18 Celebrities Who Say They've Lived in Real Haunted Houses
These stars claim to have dealt with some very unexpected roommates, from friendly ghosts to mischievous beyond-the-grave figures
Courteney Cox
During a March 2022 appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live, the star opened up about the paranormal encounters (and warnings that preceded them) at the home she once owned in the Laurel Canyon neighborhood of Los Angeles.
The first warning, Cox said, came from legendary singer Carole King, who previously owned the home.
"So Carole King came over to my house and she said there had been a divorce that was really ugly, and there was a ghost in the house," Cox told host Jimmy Kimmel. "And I was like, 'Yeah, whatever.' "
"But other people who had stayed there with me — friends of mine — said they had an encounter with a woman who was sitting on the edge of the bed," Cox continued, though she brushed off their concerns at the time as well. Until ...
"I was at the house one day, not being a believer," Cox told Kimmel. "And the doorbell rang. It was a UPS guy or something, and I opened the door and he said, 'Do you know this house is haunted?' "
Cox replied, "Yeah, why? Why do you think that?" to which the delivery driver responded, "Because there is someone standing behind you."
The star said that was enough to convince her once and for all, as she joked, "And I was like, 'Let's sell!' "
Octavia Spencer
Spencer opened up about her supernatural roommate during a December 2021 appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show.
"I grew up watching Westerns, and I bought this house, and it was owned by a guy who did Westerns, so I must have been a fan of his," she told the talk show host.
Spencer purchased a 1927 Spanish-style house in Toluca Lake in 2013. She told DeGeneres that the ghost who she claims came with the property is her "protector."
"I love him, because he kind of sorts out the bad people that shouldn't be there," Spencer explained. "He runs them out."
"If they stay at my place, they don't wanna come back. And that's how I know that they don't belong here," she continued. "If you're a person that belongs there, everybody is like, 'Oh, your place is so welcoming. It's so great.' And that's how I feel about it."
When DeGeneres asked if she's experienced any spooky moments at home, like doors closing on their own, Spencer said, "Well, when I leave for a long time he's a little shady."
"The doors close, the lights go off when I turn them on," she said. "The only problem — I love my ghost, I just don't want you bringing your ghost to my house. I don't want anybody's ghost thinking they can be friends with my ghost."
Britney Spears
Before selling her Hollywood Hills home to Brittany Murphy and her husband — both of whom died in the house in 2009 and 2010, respectively — Spears had otherwordly experiences on the property, her former makeup artist Julianne Kaye shared on the "We Need to Talk About Britney" podcast in February 2021.
"[She] had that place up on Sunset Plaza — and I'm just gonna say, this is really weird … She calls me … I had my friend do reiki healing on her, he had come up, I guess she'd had a crazy partying weekend and needed to relax. He left, and she swears to God that he opened some spirit portal or something, and these bad spirits had come in … and they were trying to, like, push her down the stairs or something crazy," Kaye explained on the podcast.
She continued: "It was so bad that she left. She went to the Casa Del Mar hotel to stay there and never went back to the house. She goes, 'I know you're gonna think I'm crazy. I'm not crazy. I know what I saw. I know what I felt.' "
Though Murphy never had a supernatural encounter in the home, she often complained to her husband that something was "off" about the house, he recounted shortly before his death in 2010.
Jenny Slate
Jenny Slate says that living in a haunted house "basically shaped [her] entire personality."
Slate opened up about living in a haunted house in her Netflix standup comedy special, Stage Fright, but first talked about the experience on Ellen in 2014.
She told DeGeneres, "I grew up in Massachusetts. I grew up in a genuine haunted house. … I knew it was haunted. My parents, when they moved in, they bought it with all the furniture in it, the people had died, and—I'm getting scared even telling the story…"
Then, she recounted how her parents pulled up the runner on the stairs, only to find a stack of old letters that had been hidden there. The letters were from a man who was not the previous owner's husband, but a sea captain.
Slate said that her father ended up actually seeing the sea captain's ghost: "My dad went out into the hall, and he looked onto the stairs, and standing there was this sea captain, looking at him, pleading."
Eventually, the family burned the letters and the sea captain never returned ... though they did continue to see other apparitions. Spooky!
Jennifer Aniston
When she first moved to Los Angeles, Aniston rented an apartment that came with a ghost who just so happened to hate her roommate. "All of the sudden things started to [happen]. This dishwasher would start to go, or the coffee maker would start to go, or the stereo would just turn on at full volume. And it was terrifying," The Morning Show actress said on The Late Late Show with James Corden.
Following the advice of a friend, Aniston had someone come to "clear the house." "They had frankincense and they put it in a little dish, and sort of started saying all these things. And the first corner that she went to, the dish cracked," she recalled. "When we got to the really thick, thick, thick 1975 ashtray that was sitting on the table and then that cracked and she asked me to leave then I [really believed it]. She had to have a talking to [with the ghost]."
The ghost expert was able to pinpoint the problem after chatting with the spirit. "[The ghost] hated my roommate," Aniston said. "I moved out. I feel terrible, but I couldn't say, 'It doesn't like you.' I mean that would be terrible."
