The Octagon Mansion was built in 1798 and was originally located among fields and forests. Today it already stands in the center of a fashionable residential area, at the corner of 118th Street and New York Avenue. The first owner of the building was Colonel Tayloe, who used it as a city home in Washington. The history of this house is riddled up and down with reports of ghosts and ghosts within its walls. The main place of accumulation of "ghost incidents" is the stairs. Since the 1850s, many eyewitnesses who arrived on the 1st or 3rd floor claimed to have heard human footsteps on the second floor (on which there was no one), a sad female voice, observed incomprehensible shadows there and felt a presence there something invisible.
Also, often in the house there were problems with lighting and probably audible steps in non-residential premises. The superintendent of the mansion was many times not happy with the fact that he found the doors open almost immediately after he personally locked them, and the light was on after he turned it off with his own hand.
One case received a lot of publicity when the police called the superintendent in the middle of the night and said that the lights were on in the house. Mr. K. had to pack up and drive to the mansion to go down to the basement and turn off the lights. Arriving in the basement of the house, the man clearly heard someone's steps in the place of the mansion, near which he walked just a minute ago. In complete horror, the man ran out the stairs, but he did not see anyone there. The museum caretaker also recalls that, once working on the second floor, she more than once heard steps on the third floor, which was completely deserted and closed. One day she decided to carefully check what was happening on that floor, and, going up there, found several light traces on the dusty floor. They were so light that a human leg clearly could not leave them. Such tracesaccording to the woman, only an almost weightless girl could leave.