ST. LOUIS — What may soon become the “Scariest House in America” sits high atop a bluff overlooking Interstate 70 in the College Hill neighborhood.
It’s in somewhat ramshackle shape, but its bones are good.
Thirteen people are known to have died in the house. Some may have been buried in what is now the front yard. A private cemetery was once on the land, possibly where there is now a series of depressions in the front yard.
In June, the owner discovered part of what appears to be a human skeleton under the old front porch.
And then there are the fictional people who were killed there every weekend for 40 years.
The Bissell Mansion is best remembered locally as the site of a popular murder mystery dinner theater, where corpses were served up comically along with a meal. Built in 1823, it is also the oldest house in St. Louis.
On Friday at 8 p.m., it will be one of three houses featured on the HGTV show “Scariest House in America.” One will be chosen as the “Scariest House in the Midwest” and will go on to compete for the national title against finalists from the Northeast and South. The episodes feature tours of homes “full of haunts, frights and scares,” the show’s website says.
The winner will receive $150,000 worth of renovations, supervised by HGTV designer Alison Victoria.
The money will be a good start, but the Bissell Mansion needs a lot more work than that, said Kyle Wheeler, 37, who owns the property with his wife, Aleha Jane, 33.
The couple bought the house last October, and they were contacted by HGTV around two weeks later. Aleha Jane suspects the channel had its eyes on the house before she and Kyle bought it.
HGTV thinks the house is scary, even if the Wheelers do not.
“I’ve never been one to believe stuff like that, and I don’t really think (it’s haunted), but there are things like the alarm going off,” Kyle said.
The first week they bought the property, one of the motion-detector alarms in the basement went off every night, as if something was moving in front of it. The Wheelers placed a camera in that part of the basement, but it never showed anything.
“The weird thing is when I would get here, it would stop,” he said.
The alarm kept going off until they disabled it.
Sometimes when he is on the first floor, Kyle hears footsteps across the floor above him. But the sound could just be the ordinary creaks of a house that has stood for 202 years.
Three months ago, Kyle discovered what appeared to be skeletal remains under the original front porch. He called police, who told him to seal off the site until an investigation can be conducted.
And then there is the mysterious man who was occasionally seen standing in a corner window by workers leaving the dinner theater. Contractors working on the house in recent weeks also reported seeing a man dressed in black standing at the window.
Aleha Jane, who is in her last year of law school at St. Louis University, admits she does not feel completely comfortable in the house alone.
History and tragedy
The main portion of the house was built by Capt. Lewis Bissell. By 1860, it was a fruit-growing plantation with six slaves and two Irish indentured servants. Based on the number of mulberry trees growing on adjacent land, which was once part of the 1,600-acre plantation, Kyle Wheeler thinks they probably grew mulberries.
Bissell fought in the War of 1812 and was wounded in the Battle of Lundy’s Lane, one of the war’s bloodiest engagements. Perhaps because of his experience, he built the house on a defensive position at the top of a steep hill.
At the time, American Indians sometimes conducted raids on white settlers. Basement windows in the house are protected by bars, and people defending the home could stick guns through the bars to fire on attackers. If necessary, they could hide in the extensive system of caves below the house.
A hole in the basement floor led to the caves, but it has long been bricked up. According to one story, the caves led all the way to the Mississippi River, close to where Mary Meachum led escaped slaves across the river to the free state of Illinois.
One local historian, Dan Fuller of Bellefontaine Cemetery, told the Wheelers that the house and caves may have been a stop on the Underground Railroad. The Bissells owned slaves, but some abolitionists owned slaves as a front to cover their own anti-slavery activities, he told them.
In its June 17, 1857, edition, the St. Louis Republic newspaper ran a short item about the death of one of the Bissells’ slaves, named Aunt Till. She purportedly died at what the paper called “the extraordinary age of 130 years.” The Bissell family attended the funeral.
The family sold the house in 1882 to the Kraft family, which was soon beset by tragedy. Three of their children died of diphtheria in just 11 days, and a fourth succumbed a year later.
The house changed hands a few times after that, eventually becoming a rooming house. In 1953, the plan was to knock it down to make way for the expressway. In 1957, the Landmarks Association of St. Louis stepped in to save it from demolition.
It was briefly a restaurant before it was turned into a murder mystery dinner theater.
That’s how Kyle Wheeler knew it when he was growing up in the Southampton neighborhood. He was always intrigued by the building.
Aleha Jane is from San Diego, and when she and Kyle were dating they always tried to attend a murder mystery at the house when she was in town. The show was always sold out, though.
Kyle wanted to buy the house for years. In 2018, he sent the owner a message through Yelp, offering to buy it. The owner thought it was a joke and never responded.
But then COVID came. The theater closed in March 2020 and never reopened.
The Wheelers bought the property a year ago for $205,000, without ever seeing the inside. The building, which has been added on to several times, has 11 bedrooms and 13 fireplaces, including in the basement.
It needs work everywhere. The plaster is cracked and peeling. The wallpaper — several layers of it — is dingy and old. The lighting is dim. The floorplan is haphazard. But the floors are sturdy.
HGTV asked the Wheelers not to do any substantive renovations until the filming was finished (the episode was filmed on Easter day). Since then, Kyle has done work on the roof and some tuck pointing, and a carpenter is coming this week.
The couple anticipates it will take two years to restore the mansion to its former glory. When finished, they want to revive the murder mystery dinner theater, with rooms on the second floor for people who want to spend the night.
At this stage of the renovation, Kyle says he is most interested in exploring the caves behind the bricked-in floor and seeing what is inside a covered-up well next to the house.
He asked Aleha Jane what she is looking forward to most.
“When it’s all done,” she said.
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Daniel Neman | Post-Dispatch
Features writer
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