One-time home to record producer Phil Spector, this castle has sat vacant ever since Spector went to prison for the killing of a female companion in the entryway. Though he's withering away behind bars, Spector still recently sued the city of Alhambra in an attempt to prevent construction next door.

Now operated as the Winchester Mystery House, this sprawling Northern California mansion was built by the paranoid and superstitious Sarah Winchester, widow to Winchester Rifles founder William Winchester. A fan of seances, she used her communications with the dead to design the structure, built over 38 years, which resulted in a maze-like home, full of dead ends, secret passages, and twisting hallways.

In the years before the Civil War, this French Quarter mansion was reportedly rented to a rich young Turk, who came complete with "a harem and eunuchs" and threw secretive parties. One morning, a passerby noticed blood trickling down the steps and alerted authorities, who found all the revelers hacked to death. Legend says the renter had stolen from his brother, a sultan, and that the murders were revenge.

The Jim Williams shooting drama unfolded at this historic antebellum mansion, which already had a sordid past. In 1913, another owner had tripped, fallen on his head, and later died from the injuries. In 1965, a young boy chasing pigeons on the roof fell and impaled himself on the fence below. The house is now operated as the Mercer-Williams House Museum.

In the 1830s, Dr. Louis Lalaurie and his wife, Delphine, were known for their wealth, social prominence, and lavish parties. Today, they're infamous as an evil duo who tortured their slaves, subjecting them to horrific pseudo-scientific experiments that were only discovered when a fire broke out in the mansion. More recently, the mansion was owned by actor Nicolas Cage, until he lost it to foreclosure in 2009.

Franklin Castle is widely referred to as the most haunted house in Ohio, and for good reason. Completed in 1865, the house saw its first death in 1881, when the owner's daughter succumbed to diabetes. The owner's mother passed soon after. In the following three years, the owners buried three more children and built onto the house (perhaps as a distraction from their grief). Sold last year for $260K, the house is slated to be renovated into a multi-family apartment building.

Built a few years after the end of the Revolutionary War by General David Bradford (who had a role in the treasonous Whiskey Rebellion), this plantation later came under the management of a Clark Woodruff. According to legend, Woodruff had an extramarital affair with a slave, whose jealousy of the Woodruff's wife caused her to poison a pie and kill two of the couple's children. That's apparently just a tall tale, but a Civil War soldier was murdered on the front steps.

Built for a silver baron who later became a U.S. Senator, the Chambers Mansion is surrounded by legend. The senator lived in the home with two nieces who reportedly despised one another. When he passed, one of the heiresses remained in the house while another moved next door. The one who stayed was later found scythed in half in what the family described as a farming machinery accident.

Said to be the earliest surviving house on Manhattan, the Morris-Jumel Mansion has had 247 years to amass spooky stories. George Washington's HQ during the Revolutionary War, the house was later occupied by a rich Frenchman, Stephen Jumel, and his wife Eliza, who moved in in 1810. When Jumel turned up dead in the house under mysterious circumstances and Eliza quickly married Vice President Aaron Burr, speculation turned to her having a hand in her husband's death. Today, unsurprisingly, it serves as a museum.

The childhood home of poet Conrad Aiken, this brick home in Savannah was the site of a murder-suicide by Aiken's father, who shot his wife and then turned the gun on himself while his son listened from the next room.

Officially known as Rehmeyer's Hollow—after its original owner, the Pennsylvania Dutch "Pow Wow Doctor" Nelson Rehmeyer—this house is more commonly referred to as the Hex House. That's because Rehmeyer was beaten to death here after another "witch doctor" accused him of casting a hex.

Built in the 1880s for brick baron Balthasar Kreischer, this elaborate Victorian mansion has seen more than its fair share of ill events. For one, there was once a similar mansion, one Balthasar had built for his son, but it was destroyed by fire during a fight between father and son, killing the younger Kreischer and his wife. A far more recent killing took place in this house. In 2005, local mafia elements paid then-caretaker Joseph "Joe Black" Young to murder a man and dispose of his remains in the house's incinerator.

In 1974, Ronald DeFeo, Jr. murdered six of his family members while they slept in this grand Dutch Colonial on Long Island, allegedly at the urging of spirits occupying the house. When the subsequent owners, George and Kathy Lutze, moved in, they could only tolerate 28 days inside before moving out due to strange, supernatural occurrences. That drama inspired the classic film "The Amityville Horror."

Famous as the home and studio of legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright, Taliesin was also the scene of one of the most horrifying crimes of the 20th century. On August 15, 1914, a disgruntled estate employee barricaded the doors and set fire to the residence, burning alive Wright's wife and her two children, along with four others.

Once owned by notorious Long Island serial killer Joel Rifkin—and the site of several of his murders—this nondescript suburban home was sold last year for around $320K.