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

The Treasure Valley is hardly lacking when it comes to man-made haunted houses. But do they make your skin crawl as much as the real deal? 

Because we have those in the Treasure Valley too! Two national websites set out on a mission to find America’s REAL most haunted houses. They’re two very different websites. 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. 

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First of all, they disagreed on the most haunted homes in our neighbor 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 that’s 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 style-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, so we can’t personally confirm any suspected ghosts. We DID, however, poll our listeners to see if they had any experience with the home since it was at one time a rental. These are the stories they told us.