Everyone knows there's nothing quite like an old church to give you a case
of the heebie-jeebies. But which ones are the spookiest of all? These are
the haunted churches that even hardened ghost-hunters will be too scared to visit.
Located in Northern Virginia, Historic Aquia Episcopal Church has stood for over 200 years,
enduring three wars, a fire, and near-abandonment in the process.
The childhood church of patriot George Mason, Aquia Church has a rich history connected to
the founding of the United States. Spared by British troops during the War of 1812,
the church would later serve as a Union Army camp and hospital in the Civil War.
But Aquia Church's history is not without its dark side. Legend holds that, in the mid-18th century,
a young woman fleeing from a gang of highwaymen took refuge in the church,
hiding within its belfry. The robbers found the woman and killed her, leaving
her corpse behind. Years later, when the church resumed services after the Revolutionary War,
the woman's mostly skeletonized remains were found by parishioners — who claimed
the body had golden tresses as vibrant as those of a living woman.
Blood stains from the incident remained on the floorboards for nearly a century,
until the church was refurbished with concrete flooring. To the present day,
congregants claim they can hear running footsteps in the church's graveyard
and sounds of a violent struggle inside the church itself. Perhaps most disturbingly of all,
the figure of a woman with long blonde hair has frequently been sighted in the balcony window.
Dating back to 1298, the ruin of Saint Katherine's Augustinian Abbey, located in County Limerick,
is host to one of the most feared hauntings in Ireland. Known to locals as the Abbey of the Black
Hag, the crumbling medieval nunnery was officially put out of commission by Pope Martin V in 1541,
though it had been vacant since at least 1428, owing to a number of occurrences taking place
on its grounds, including the practice of black magic and bizarre sexual rituals.
It's said that the diabolical abbess remained in the abandoned nunnery,
her skin blackened by dismal living conditions and sinister magic.
Another legend associated with St. Katherine's Abbey is the tragic tale of the Countess of
Desmond. Fleeing from attackers with her husband, the Earl of Desmond, the countess was shot through
with an arrow, and so the grieving count hastily buried his bride in a makeshift grave on the
abbey's grounds. Sightings of her ghostly figure roaming the woods around the abbey
prompted an investigation of her grave — which revealed she had actually been buried alive.
Having regained consciousness, the Countess had attempted to claw her way out of the grave…
wearing her fingers to the bone in a frantic and doomed attempt at escape.
Originally constructed in 1841 by Father John Stephen Raffeiner,
New York's Most Holy Trinity Church was rebuilt as a two-towered brick building in 1854 — before
taking its final incarnation as the twin spired edifice that now towers over the Brooklyn
neighborhood of East Williamsburg. Home to a thriving congregation for nearly two centuries,
the parish is one of the oldest in Brooklyn.
Founded in the spirit of fellowship and faith, this revered house of worship nonetheless has
its fair share of dark secrets. For example, the church's adjoining school is built on land that
once served as a cemetery, and, according to legend, not all of the bodies were relocated.
Witnesses report hearing phantom footsteps and mysterious voices resounding throughout
the building, and it's said that lights in the gym often turn on and off without cause.
Holy Trinity's other ghostly tenants include the restless spirit of the church's second priest,
Father Michael May, who is said to still reside in his room in the church's rectory. Now reserved
as guest quarters, none of the church's priests are willing to take May's chambers as their own.
In 1897, the church sexton and bell-ringer George Stelz was
killed in Most Holy Trinity's vestibule — and rumor has it that the bloody handprint of the
killer still remains in the stairway leading to the church's bell tower.
"Unfortunately he was attacked for a thief, and he was assassinated." "Wow, in the church."
Parishioners claim Stelz can be heard roaming the halls, and suggest that
his spirit is responsible for the occasional inexplicable ringing of the church's bells.
Nestled in Normandy's Forest of Lyon are the crumbling ruins of L'Abbaye de Mortemer,
one of the most haunted locations in France. Constructed of flint and limestone,
the secluded abbey was erected by Abbot Alexandre and his small band of Cistercian
monks in the 12th century. By the 15th century, it was a thriving ecclesiastical community,
home to hundreds of monks and counted as an important seat of religious influence.
During the 17th century, however, a shifting political landscape led to the abbey's rapid
decline, and at the time of the French Revolution, Mortemer Abbey housed only four monks under its
crumbling roofs. Among the changes wrought by the revolution was a distrust of religious
institutions — which had deadly consequences for the remaining Cistercian brothers.
Suspected of hoarding wealth, the monks were hunted down and killed.
In 1863, the abbey was purchased by one M. Delarue, a wealthy Parisian who moved
his family into one of the remaining houses. But the Delarues found their
new home anything but welcoming. Plagued by ghostly lights, horrifying sounds,
and a procession of spectral monks, the Delarue family had the grounds exorcised… but to no avail.
Moreover, Mortemer Abbey is also the alleged home of the White Lady,
assumed to be the ghost of Empress Matilda of England, daughter of King Henry I
and benefactress of the abbey. Seen gliding through the abbey's broken arches,
the appearance of the White Lady often portends misfortune to all those who see her.
Long considered the heart of New Orleans, St. Louis Cathedral is North America's longest
continually operating Catholic cathedral. Known for its three distinctive steeples,
the cathedral, originally built in 1727 for the canonized French monarch King Louis IX,
was burned to the ground during New Orleans' great fire of 1794. Rebuilt in the 1850s,
the current church was upgraded from cathedral to basilica in 1964. Today,
the cathedral is among a number of supernatural hotspots in the Big Easy.
