For most of the year, the Historic Adams House is a hushed museum piece — a meticulously restored 1892 Queen Anne mansion where docents lead daytime tours past hand-painted canvas wall coverings and a pantry still stocked with cookies from 1936. But on select October evenings, the lights go down and the house at 22 Van Buren Street becomes something else entirely: a laboratory for the unexplained.
Deadwood History, Inc. and Black Hills Paranormal Investigations (BHPI) will again open the home for Paranormal Investigations of the Adams House. Sessions begin at 6:00, 7:30, 9:00 and 10:30 p.m., and each is capped at 24 participants. Tickets are $35 per person, and reservations are required. Participants must be at least 12 years old, and those between 12 and 16 must be accompanied by an adult. Tickets and details are available through DeadwoodHistory.com or by calling 605-722-4800.
The premise is straightforward and, for a certain kind of traveler, irresistible: this is not a haunted house attraction with actors in sheets. It is a working investigation. Guests handle the same equipment BHPI uses in the field — parascopes, para-lanterns, the Tempest, Rem-Pod, an Onvoy ghost box, a Pharaoh Box, Flux 2, Ovilus, digital audio recorders, laser grids, divining rods, K2 meters, a "Dead Bell" and EMF meters — across an eighty-five-minute sweep of the home. Along the way, the BHPI team explains how evidence is documented and analyzed, and walks through findings from its own past investigations of the house.
What makes the evening land isn't the gadgetry so much as the story underneath it. The Adams House holds one of the darker family histories in a town that has no shortage of them.
The home was built in 1892 by pioneer businessman Harris Franklin and his wife, Anna. Local newspapers of the day called it among the finest houses in Deadwood and west of Omaha — a startling claim for a former gold camp, and a deliberate one. The mansion announced that Deadwood had grown up. It boasted stained glass, modern 19th-century plumbing and electricity, telephone service, and a turret that caught fire in 1895 and nearly took the whole house with it. The Franklins sold the property to their son Nathan in 1905 for the symbolic sum of one dollar.
In 1920, the house passed to William Emery (W.E.) Adams and his wife, Alice. Adams had arrived in Deadwood in 1877 with his brother; he tried gold mining, found it a poor fit, and instead built a grocery wholesale business that made him one of the richest men in town. Then tragedy arrived all at once. Alice, diagnosed with cancer, traveled to California to be near their daughter Helen, who was about to give birth. Alice died there. The shock sent Helen into premature labor; she delivered a baby girl, then died. The infant, also named Helen, lived only a few hours. W.E. Adams lost his wife, daughter and granddaughter in less than forty-eight hours.
A few years later, at 73, Adams married Mary Mastrovich Vicich, then 29 — a match that set tongues wagging across Deadwood and Lead. Adams spent his later wealth on the town that had enriched him, funding the Adams Museum, which opened in 1930. On June 7, 1934, he suffered a stroke and was brought home, where he died on June 16. His body lay in state in the museum he had paid for, and he was buried in the family plot in Pasadena, California.
Mary inherited the house but could not bear to live in it alone. She closed it up and left — and, according to the lore that has grown around the property, she left partly to escape what she believed was her husband's ghostly presence. She kept everything: sheet music on the piano, books in the library, china in the pantry, even the cookies in the jar. The house sat silent for more than half a century.
The Deadwood Historic Preservation Commission bought the home in 1992. A two-year, $1.5 million restoration followed, and the house reopened as a museum in 2000 — its original contents intact, a time capsule of a family frozen at the moment of its departure.
That combination — sudden grief, an abruptly abandoned house, and five decades of stillness — is the raw material BHPI works with. The group, which investigates across South Dakota, eastern Wyoming, northwest Nebraska and southwest Montana, has probed hundreds of locations, including Deadwood's Shasta Rooms (the former Beige Door brothel). Its stated approach is notably un-mystical: scientific methods, systematic processes, skepticism and logical thinking. As the organization puts it, it does not enter an investigation looking to prove a haunting; it lets the evidence tell the story. That posture is part of what makes the Adams House nights feel credible rather than carnival.
Whether or not anything answers back, the experience offers something a daytime tour cannot: the house after dark, with its darker stories told aloud, and the tools of inquiry in your own hands. For a town built on gold, gunfights and myth-making, it may be the most honest way to spend an October evening in Deadwood — asking the old house what it remembers, and waiting to see if it answers.