Beautiful and Eerie Biltmore Estate

I spent a couple of days last week busy in Asheville, NC getting stuff for school done.  (I'll spare you the boring details).  In between testing and talking to councellors and whatnot I found time to visit America's largest home - The Biltmore Estate.


If you do not know what it is; the place is completely gorgeous!  A bit pricy to see, but if you buy a two day pass you will certainly get your moneys worth with gardens that spread across acres, a mystical enchanted forest, a winery (with FREE wine tastings), and of course the gigantic estate.

The Biltmore is a very beautiful mansion that you can take tours of, however you cannot see even half of the house when you are going through it.  There are several wings that are completely roped off, as well as floors that guests are forbidden to visit.  I would have loved to see the place with the ropes completely gone and no one there seeing as the crowds were large even early in the morning.


The estate was built by George Washington Vanderbilt in the late 1800's.  There is a long and interesting history about the family, though I do think a lot of the history the Biltmore gives you is sugar coated.  They do talk about a few tragedies, such as G. W. Vanderbilts death, a flood that happened in 1914 which killed a lot of people in Biltmore Village (it is a few miles away from the mansion), and of course the great depression.  I felt though that a lot of the family drama was left out of the history of the sprawling mansion and surrounding lands.  One gets the feeling when reading about the Vanderbilts lives that it is all fluffed up stories of their past sparing the details of who they really were.  The original family still owns the place however which would explain why the family secrets are still in tact.

The mansion is completely beautiful, but there are sections of the estate that are downright eerie ( which further suggests that there is more to the story than what is shown at face value).  The upper floors of the estate are lovely; breezy and beautiful with lavish riches spread throughout the rooms that could give even the most poverty stricken person a feeling of decadence.  You can almost see the family and their guests through a veil of the past as visitors walk around looking at everything.  I didn't think that the energy on those floors felt bad, rather it was airy and nice, but there was an air of sadness that even the Vanderbilt family's fairytale story of the estate could not get rid of.  The energy after all does not lie.


The basement is where the energy goes from airy and nice with a twinge of sadness to weird and foreboding.  The air feels of tragedy and the most immense sadness, yet there are no stories as to anything tragic ever happening there.  However there is a story about a wild three week party they had there back in the 1920's.  It is unknown what happened at this party, but they did paint the most creepy murals in a room called "The Halloween Room".  The guests were handed brushes and buckets of paint and told to paint whatever they liked.

Truly the above picture does not do the room justice, nor does it really show the other parts of the mural which are very strange.  There are many weird animals, witches, angels, demons, etc painted on the walls.  It is hard to explain what the room felt like.  The word tense comes to mind however, and it is a great precurser to the weird energy one encounters in the rooms following the "Halloween Room". 

The energy just gets stranger as you walk out of the Halloween room through the changing room(s) hallway.  This was the only time I had a chance to be alone in the house and while I was there I couldn't shake the feeling of being watched.  The feeling increased when I walked into the pool room.

I don't know what it was about that room.  Perhaps it was the empty pool, likely unused for 50 or 60 years, but that is just a guess.  I couldn't help but wonder if something terrible happened in that room, but there aren't any stories about anything bad ever happening there.  I know that I am not the only one who has felt this way.  When I got home I looked on the internet and low and behold many other people had the same feelings as I did.


So what did happen in the Biltmore house to give it such an odd feeling?  Why is it not mentioned that the daughter of the builders of the estate had a tragic divorce from a man she didn't love and left the estate never to return leaving her ex husband to run the place?


So many strange things, and such and interesting place with a lot of hidden secrets which tempt the imagination but likely will never be revealed.