Its most famous specter is the ghost of the legendary monk Pére Dagobert. Dagobert,
in defiance of New Orleans' newly-installed Spanish governor, performed the funeral rites
for six executed Creole rebels left to rot outside the cathedral. Dagobert boldly led a procession
of the slain men's families through the streets of New Orleans, loudly singing the funeral mass
in his distinctive baritone all the way to an unmarked grave. It's said that Dagobert can still
be heard singing his prayers on rainy mornings. Some even claim to have witnessed the robed
monk leading a phantom funeral procession from the cathedral doors through a nearby alleyway.
Located adjacent to the historic Arlington National Cemetery, Old Post Chapel stands
out as one of the Washington, D.C. area's most notorious haunted locations.
Commissioned in 1933 by George S. Patton, Old Post Chapel is situated at the former location
of the U.S. Army outpost Fort Whipple, and functions as a community worship center,
wedding chapel, and funeral chapel. With its deep roots in American history and tragedy,
however, it comes as little surprise that Old Post Chapel is rife with alleged paranormal activity.
Unexplained voices and organ music are said to emanate from the chapel late at night. Locked
doors and cabinets swing open without logical explanation, and a host of apparitions frequent
the building's grounds — including a ghost believed to be the spirit of Mary Anna Custis Lee,
the widow of Robert E. Lee, who haunts the general's memorial.
Elsewhere, the wailing shade of a grief-stricken woman in white has been seen and heard by the
chapel's entrance. According to legend, she threw herself from Old Post's
now-locked bell tower, which remains off limits to the public to this day.
Even animals aren't immune to the chapel's terrors, as it's said that the K-9 dogs that
patrol the cemetery outright refuse to enter Old Post Chapel at night.
Located in the laid-back vacation spot of Key West, St. Paul's Episcopal Church has faced
all kinds of untold tragedy in its nearly two centuries of operation. Destroyed by
fire in 1886 and again by a 1928 hurricane, St. Paul's has been rebuilt several times since its
initial construction in 1838. It was built on land donated by the widow of land baron John Fleming
on the condition that her husband's remains were never to be removed from the grounds — so maybe
it's no surprise that the church has also become home to an ever-growing congregation of ghosts.
One of St. Paul's most active spirits is the ghost of John Fleming himself, who is said to appear as
a misty apparition dressed in 19th century clothing. Meanwhile, spectral children have
been seen huddled around one of the many statues on the church's grounds. According to local lore,
the kids were killed in a fire set by a clergyman after he discovered his wife in a tryst with a
deacon. Of course, no Key West haunting would be complete without a ghost pirate — and sure enough,
both a phantom freebooter and ghostly sea captain are said to roam St. Paul's churchyard.
Until it was gutted by fire and demolished in 1944,
Borley Rectory was known as England's most haunted house. Built in 1863 by the Reverend Thomas Bull,
the rectory was said to be so rife with paranormal activity that it drove two rectors from the house,
one of whom stayed for only nine months.
In 1929, psychic investigator Harry Price began a study of the rectory that lasted nearly a decade.
In the course of his investigation,
Price experienced incidents of intense spectral activity, including moving objects,
spirit writing, mysterious rappings, and unexplained footsteps.
"But over the years, phantom figures have been seen,
footsteps have been heard… solid, heavy footsteps on floorboards."
Price chronicled his findings in two books and was working on a third at the time of his
death in 1945. Sadly, a 1956 analysis of Price's findings by the Society for Psychical Research
determined that Price may have falsified at least some elements of his Borley haunting.
Nevertheless, unexplained incidents continue to occur to this day,
mostly focused around the nearby Borley Church. Although diminished in intensity, footsteps,
allegedly those of a phantom nun, were heard in and around the church as late as the 1970s.
From ghostly lights and black mists to the figure of a hooded monk seen roaming among the ruins,
England's long-abandoned Church of St. Mary the Virgin has a long history with the supernatural
and occult. Built in 1350, the church is said to be built facing the "wrong direction,"
with its altar pointing away from the rising sun, and therefore,
away from God. As it happens, the church is simply oriented toward Jerusalem,
as is the case with many medieval churches. Nevertheless, the church's
sinister reputation has made it a magnet for would-be practitioners of the dark arts.
In 1963, the church was targeted by graverobbers who exhumed the remains of Jenny Humberstone,
the wife of an apothecary who died in 1770. The bones were scattered about the grounds
in a pattern suggesting an attempt at some manner of dark ritual. St. Mary's faced a
spate of desecration and damage to its cemetery throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s,
leading local authorities to move the headstones and plow the earth to obscure the graves.
The burned-out husk of what was once St. Helena's Chapel of Ease exudes an undeniably
spooky atmosphere. Built on St. Helena's Island in South Carolina back in 1740,
the Chapel of Ease was gutted by a fire sometime after the Civil War.
The ruins of the chapel and its adjoining graveyard remained virtually untouched for
more than a century — yet some claim to have heard the disembodied voices of a ghostly choir
raised in song. Others have experienced feelings of dread inside the ruins, too.
In the Chapel of Ease's graveyard stands an ornate mausoleum,
built as the final resting place of Edgar and Eliza Fripp. During the Civil War, the couple's
tomb was ransacked by Union soldiers looking for treasure, and so workmen were contracted
to brick up the mausoleum's damaged doorway. Having finished their job, the workers returned
to find the tomb unsealed, their bricks neatly stacked by the mausoleum's door. All subsequent
attempts ended with the same result, and the Fripp mausoleum remains unsealed to this day.
Check out one of our newest videos right here!
Plus, even more Grunge videos about your favorite stuff are coming soon.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel and hit the bell so you don't miss a single one.