Morse Mill Hotel

Missouri's first female serial killer, Bertha Gifford, once managed this pre-Civil War hotel in Jefferson County where she poisoned at least 17 neighbors with arsenic. The building, which also served as a slaveholding site, Underground Railroad stop, and Confederate hospital, is now a private residence closed to the public, but a ghost girl named Annabell still insists she's five years old to anyone who'll listen.

Bertha Gifford nursed her neighbors back to health, and then she killed them. Between 1906 and 1928, the farmwife who once managed the Morse Mill Hotel in Jefferson County, Missouri poisoned at least 17 people with arsenic in the nearby town of Catawissa. She bought rat poison from local druggists, sometimes just hours before a victim died. When authorities finally exhumed the bodies of Edward Brinley and brothers Elmer and Lloyd Schamel, they found massive amounts of arsenic in all three. Her 1928 trial lasted three days. She was found not guilty by reason of insanity and spent the rest of her life institutionalized, dying at Missouri State Hospital in 1951.

The hotel where Gifford once worked predates her by almost a century. A farmhouse went up on this land in 1816, then was expanded to four stories before the Civil War. The property sits on what was once Native American burial ground, and its basement has evidence of shackles from its years as a slaveholding site. The building later served as a stop on the Underground Railroad and then a Confederate field hospital. After the war, it cycled through identities: hotel, brothel, speakeasy, post office, halfway house. John Morse built the mill that gave the town its name in the 1870s, but the building's story stretches back further than any single owner.

The ghost of a young girl named Annabell is the most frequently encountered presence. She talks to visitors, always cheerful, always insisting she's five years old. Everyone who sees her says she looks about twelve. Nobody knows why the number matters to her, but she never wavers on the claim. Guests have left toys for her in the attic, and staff say she moves them to different rooms overnight. She's playful and friendly, the lightest presence in a building with a deeply heavy past.

The basement is a different experience entirely. Visitors hear chains rattling in the small hours, in the room where the shackles hang. The sound people describe is specific: someone wrenching against metal restraints, scraping and straining. It happens most often between 2 and 4 AM. A figure connected to the building's days as a slaveholding property has been reported in that same dark room, which locals have taken to calling "the dungeon."

Upstairs, an older male presence drifts through the upper floors. Paranormal investigators have documented floating orbs, locks that unlatch themselves, and doors that swing open and shut with no draft. Travel Channel featured the property on Most Terrifying Places in America. Multiple local investigation teams have run overnight sessions and come back with audio recordings and photographs they couldn't account for.

The building's history stacks tragedy on tragedy when you total it up. Enslaved people held in chains. Wounded Confederate soldiers bleeding out in makeshift wards. Bertha Gifford's arsenic victims, poisoned by the very woman their families called to help. More than two centuries of suffering soaked into one four-story farmhouse in rural Missouri.

The Morse Mill Hotel is now a private residence. New owners bought the property, renovated it extensively, and shut the doors to the public and to paranormal investigators. Their position is simple: they leave the spirits alone, and the spirits return the favor.