Bothwell Lodge

Sedalia attorney John Homer Bothwell spent 31 years building a 31-room mansion on top of three caves, complete with secret passages and hidden compartments, then died one year after finishing it. Tour guides at the state historic site now calmly confirm that the figures visitors see in early-twentieth-century clothing aren't reenactors.

A wooden box in the storage room beneath the library covers a shaft that drops straight into a cave. Bothwell Lodge in Sedalia, Missouri was built on top of three natural caves, and its creator, attorney John Homer Bothwell, spent years trying to use them as a primitive air conditioning system, piping cool subterranean air up through the house via a winding stairwell in the tower. He rigged doors and windows that could be opened to create a draft pulling the cave air upward. It worked, sort of, until he gave up on the idea around 1917. The caves are down there, sealed off beneath the floorboards.

Bothwell was a Sedalia lawyer born in Maysville, Illinois in 1848. He graduated from the University of Indiana in 1869, finished law school in Albany, New York in 1871, and settled in Sedalia as assistant prosecuting attorney for Pettis County. He served as a state representative and supervised the Republican State Convention in 1904. In 1897 he started building a summer cottage on a bluff north of town. By the time he was done in 1928, the cottage had become a 12,000-square-foot, 31-room Craftsman mansion with medieval European touches, including a decorative tower with a parapet. The whole structure was built from native rock quarried on the estate grounds. Secret passages and hidden compartments run through the house. A house practically built to collect ghost stories.

Bothwell died in 1929, one year after the lodge was finally finished. He left the property not to family but to a group of friends and relatives he called "The Bothwell Lodge Club." They used the mansion for the next four decades. Missouri acquired the property in 1974 and opened it as a state historic site on 180 acres along Highway 65.

Tour guides at the lodge have learned to distinguish between live visitors and the others. People on tours sometimes spot figures wearing early-twentieth-century clothing, standing at the base of staircases or drifting through hallways. When they point them out, the guides confirm what they're seeing. Those aren't reenactors. Staff at the lodge acknowledge the sightings without fanfare, like it's just part of the job.

A girl in a white dress appears on the upper floors. Visitors have heard children's voices in empty rooms, laughing and chattering when no kids were on the tour. People sitting in chairs during presentations have felt someone sit down beside them when nobody was there. Footsteps run back and forth in the hallways at hours when the lodge should be sealed up and silent.

Doors open and close on their own. Personal objects left on tables go missing and reappear in different rooms entirely. The winding staircases and hidden passages that made the lodge architecturally unusual also make it feel like someone could always be just around the next corner, watching from a concealed doorway that looks like a wall.

Missouri State Parks runs regular tours of the interior, and while the haunting isn't the official draw, the staff doesn't pretend it doesn't happen either. Bothwell spent 31 years building a house he got to enjoy for exactly one. The friends he trusted with his life's work kept it alive for forty more. And every tour guide on staff has a story about the time they answered a question from someone who wasn't on the guest list.