Dana-Thomas House

A light sconce launched itself off the wall on the anniversary of owner Susan Lawrence Dana's death at this Frank Lloyd Wright masterpiece in Springfield. Dana, who lost two husbands, two infants, and both parents, held seances in the very rooms Wright designed for entertaining, and staff and visitors still report a woman in black appearing on dates tied to her personal tragedies.

A light sconce ripped itself off the wall of the Dana-Thomas House on the anniversary of Susan Lawrence Dana's death. No earthquake, no vibration, no logical reason. The fixture just launched from the plaster and hit the floor. The date was February 20.

The State of Illinois, which maintains the house as a museum, officially denies any haunting. Staff members have a different take. "It's a standing joke among us, that Susan still walks the halls, watching over," one employee told Springfield newspapers.

Frank Lloyd Wright designed the house in 1902 for Susan Lawrence Dana, a Springfield socialite with money, taste, and a growing obsession with the spirit world. Wright was 35 years old. He built her something extraordinary: 12,000 square feet across 35 rooms on 16 different levels, filled with more than 100 original pieces of furniture and 450 art glass windows, doors, and light fixtures that he designed himself. It was his 72nd building and remains the best-preserved of his early Prairie houses. It is also, by a wide margin, the most haunted Frank Lloyd Wright property in America.

Susan had her reasons for turning to spiritualism. Her husband Edwin Ward Dana died in 1894 in a mining accident in Oregon. Two infants died during childbirth. Her father, R.D. Lawrence, died on February 17, 1901. Her mother suffered a fatal heart attack in 1904. Her second husband, Jorgen Constantin Dahl, died in 1913, just one year after they married.

By the 1910s, Susan was consulting mediums regularly. She founded the "Springfield Society of Applied Psychology" in the house, which later became the "Lawrence Metaphysical Center" in 1924. She held seances in the very rooms Wright had designed for entertaining. The center eventually moved downtown in 1927, and Susan closed the main house around 1928, moving across the street.

The phenomena that staff and visitors describe tend to cluster around specific dates. Susan's birthday. The day her mother died. The dates of the three funerals held inside the house. Springfield newspapers have documented reports of footsteps in empty corridors and the sound of hands clapping when no one else is in the building.

Curtains move on their own. Chairs get thrown down staircases. A woman in black has been seen in multiple areas of the house, always briefly, always at the edge of vision. The reports come from visitors and staff independently, and they describe the same figure.

The house sat neglected for decades after Susan left. It changed hands, declined, and nearly disappeared before the state acquired it. A full restoration brought it back, and the art glass collection alone is worth the visit. Wright designed every window to catch light at specific times of day, creating shifting patterns across the interior that change hour to hour. It's a living piece of architecture, one of the few Wright houses where almost nothing has been removed or replaced.

Management's official position hasn't changed. There is no ghost. But the February 20 sconce incident happened. The clapping sounds keep getting reported. And the woman in black keeps showing up on the dates that mattered to Susan Lawrence Dana, in the house that Wright built to her exact specifications, ninety years after she left it.