but, several different owners tried to revive the home to its former glory before falling on hard times themselves. Which begs the question: Is it cursed? Probably not, but you never know!

From the outside, this 11,000 square foot Memphis, Tennesse mock castle doesn’t look like it boasts a history too different from that of Elda. And its earlier history is relatively similar: A wealthy man, Robert Brinkley Snowden, built the property in 1896 for his family and dubbed it Ashlar Hall. They lived there enjoying its eight bedrooms, six bars, five bathrooms, and indoor pool until his death in 1942. After about a decade of grueling upkeep, the family decided to turn it into a place of business, operating it as a restaurant. At some point after that, Ashlar Hall and the surrounding land were purchased by investors who built skyrises around it and left it to rot.

But the inside looks completely different today, telling a decidedly less conventional tale. Fast forward to the 1990s, when Robert Hodges, a.k.a. the self-proclaimed Prince Mongo, transformed it into a nightclub, The Castle. Mongo believes he is an alien ambassador from the imaginary planet of Zambodia and famously sports steampunk goggles, a long white wig, and rubber chickens around town. Among many of his bizarre decisions, he filled the parking lot with sand so it could be used as a “beach” to take the party outside when the fire marshal shut down the nightclub due to repeated overcrowding issues.

The most recent owner, property developer Juan Montoya, bought it at a tax sale for $59,000 and plans to transform the property into an event venue.

Bannerman’s Castle is perched on an island in New York’s Hudson River. Francis Bannerman VI, whose family launched a military surplus business post Civil War, purchased the island in 1900 to use as a warehouse (they bought 90 percent of the weapons the U.S. military captured from the Spanish during the Spanish-American War, for example). He also built a smaller residential structure nearby, but construction ended with his death in 1918. A few later explosions hurt the business further.

When legislation changed in the 20th century, sales rapidly declined, and then a storm devastated the island, destroying the ferry people used to access it. It was pretty much vacant up until the late ’60s, when the state bought it. It was open to the public for tours for about a year, until another fire ravaged it, but the Bannerman Castle Trust recently started holding tours again.

Built in 1929 in Baroque style, the Minxiong Ghost House (aka the Lui family mansion) is a freaky place with a heartbreaking history. Located in the Taiwanese countryside, it’s been abandoned since the 1950s when the family fled abruptly. Like all mysterious places, there’s plenty of lore around the family and why they left the once-beautiful place.

Rumor has it that the family’s maid was having an affair with her employer, Liu Rong-yu, and when the secret became public, she died after jumping down a well (but since she did not live to speak tell the tale, it’s hard to know exactly what happened). A few years later, the property was occupied by members of the Kuomintang of China (KMT), many of whom were also thought to have died of suicide, which exacerbated its reputation as haunted.

Of course, there are also other, far less morbid narratives out there—like the idea that new business required the family to move closer to downtown.

Far more beautiful both in backstory and design than some of the other featured homes here, Casa Sperimentale is an abandoned brutalist treehouse in Fergene, Italy, a coastal town outside of Rome. It’s a fascinating cluster of geometric shapes elevated in the treetops. It was built in the late 1960s by Giuseppe Perugini, his wife Uga De Plaisant, and their son Raynaldo Perugini as a holiday home as well as an experiment to see if it was a livable structure. It’s accessible by a drawbridge staircase to make it feel totally isolated from the rest of the world.

Little information is known about its abandonment, but it probably just fell into disrepair when the architect passed away.

Deep in Missouri’s Ozarks is the Ha Ha Tonka Mansion. Some claim the state park’s name means “laughing waters,” which could either be adorably cheerful or downright creepy, depending on how you see it. This shell of a mansion was the dream of wealthy businessman Robert Snyder. He got to work building a European-style castle on his private lake in 1906, but he soon died in one of Missouri’s first automobile accidents.

His sons continued construction until the mansion was completed in 1920. One of them lived there until he ran out of money due to a string of land-rights lawsuits. Eventually, Snyder’s son was driven off the property and it functioned as a hotel and resort in the mid 20th-century. Eventually the hotel was ruined by a fire and they finally closed down shop. The remains are now a popular site, which you, too, can visit if you get tired of waterskiing and hiking.

Located in Fairfield County, Ohio until recently, the Mudhouse Mansion has a bad reputation. Nobody can seem to agree on when it was built, but it dates back sometime between the 1840s and 1900. Unlike the other abandoned mansions on this list, you sadly can no longer visit it, as the home was demolished in 2015 after not being occupied since the 1930s. The last resident (at least legally speaking) was Lulu Hartman-Mast, and the current owner of the property is her relative Jeanne Mast.

Because there’s so little information about who lived here and when, and because abandoned places tend to ignite the dark side of the imagination, there are tons of legends around alleged atrocities occurring (and consequent hauntings). The sources don’t seem to be very credible, though.

Villa de Vecchi is foreboding, alright. Just consider that looming fog blanket! Located near Lake Como, Italy, the “House of Witches” dates back to 1854-1857, when it was built as a summer house for Count Felix De Vecchi. The family was only able to spend a few years there, as their lives were mired in tragedy right after it was built.

First, the architect died a year after construction. Then in 1862, Count De Vecchi came home to discover his wife murdered and his daughter missing. When he could not find her after a year of searching, he died by suicide. His brother then moved into the home and his family continued to live there until WWII. It’s been vacant since the 1960s, and an avalanche in 2002 wiped out all the houses in the area… except this one. Spooky.

Hegeler Carus Mansion in La Salle, Illinois is one of the few abandoned residences that was actually restored and turned into a landmark. It was built for Henry. C. Hegeler, a zinc manufacturer and publisher, by the same architect who completed the state capitol building and the famous Chicago Water Tower.

The Hegelers had ten children, but two of their daughters died in the same year, with another passing away at age 23. His descendants lived in the seven-floor home until the last one died in 2001. It was only empty for a little while before it was renovated and turned into a museum. Though it has the appearance of “haunted house,” it’s just old and actually has a nice, cheerful energy, some say.

And now for the one I personally find most fascinating: the Los Feliz Murder Mansion. Los Feliz is one of L.A.’s coolest, most livable neighborhoods, but it also has a very dark past with some of history’s most gruesome (and Hollywood-adjacent) murders. There’s the Sowden House, a Lloyd Wright-designed Mayan Revival home rumored to be the murder scene of the Black Dahlia; the home of the Manson murders; and then there’s this place.

It was the seemingly happy home of Dr. Harold Perelson and his family, until the horrific night of December, 6, 1959 when he murdered his wife in her sleep with a ball-peen hammer and attempted to murder his three children before drinking acid to kill himself. Fortunately, his eldest daughter let out a scream when he struck her in the head, waking up the younger children, who then walked into the hallway to find out what was going on. During the commotion, they were all able to flee.

Before the murder-suicide, he was a successful doctor who invented a new type of syringe after investing most of money into its research and production, but he got screwed out of the rights (leading investigators to blame financial problems). Other creepy details include a passage of Dante’s Divine Comedy left open on his bedside table. Two years later, it was sold to the Enriquez family, who used it as a “storage unit,” and their son continued to to do so until he sold it to a couple in 2016 who had plans to fix it up. But it seems to have scared them off because within a few years, it’s on the market again.