If you’re a thrill-seeker looking for a bit of a real life fright on Halloween and beyond, you might check out Oklahoma’s old territorial governor’s mansion in Kingfisher.I’ve never been a believer in ghosts, but when I first laid eyes on the nearly 132-year-old, three-story building with cockeyed- looking windows and a few missing shingles as twilight was setting in, my first thought was that our state owns a bonafide haunted house.As I gazed up at it from outside, it felt like someone was watching me back from the top floor. But, nobody was at the windows. The top floor is a former great hall space, which is not accessible to the general public.So, I asked Jason Harris, the executive director of The Chisholm, if the mansion known as Horizon Hill is believed to be haunted. Harris oversees the mansion, which was built by Oklahoma’s third territorial governor Abraham Jefferson “A.J.” Seay in 1892, and an agriculture- themed museum across the street, He said it is.Staff typically prefer not to enter the mansion alone, Harris said. Workers and visitors alike have reported hearing the piano playing with no one at the keys. Visitors report the clock in the ladies’ parlor randomly chimes at odd times. The home even has a local reputation of being haunted, and children are known to dare each other to run up to the porch at night.Harris told me that ghost hunters, who rent the space, swear the home has not one, but two, spirits living within. While nobody knows for sure who they are, some people like to believe one is Seay’s sister. She died in the home, possibly from tuberculosis.The other is reportedly a little boy.The home has had at least 15 different owners since Seay sold it in the early 1900s. It even once served as tenement dwellings before the state acquired it in 1964. So the boy’s identity may always remain a mystery.Until recently, I had no idea that there was even a historic gubernatorial mansion that predates statehood tucked away in a modern-day residential neighborhood about 55 minutes from our current state Capitol. I definitely didn’t fathom that the state might have an actual haunted house in its property portfolio.The cool thing is rather than being stereotypical stodgy museum employees who turn their noses up at thoughts of the paranormal, Harris and his staff lean into the mystique.On Halloween, they’ll allow ...
