Glenn House

One evening at the Glenn House in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, the board met with the doors locked, and every member in the room heard the front door open. Footsteps crossed the hall, climbed the stairs, went down the upstairs corridor, and walked into the children's bedroom. They searched the house and found no one. The front door was still locked. Because it happened during a meeting, it went into the official minutes.

The house had been standing nearly a century by then. Architect Edwin Branch Deane built it in 1883 for his daughter Lula and her husband, David Glenn, a banker and merchant who ran a mercantile company on the square. It is a painted-brick Victorian with a turret and an oriel window, and the family moved in the year it was finished. They had six children here. Three of them died young, in the house, in the years when illness took infants fast. In 1901, Deane himself was laid out for his funeral in the downstairs parlor, in the home he had drawn.

The ghost staff describe most often is a young girl, a child of the extended family who died of an illness inside these walls. The activity gathers in the Children's Room. Guides report little footsteps from inside it and toys that move on their own. The director has called the nursery the scariest room in the house, and says she won't be in the building after dark.

For a while, the staff put up a tree at Christmas and wrapped empty boxes to set underneath, the way the Glenns would have. They kept finding the boxes opened by morning, unwrapped the way a child opens a present. They stopped wrapping anything.

A film crew packing up after a Halloween shoot heard a crash, as if every door in the house had slammed at once. The footage showed every door standing open, with nothing on screen to make the sound.

The house turned up on A&E's "Ghost Hunters" in 2020, in an episode called "The Glenn Family Curse." It was built around Sarah Glenn Marsh, a great-great-granddaughter of David and Lula. In 2019 she found an ancestor's photo with the house's address written on the back, reconnected with the home, and reported sightings began to climb. The case file ran long: a man in a dark coat in the kitchen, an organ that played itself, the original servant-bell system ringing on its own after it had been disconnected from the wall.

"It's been a little bit hard to actually say out loud," the board president told a local station, "that many of us believe the Glenn House is haunted."

The Glenns lost the business and the house in 1915, sold it, and never came back. The home keeps a child's footsteps anyway, and once, with the doors locked and witnesses in the room, it wrote one down.