Griggs Mansion

The Griggs Mansion at 476 Summit Avenue in St. Paul has a reputation as the most haunted house in Minnesota, and in 1969 the man who owned it set out to put an end to that. He invited reporters and a photographer from the St. Paul Pioneer Press to spend a night and prove the place was ordinary.

The owner was a strange man to be making that bet. Carl Weschcke ran Llewellyn Worldwide, the country's oldest occult-and-metaphysical publisher, and he'd bought the 24-room brownstone in 1964. He wasn't a skeptic. He was a man who believed in this kind of thing inviting the press in to disprove the legend on his own house.

It didn't go the way he planned. The reporters left before morning, around 4 a.m., after they heard footsteps climbing the stairs toward their room. They closed their write-up with a line that became the house's epitaph: there was no prize on earth that could get them to spend a single night alone in that great stone house.

The mansion was built in 1883 for Chauncey Griggs, a Civil War colonel turned grocery and lumber merchant, who lived in it only four years before leaving for Tacoma. Fire gutted it in 1910. From 1939 to 1964 it housed an art school, and the stories pile up around those years: a student who reported a child's see-through head floating above the bed in the late 1950s, doors and windows that opened on their own, light bulbs that shattered, coughs from empty rooms.

The most-told ghost of all predates the school. The legend goes that a maid hanged herself from the top-floor landing around 1915 after a love affair fell apart, and that she drifts the upper floors now as a white mist that arrives with a sense of dread. No death certificate, no newspaper, no record of any kind backs the story up — it lives only in the telling. By some accounts the house holds as many as half a dozen of these spirits.

Weschcke himself told of standing in 1964 and watching a man in a dark suit hold his gaze from the library doorway for half a minute, then vanish. The figure is tied to a former caretaker said to haunt the books, heard rustling their pages in a room with no one in it.

Here is the part that complicates all of it. One family lived in the mansion for roughly 27 years, until around 2012 — longer than anyone. They said they never experienced anything haunted at all. The reputation that sent reporters running rests on a handful of mid-century nights, in a house its longest residents found perfectly quiet.