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Heavily Investigated

Something about Thornewood doesn't feel finished — as if several of its former residents simply never left. Chester Thorne is still said to haunt his old bedroom, where guests find lightbulbs unscrewed in the dark. Anna lingers in the bridal suite, glimpsed in her mirror, gazing toward the garden she loved. Near the lake, people have spotted a small child standing alone at the water's edge — a grandchild, rumor holds, who drowned on the grounds — only to find nothing there when they go to look.

Chester Thorne, financier and co-founder of the Port of Tacoma, commissioned the estate in 1907 — and being a man of serious ambition, he purchased an actual 400-year-old Elizabethan manor in England, dismantled it, and shipped the pieces around Cape Horn on three vessels. The resulting 27,000-square-foot Tudor-Gothic mansion was completed in 1911 and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It later stood in for a haunted Seattle estate in Stephen King's miniseries Rose Red — a role, one might note, it was born to play.