In Brief
At the Beattie Mansion in St. Joseph, Missouri, the woman who built the house in 1854 is said to still walk the second floor between its two wings. Visitors and the people who run the place say she patrols for men, and doesn't care for them.
The Full Story
There is a woman at the Beattie Mansion in St. Joseph, Missouri, and the people who run the house say she does not like men. They report her on the second floor, in the stretch between the east wing and the west, where she's said to single out the male visitors and let them know they aren't welcome.
They believe she's Eliza Beattie. She and her husband Armstrong built the house in 1854, up on the hill where it still stands, back when Armstrong was the town's first banker and on his way to being mayor five times over. He caught cholera and died in 1878. Eliza died two years after that, in 1880. They left no heirs.
What happened to the house next is the part that stays with you. In 1882 a women's charity bought it and turned it into the Home for the Friendless — a refuge for unwed mothers, for women who'd worked the St. Joseph brothels and gotten pregnant, for anyone with nowhere else. Then it took in orphans. By the early 1900s it was the Memorial Home for the Aged, and it kept the old and the dying for roughly a century. A house full of women the world had set aside, run for generations on the spot where Eliza had run her own.
Armstrong stayed too, in his way. The east wing was his, and he whistled in life. People say they still hear it there.
The others arrived with the house's later lives. A four-year-old orphan named Mabel is said to keep to an upstairs bedroom; during one investigation a music box switched on when the team asked if she was there. A man in overalls and a white shirt is reported at the basement window, the spot the old caretaker is supposed to keep. Visitors describe mocking voices down there, and being shoved.
In 2005 a man named Michael Burkart bought the place to make a boutique hotel. By his account, the staff and contractors he hired kept quitting within a week or two, whatever he paid them. The hotel never opened, and the mansion became one of the most-investigated houses in Missouri instead. Nick Groff and Katrina Weidman brought Paranormal Lockdown there for a 2019 episode, the last time the pair worked a case together for the series.
The investigations kept coming. In October 2024, an Iowa team spent the night, and the house manager, a medium named Mary Ann Podrasky, told them what she lives with: footsteps, whistling, piano music, singing, her own name called out of the quiet. The house went on keeping whoever it had, and turning men away on the second floor.
