10 Haunted Houses That Have Murdered People

3. The Mark Twain Mystery House

A bronze plaque commemorates the year that American icon Mark Twain lived in a townhouse at 14 West 10th Street in New York, from 1900-1901. To find out more about the Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer writer's time in that deceptively gorgeous building, however, you have to look beyond his work - he was an avowed sceptic and rationalist in a time when spirituality was in vogue once more.

In fact Twain got off lightly during his stay in his Greenwich Village home. During his time there his encounters with the spirits amounted solely to a piece of kindling levitating from a basket next to the fire, which he responded to with a shot from his pistol. Blood appeared on the floor beneath the wood as it clattered to the ground, yet nobody was there.

But it might very well have been Twain who was re-enacting a moment from the house's tragic history. A curse can be said to be on 14 West 10th Street, with some saying that it is haunted by no fewer than twenty-two spirits - all of whom died in that house, some under tragic circumstances. Twain's ghost is said to have joined them, too, perhaps himself a victim of that curse when he died a few years later.