In Brief
At Glensheen Mansion in Duluth, Minnesota, two women murdered in the house in 1977 are the ones visitors keep reporting — a cold spot on the staircase where the nurse died, a wash of sadness in the heiress's bedroom.
The Full Story
At Glensheen Mansion in Duluth, Minnesota, the two ghosts people report are the two women who were murdered inside it. One is a cold spot on the grand staircase landing. The other is a feeling that floods a single bedroom and lifts the moment you step out of it.
The house is a 39-room lakefront estate on Lake Superior, built between 1905 and 1908 for the mining magnate Chester Congdon, all wood-paneled walls, tapestries, and leaded glass. On June 27, 1977, his 83-year-old daughter Elisabeth was suffocated with a satin pillow in her own bed. Her night nurse, Velma Pietila, was beaten to death with a brass candlestick on the grand staircase, where her body was found at the bottom.
The tragedy behind this ghost story isn't whispered folklore. It's in the court records. Suspicion fell on Elisabeth's adopted daughter, Marjorie, and Marjorie's husband, Roger Caldwell. The couple was deep in debt, and Marjorie stood to inherit about 8 million dollars when her mother died. Caldwell was convicted in 1978. His conviction was overturned by the Minnesota Supreme Court in 1982. In 1983 he took a plea deal and confessed to both killings, was later released, and died by suicide in 1988. Marjorie was acquitted of the murders, then went on to be twice convicted of arson.
The estate opened to the public as a museum in 1979, two years after the killings. And the haunting, when people started reporting it, mapped onto the crime scene almost exactly. Velma is the cold spot on the staircase landing where she fell. Elisabeth is the room reported to leave visitors with what one account calls "an unexplainable wash of sadness" that lifts the instant they step back out. A white mist gets reported in the library, one of her favorite rooms. Apparitions of both women are said to appear together in the upstairs windows, gazing toward the lake. Staff describe flashes of light from the staircase and faint shadowy figures that surface later in photographs nobody noticed at the time.
For years, the guides wouldn't talk about any of it. Not the ghosts, and not the 1977 murders either, out of respect for the family the dead women left behind. People came through the most famous house on the North Shore and heard about the architecture and the marble vases and the leaded glass, and nothing about the two things that had actually happened inside it.
The house gives you the history it's comfortable telling. The rest, it kept quiet for decades.
