Epperson House

Harriet Barse designed a custom organ for Epperson House but died three years before it was completed in 1925. Security guards, staff, and visitors have heard the organ playing at night in the locked, vacant 54-room UMKC mansion ever since, alongside sightings of a woman in an evening gown, a man in a blue suit flipping light switches, and a patrol car pushed eight inches by nothing visible.

The organ in the basement of Epperson House was built for a woman who never got to play it. Harriet Barse, an organ student at the Kansas City Conservatory of Music, designed a custom Reuter organ for the mansion's loft space. She died on December 20, 1922, from a perforated gallbladder at age 47, three years before the instrument was finally dedicated on November 29, 1925. People have heard it playing at night ever since.

Uriah Spray Epperson built this 54-room Tudor-Gothic castle at 5200 Cherry Street between 1919 and 1923 for roughly $450,000, about $8 million today. The architect was Horace LaPierre. The house had six bathrooms, elevators, a Grecian-tiled swimming pool, a billiard room, a barbershop, hand-carved walnut and oak paneling, and a tunnel connecting the east and west wings. Epperson made his fortune in insurance and meatpacking. He brought Harriet into the household as an "adopted daughter," though no legal adoption ever occurred.

Uriah died in 1927, just four years after the house was finished. His widow Mary donated it to the University of Kansas City (now UMKC) in 1942. The Navy used it as an air cadet dormitory during World War II, then it became a men's dorm until 1956. The conservatory used it for practice space in the 1970s. It has been vacant since 2011.

The haunting stories are layered and persistent. A popular version of the legend claims Uriah had a psychiatric breakdown after Harriet died, murdered his wife, and killed himself inside the house. None of that happened. Uriah did not murder Mary, who survived him by twelve years. He did not commit suicide. But the false version of the story is so widespread that it made Unsolved Mysteries' list of the top five haunted houses in America.

What people actually report is more interesting than the fabricated murder-suicide. Security guards in the 1970s and 1980s described lights turning off sequentially as they searched the building, as if someone was staying one step ahead of them. In 1978, a guard saw the arm of a man in a blue suit reach from behind a door and flip a light switch. In 1979, a patrol car parked outside was pushed eight inches with no visible cause. A chandelier fell from the ceiling on its own.

Staff and investigators describe a woman in an evening gown near the grand staircase. Cold spots drop 20 degrees without warning. The smell of roasting bread drifts through the former servants' quarters. Children's laughter echoes from empty rooms. Equipment fails in the library and on the stairs, where EMF readings spike even with electrical systems turned off.

The organ remains the signature phenomenon. Multiple witnesses over multiple decades report hearing it at night when the house is locked and empty. The instrument Harriet designed, built by the Reuter Organ Company of Lawrence, Kansas, plays for an audience of no one in a house that hasn't been regularly occupied in decades.

New plans announced in January 2025 would convert the mansion into a 14-room boutique hotel and spa, complete with a restaurant and hydrothermal spa. If that goes forward, guests sleeping inside Epperson House will get to test the stories for themselves.