Epperson House

A 52-room, 24,000 square-foot Tudor-Gothic mansion built in 1920 at a cost of $450,000 by insurance tycoon Uriah Epperson. Located on the UMKC campus, it was featured on Unsolved Mysteries as one of the top five most haunted houses in America. Currently being converted to a boutique hotel.

Epperson House on the campus of the University of Missouri-Kansas City is a fifty-four-room Tudor-Gothic mansion that looks more like an English castle than a university building. Built by millionaire businessman Uriah Spragg Epperson between 1919 and 1923 at a cost of four hundred and fifty thousand dollars -- equivalent to over seven million dollars today -- the four-story structure contained six bathrooms, elevators, a swimming pool, a billiard room, a barbershop, a custom pipe organ, and a tunnel linking its east and west wings. It was designed to be a monument to wealth and culture. Instead, it became a monument to tragedy and one of the most haunted buildings in Kansas City.

The haunting centers on Harriet Barse, an organ instructor at the Kansas City Conservatory who formed an extraordinarily close relationship with the Epperson family. Uriah and his wife Mary considered Barse their adopted daughter and commissioned a custom pipe organ to be installed in the mansion specifically for her to play. But Barse died on December 20, 1922, of a perforated gall bladder at the age of forty-seven, before the organ was completed and before she ever had the chance to play it. The instrument she was meant to bring to life was finished without her, and many believe her spirit returned to play the music she was denied in life.

Years later, when the mansion was used as a men's dormitory for UMKC students following the Eppersons' donation of the property to the university in 1942, residents reported hearing organ music emanating from within Epperson House -- haunting melodies played on an instrument that sat in a locked, empty room. The music was reported with enough consistency that it became part of campus folklore, attributed by believers to the ghost of Harriet Barse finally getting her concert.

A campus police officer investigating a light that had been left on in the mansion experienced one of the most dramatic encounters. As he approached a room to switch off the light, a ghostly arm reached around the wall and flipped the switch, plunging the room into darkness. The officer fled the building. Epperson House was featured as one of the Top 5 haunted houses in the United States on the television program Unsolved Mysteries, bringing national attention to its supernatural reputation.

The mansion served as a dormitory until 1956 and has sat largely vacant since, awaiting restoration. The emptiness has done nothing to quiet the spirits. Students and staff continue to report lights turning on in unoccupied rooms, the sound of footsteps in the corridors, and the faint, distant strains of organ music drifting through the Gothic halls. Harriet Barse, it seems, is still waiting for someone to listen.