Once in the home, the family quickly grew to include several children. Before the home was given to the college, legend has it that a woman with two young children was staying in the house. The hotel was advertised as comfy accommodations for young women visiting the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago, but in fact it included hidden staircases and trap doors that allowed Holmes to sneak into those women's rooms. An upstairs chute allowed him to toss victims' bodies into the basement, where he'd set up a dissection room and crematorium. But if you're scared of creepy toys, the upstairs room with automated marionettes won't be any better. Today, you can visit that same tunnel and even see a message scrawled by a slave on the wall inside the secret room. It's said that you can hear two girls who found the secret passageway one Halloween, only to fall through a hole on a staircase. From Wolf's Lair Castle, you have an incredible view; you can see downtown Los Angeles, Catalina Island and the famed Hollywood sign. What you won't see is the hidden passageway between the main house and the guest house. The mother thought she heard intruders, so she took an axe and searched the house.

She mistook her children for the intruders, however, and killed them. Then the children began to die. At that time, the Underground Railroad began to help slaves reach freedom, and Wisconsin became a significant stop for slaves on that journey. Wisconsin and other westward migration destinations were increasingly attracting settlers looking for work in the mining, lumber and dairy industries. If Native Americans attacked, the family would need a place to hide, so Brown's design included nine secret passageways and a hidden room adjacent to the Indian Lookout room. As an early settler to the region, Brown was fearful he might be attacked by the Native Americans in the area, so he built the 12-room Octagon House as somewhat of a fort, complete with an "Indian Lookout" room, where Brown could keep watch. The Octagon House, with its nine secret passageways and secret room, was one home in the area that hosted numerous runaway slaves who passed through. Homes with hidden passageways have a way of taking on new roles as times change, which was the case for the Octagon House in Fond du Lac, Wis. As the whispers started circulating through town that perhaps there was more to these deaths than met the eye, Tiedemann decided to build on to the house to distract his wife from her grief.

If this story is true, it seems more likely that the girls broke their necks; surely the hidden passageway wasn't so hard to find that the other students wouldn't have come to their classmates' rescue when it was discovered the girls were missing. All the lights are turned off, what is billiards and the students have 20 minutes to search for the meeting spot of the star-crossed lovers. The house was constructed by Captain Jonathan Hunt in 1710. To provide protection from the local Native Americans, Captain Hunt installed a secret passageway in the home as a family hiding spot. And Garriott isn't just Lord British online; when he hosts his famous haunted house at his Austin, Texas, mansion, he does so in Lord British garb. Richard Garriott is building a new home in Austin, so he may outdo Britannia Manor. It takes several hundred volunteers and tens of thousands of dollars to put on the event, but Garriott truly seems to enjoy it. Those who think they have what it takes to survive in this lair camp out every other year for the chance to obtain free tickets to Garriott's four-night haunted house. Not long after that, in the years leading up to the Civil War, the house took on a completely different role.

The 24-room Gillette Castle was built high on a cliff above the Connecticut River in 1913 by William Gillette, a successful stage actor renowned for his role as Sherlock Holmes. Franklin Castle has passed through the hands of numerous owners since the 1960s, some of whom have complained about troubles with ghosts and odd occurrences. It was likely a better buy than the next eccentric home on our list, which has passed hands many times over the years due to a little problem with ghosts. I thought a little overdone. In the season three episode "The Little People," turnabout is fair play for a Pete Craig, a sadistic astronaut who becomes a despotic god on a faraway planet of tiny beings. In the 1962 episode "To Serve Man," humanity's problems are solved when a seemingly benevolent alien race called the Kanamits arrive on earth. A cupboard is a cabinet or closet with shelves, a door and/or drawers in which dishware such as cups, plates and saucers are stored.