Boise, Idaho Landmark Named One of America’s Most Haunted Houses

From Haunted World to the Haunted Mansions of Albion, there’s no shortage of terrifying haunted houses to visit in Idaho! However, while two national publications were on the hunt for the most “haunted home” they weren’t searching for THAT type of “haunted house.”

They were on a search to find America’s REAL most haunted houses. That’s not a dig on Idaho’s spooky season attractions. It’s simply saying that these two very different websites were looking for homes that people had actually lived in at one point. 

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For example, Colorado’s most haunted house belonged to the Unsinkable Molly Brown, who survived the Titanic. It’s now a museum dedicated to the “Heroine of the Titanic.” That sounds really nice, but people swear it’s haunted by Molly’s husband JJ and possibly Molly herself. From smelling a tobacco pipe on a non-smoking property to light bulbs that seemingly unscrewed themselves to furniture feng shuiing itself, weird stuff happens there. 

As we mentioned, these two publications are very different. The House Beautiful website is a digital arm of a home design magazine that’s been in print for over 125 years. Big 7 Travel is a travel blog meant to save tourists from spending countless hours reading reviews on TripAdvisor, Foursquare or Google Reviews. While their missions are radically different, the two publications can agree on two things: one of the most haunted homes in America can be found in Idaho and that home is just minutes from Downtown Boise. It’s significant for a few reasons. 

First of all, they disagreed on the most haunted homes in our neighboring states Washington, Nevada, Montana and Wyoming. Second of all, inns and hotels seemed to be fair game for this list. That means the Boise home in question seems more haunted than the Idaho Hotel in Silver City which is believed to be haunted by two men who died in a shootout outside the hotel’s doors and the former owner, who took his own life in the saloon after discovering he had cancer. 

Is it more haunted than the Gooding University Inn? The former Idaho State Tuberculosis Hospital is now a VRBO rental. It’s had enough unexplained occurrences that it caught the attention of the Travel Channel’s Zak Bagans, who filmed an episode of Ghost Adventures there. 

Apparently, it is. Both House Beautiful and Big 7 Travel chose the infamous “Murder House” on Linden in Boise. Over the years, we’ve covered the “Murder House” pretty in-depth. The short version of the story? A man was murdered in the basement of the home, chopped up into pieces and then thrown into the Brownlee Reservoir. 

Naturally, a murder that gruesome can lead to plenty of urban legends about the home. Many believe that the ghost of Preston Murr, the man who was murdered there, haunts the dilapidated home. Others claim that they’ve seen a ghostly female figure wearing 1800s clothing lurking in the window. The home was built in 1910, so it’s quite possible that there could be a ghost in old-timey clothes lurking in the halls.

We’ve never been inside the home, so we can’t personally confirm any of the ghostly activity from these stories. The closest we’ve been was the front yard during a yard sale that the owner’s family member had in June 2023. We wanted to by the cool old radio/record player they were selling, but our spouse insisted that it was haunted and wouldn’t let it inside our apartment. 

The home was, however, a rental at one time so we polled our listeners and asked if they had ever been inside. These are the stories they told us! 

AUTHOR'S NOTE: This home is private property. Under no circumstances should you enter the property. By doing so you risk prosecution for trespassing.