In Brief
The James J. Hill House on Summit Avenue in St. Paul has every feature a haunted house should have: 42 rooms, dragon-carved gas lamps, a secret door, an organ that sighs through the walls. The museum that runs it insists nothing walks there. The ghost-tour guides disagree.
The Full Story
The James J. Hill House sits on Summit Avenue in St. Paul, a 36,000-square-foot pile of red sandstone, and St. Paul's ghost-tour guides say a dead woman still takes a seat at the music performances held inside it. They name her Maud Hill, the daughter-in-law of the railroad baron who built the place, and they tell it the same way: she settles into the audience for the recitals in the mansion's gallery, the way she might have when she was alive. Up on the third floor, the same guides say, a small dog wanders the rooms, a pet the Hill children once kept.
The man who built it would have understood the part about the house. James J. Hill ran the Great Northern Railway, and over three years of construction, finished in 1891, he raised the largest private home in Minnesota: 42 rooms, 22 fireplaces, 13 bathrooms, a two-story skylit art gallery, all of it for $931,275.01 including the furniture. The style is Richardsonian Romanesque, all rounded arches and heavy stone, the same style first used in America for a madhouse. The gas lamps are carved into dragons. There are faces hidden in the woodwork. The dining-room wall holds a secret door to a safe. And the pipe organ that fills one wall of the gallery leaks air through its pipes as they snake up through the building, so the house breathes a constant low rushing sound on its own.
There is one wrinkle in the lore. Maud and her husband Louis, James J. Hill's son, lived in their own house a few doors down Summit Avenue, not in the baron's mansion at all. They separated in 1934, and she moved away across town. Yet the story plants her ghost here, in the bigger house, in the seats of the gallery.
It looks, in other words, exactly like the place a ghost would live. The novelist Shirley Jackson named her famous haunted house Hill House too, though she meant a different one. A local critic put the real one plainly: "If ever there was a building that looked as though it should be haunted, it's the James J. Hill house in St. Paul."
The Minnesota Historical Society, which has run it as a museum since 1978, says it isn't. No grave, no death record, nothing in the archives ties Maud's ghost to this house. The guides keep telling it anyway.
And every October, the museum dims the lights in the parlor where the Hill family once read aloud to each other, and brings in actors to read Poe by candlelight.
