Vaile Mansion

Sophia Vaile took a morphine overdose in this 31-room Second Empire mansion in February 1883 while her husband Harvey was on trial for mail fraud in Washington. Her ghost appears in white on the second floor where she died, a sanitarium patient roams the third floor, and an angry presence in the basement has driven the mansion to close its doors to paranormal investigators more than once.

After Sophia Vaile died, her husband Harvey tried to bury her in a glass coffin on the grounds of Vaile Mansion so he could continue to see her face. The neighbors protested until he agreed to a conventional burial. Then he became a recluse and died alone in the same house twelve years later.

Colonel Harvey M. Vaile spent ten years and $150,000 (roughly $4.7 million today) building his Second Empire mansion in Independence, Missouri. Architect Asa Beebe Cross designed thirty-one rooms with fourteen-foot ceilings, nine marble fireplaces, and two chandeliers purchased from the White House for $800. The house was the first in Jackson County with indoor plumbing, had a built-in 6,000-gallon water tank, and beneath it all, a wine cellar that held 48,000 gallons. When it was finished in 1881, it was the most expensive private home in the region.

Vaile made his fortune through Erie Canal investments and Star Mail route operations. The Star Route scandal caught up with him in the early 1880s, when federal prosecutors charged him with defrauding the government through inflated mail delivery contracts. He faced two trials, in 1882 and 1883, and was acquitted both times. But the legal defense cost him over $100,000, and the scandal destroyed his social standing in Independence.

While Harvey was in Washington for his second trial in February 1883, Sophia learned she had stomach cancer. She took an overdose of morphine in their second-floor bedroom. Whether it was suicide or an attempt at pain relief that went wrong has been debated, though most sources call it a suspected suicide. Harvey was not home when she died.

The mansion went through a series of owners after Vaile's death in 1895. It operated as a sanatorium starting in 1908, then a nursing home and a spring water bottling operation under attorney Carey May Carroll. In 1983, the property was donated to the City of Independence, and the Vaile Victorian Society began a long restoration. It operates as a historic house museum today.

Sophia is the ghost people see. A woman in white wanders the second floor, which is where she died, and visitors on the grounds below have looked up to see her staring down at them from the windows. The sightings are frequent enough that staff treat them as a known feature of the building rather than a novelty. She has been described as looking directly at people, then simply not being there the next time they glance up.

The third floor has its own presence. A young man, thought to be a former patient from the sanitarium years, has been seen roaming the upper rooms. The story is that he spent his entire life on that floor until his death, and he seems uninterested in leaving.

The basement is different from the upper floors. Where Sophia and the sanitarium patient feel quiet, almost indifferent to the living, something in the basement is angry. Visitors and investigators describe loud bangs, a male voice that comes from no visible source, and EVP recordings that suggest someone down there wants attention. On at least one occasion, a full-bodied figure was seen in the basement. The mansion was closed to all paranormal investigations for years after a bad experience with a psychic, though American Hauntings has since resumed overnight ghost hunts at the property.

Dark shapes move through the hallways and up and down the main staircase. They are quick, peripheral, and gone when you look. Charlie Beck, a member of the Vaile Victorian Society, put it simply when asked about the ghosts: "Maybe the ghosts don't like me." He hadn't seen one himself. But he'd heard enough from people who had.

Two White House chandeliers. A 48,000-gallon wine cellar. A glass coffin that the neighbors wouldn't allow. Harvey Vaile wanted to look at his wife's face forever. On the second floor, someone fitting her description looks back.