Hearthstone Castle

Hearthstone Castle is a roofless stone mansion rotting in the woods of Danbury, Connecticut, and a hiker on its second floor once looked down through a crack in the broken floorboards and watched something run beneath him. "I saw someone or something through a broken floor board," he wrote, "glowing man run underneath me." He posted it as a teenager, recounting a night he'd gone in to explore.

The castle is real, and old. A New York architect named Ernest Dietrich built it between 1895 and 1899 as a summer estate for E. Starr Sanford, a society portrait photographer who shot the Gilded Age out of a studio on Fifth Avenue. The stone was quarried right on the property and hauled across it on a little railroad built for nothing else. Eight fireplaces gave the place its later name. The story goes that Sanford's wife Emma disliked it, and the family sold after about five years.

It changed hands and names — Sanford Castle, then Buck's Castle, then Hearthstone — and in 1918 a man bought it as a wedding gift for his daughter, Irene Parks. She lived there until her death in 1982. More than six decades, the longest anyone ever stayed. If the castle has a ghost, by the lore it's probably her.

The city took the estate in the mid-1980s and let the building fall apart. The roof caved in. The second floor collapsed into the basement. It sits fenced off in the trees, sixteen rooms open to the sky.

The ghosts come from the people who slip past the fence. They report a dog panting in the basement and two eyes across the dark. Sticks thrown at them. Footsteps that follow them out — "I have heard foot steps following behind me," one wrote.

No record holds a death at the castle, though, no murder, no fire, nothing. Even the site that collects the sightings doubts the glowing man — its editor noted the interior had already collapsed by the year that hiker claimed to walk it.