In Brief
At the Enslin House in Troy, New York, owner Michele Bell counts nine ghosts and knows five of them by name. They're her own dead relatives. The other four she's less sure of, and the most active is a tenant found dead at the bottom of the basement stairs.
The Full Story
At the Enslin House in Troy, New York, the owner counts nine ghosts, and five of them are family. Michele Bell's people have held the home at 562 Fifth Avenue, in the Lansingburgh section of the city, for six generations. She knows the five by name. They're her dead relatives, her late son Nick among them. The other four she's less comfortable with: a former tenant, and three unidentified men.
The tenant is the one she calls the most active. Her name was Shirley, and she was found dead at the bottom of the basement stairs. The family tells it that she was pushed and left there for days. There's no police record, no newspaper account, nothing to confirm any of it; the story traces back entirely to the family's own telling. But the basement, where Shirley died, is kept permanently locked, along with several other rooms in the house.
The home goes back to the late 1800s. Bell's great-grandfather, a Bavarian immigrant named Frederick Anthony Feyl, bought the property in 1919. In the early 1900s it ran as a supper club and speakeasy, and the family's oral history puts the gangster Jack "Legs" Diamond among its guests; Diamond himself was shot dead in Albany in 1931. None of those long-ago figures are the ones the family worries about. The ones they count are closer than that.
People report flying orbs, footsteps with no one walking, and tall figures crossing the halls around 3 a.m. Up in the attic, a space the family calls the Artist's Loft, there's a tall man, and the faint sense of young girls nearby. Bell, who describes herself as "an intuitive alchemist, empath and real estate salesperson," puts the whole house plainly: "It has a lot of spirits. It's very haunted."
When she listed the place in 2021, she priced it at exactly $444,444, a number she tied to guardian angels and said she had no plans to change. The figure drew its own wave of coverage. The house has also been filmed for TLC, Discovery ID, and HGTV's "Scariest House in America," which it won for the Northeast region.
It was during that HGTV shoot that the host, Retta, was standing in the basement when she realized she was on the exact spot where Shirley's body was found. She went up the stairs on camera and didn't stop. The basement she fled is the one the family still keeps locked.
