History of the Haunted House:
The house was originally commissioned by Lyle Burgess, the owner of a successful shipping firm. Burgess had a wife, Sharon, and four children, Andrew, Frederick, Wendy and Lyle Jr. Built in 1879, the house originally sat on a much larger parcel of land that the family had to themselves, encompassing fully two acres of sparsely wooded area. The family was all killed in their home on the same night in 1894; the crime was purportedly never solved, and all records of the case were presumed destroyed in the fire of 1908.
The house lay abandoned for some time after; the estate had passed to one of Lyle's brothers, one Lawrence Burgess, who did nothing with it as he was living in New York City. Lawrence was a wealthy stockbroker who lost everything on Black Tuesday and subsequently committed suicide, leaving behind neither children nor heirs. As such, ownership of the estate passed to Titan City.
When city survey crews surveyed the property in 1933, it was empty save for the house itself and an outbuilding. The crew reported strange sounds and lights coming from the building, with one member also reporting “a window that wasn't there”, a baffling claim at the time. When an inspector was tasked with examining the interior of the house he came back missing three fingers from his left hand and telling wild stories about what was in there, and, more importantly, what wasn't. He reported falling along ceilings and seeing through windows that were not visible from the outside – windows that were hundreds of feet in the air. He convinced the city to condemn the building, and also convinced them that tearing it down was a terrible idea. The property was subdivided, with new metes and bounds for the house's grounds drawn up based on what was considered a safe enough distance to keep between the house and everyone else.
