In Brief
At Burn Brae Mansion in Glen Spey, New York, guests keep hearing children's voices and balls bouncing across the empty attic above them. When a TV crew chased the noise, they tore down a wall and found a room hidden behind it.
The Full Story
The most active room at Burn Brae Mansion in Glen Spey, New York, is the attic, and the trouble there is the sound of children. Guests sleeping below report voices, and balls bouncing across the floor above them, in a room with no one in it.
When the Ghost Nation team came to chase the escalating activity for an episode called "Evil in the Attic," they followed the noise to a wall, tore it down, and found a room hidden behind it. The discovery didn't explain the voices. It just sat there, a sealed space no one had known about, in a house with no murder and no massacre to point to.
What the house has instead is a family. Burn Brae was built around 1907, by the owners' account in 1908, by Charles Elkin and his wife Margaret, daughter of George Ross Mackenzie, the third president of the Singer Sewing Machine Company. Mackenzie loved this stretch of the Catskills because it reminded him of Scotland; in 1880 he renamed the hamlet Glen Spey. When he died his estate ran to $3.5 million, and seven of his children built summer mansions in the valley. Burn Brae is one of three still standing.
Margaret outlived several of her own children. A daughter died as a young child before the house was even built, and a grandchild named Levi was stillborn in 1940. Several Elkins lie in the Glen Spey Cemetery at the end of a walking trail through the property's woods, which means guests pass the family graves on their way back to the house. The attic upstairs is where the children are heard.
The mansion has drawn the cameras for years. Ghost Hunters featured it in an episode built around the Mackenzie family's losses, and Jason Hawes told the owners that whatever was here was not malicious. A later investigation that ran motion sensors, heat sensors, and recorders over several days came away with more than 180 photos and recordings, and the conclusion that the house is haunted. The place leans into it now, operating as a bed and breakfast that takes overnight bookings for private ghost investigations.
Charles Elkin was an organist. Among everything people report here, doors opening and slamming, a woman in white on the servants' stairs, a man in turn-of-the-century clothes, is one detail that does not belong in any other house. Guests describe, in the words of one account, "the distinct sound of an organ playing, when there is no organ in the house."