Jenna Bush Hager
The former First Daughter heard her share of bumps in the night when she lived in the White House. "I heard a ghost," she shared on The Tonight Show. "I was asleep, there was a fireplace in my room and all of a sudden I heard 1920s music coming out. I could feel it. I freaked out and ran into my sister's room. She was like, 'Please go back to sleep, this is ridiculous.' “
Kris, Kendall and Kylie Jenner
The supermodel revealed in a Halloween-themed 2018 Vogue video that she and her younger sister had some creepy experiences in their mom's house. "I do believe in ghosts. I don't know if I've ever seen one, but I've experienced some pretty ghost-y situations," she said. "In the house my mom lives in, Kylie and I would always hear footsteps on the roof while no one was home. Kylie's shower used to turn on all the time and we never knew why. So yeah, I'm convinced it was a ghost."
Matthew McConaughey
During an interview about his 2009 movie Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, the actor told the tale of Madame Bleu, the not-so-friendly spirit who lived in his Hollywood home. "I was not even under the influence and she was there," he recalled. "She wasn't that happy, it didn't seem like she was going to be much fun to hang around or have in my house, so I went ahead and stood my ground. I opened the door and said, 'You can move around all you want but I'm not going anywhere.' For weeks everyone that came to the house said the same thing: 'There's someone down in that hall, there's somebody down in that hall.' "
Ellen DeGeneres
"I have seen [a ghost]. It's weird," DeGeneres said while interviewing Melissa McCarthy on her talk show. "It's a very strange thing — I didn't see anything that disturbed me. And then my mother saw the same thing. I lived in that house and then I moved — because when I saw the ghost, I moved out and I put her in it. And then she saw the ghost as well. It was a man that was in, like, turn-of-the-century clothes and a hat and a three-piece suit."
Miley Cyrus
The singer and her family had a terrifying time staying at a haunted rental apartment in London. "I was having really crazy dreams and really scary things, and one night my little sister — it sounds crazy to tell you — but she was standing in the shower and all of a sudden I hear her scream. I run in there and the water had somehow flipped to hot but it was still … It wasn't like the water had just changed, the knob had turned but she hadn't turned it and it was burning her. She was really red," Cyrus told Elle UK. "Before I felt this, I thought I had seen a little boy sitting on the sink watching me take a shower so I felt really freaked out." The star added that her mom, aunt, and ex Liam Hemsworth all had "crazy experiences" in the flat after the shower incident, and that she eventually felt forced to find another place to stay.
Lea Michele
"I really, truly had a ghost in an old apartment that I lived in in New York," Michele said on A Little Late with Lilly Singh. The actress recalled hearing a "burst from upstairs" when she was on the bottom floor of the unit, only to go check it out and find it "silent" with "nothing out of place." She added, "I'm like 'It's all in my head,' and just as I say that, the window [flies open] right in front of me … And also, weirdly, I would hear someone singing in the apartment.”
Megan Mullally
Mullally is convinced she and husband Nick Offerman once shared a house with the spirit of Nicole Brown Simpson, who was murdered in 1994. "It wasn't the same house, but it was on the same property where had once stood a house that O.J. Simpson had rented for Nicole Brown Simpson," Mullally said on Busy Tonight. "We would have in that house, in one corner of the house, like maybe where the bedroom used to be in the old house, we would have all these sounds and weird things all the time. I would be like, 'That's Nicole and she's pissed because Nick doesn't get it.' "
According to the Will & Grace star, the spirit's activity stopped after Offerman watched documentaries and the American Crime Story series that covered Brown Simpson's murder: "Ever since then, no more sounds. She just needed Nick to understand what happened."
Demi Lovato
"My house in Texas is so ridiculously haunted," Lovato wrote in a 2013 Buzzfeed piece. "Not by a bad spirit, but a little girl. I think her name is Emily. I've had a medium come over and ghost hunters, and they both told me the same name, Emily. There were so many times that I saw her when I was growing up."
"I believe that everyone can tune into that part of their mind. I think I have a really strong connection to the afterlife," the singer continued. "When I walk into a room, I can tell if something has happened there or not, or if a hotel is haunted."
Gigi Hadid
"I've had a lot of unexplainable experiences with the supernatural," the model said in a Vogue video. "When we were kids, we lived in this really old house, and I was given the attic as my room. We used to hear this weird sound in the closet, and then we asked my dad, and he said this old lady used to live in the house."
"We convinced ourselves [it was her], and we would talk to her. We'd be like, 'Girl, we'll bring you some tea,' " she added.
Jessica Alba
Alba told the Sydney Morning Herald that she was attacked by a ghost while sleeping in her family's home when she was 17. "I had no idea what it was. I felt this pressure and I couldn't get up, I couldn't scream, I couldn't talk, I couldn't do anything," she said. "Something definitely took the covers off me and I definitely couldn't get off the bed, and then, once I did, I screamed, ran to my parents' room and I don't think I spent many nights in that house ever again … There was definitely something in my parents' old house — I don't know what it was. I can't really explain it. But they got it blessed and they burned sage and stuff since then."
Lucy Hale
"I have a ghost in my house," the Katy Keene star told Hollywood Teen'Zine in 2010, adding that her coffee maker once came on by itself at 1 a.m. "Doors close, not slam, but they close. And I have a motion sensor that lights up in my apartment and I swear it lights up sometimes when there's nothing under it. And my dog barks a lot. I don't feel threatened, that threatened, but it definitely freaks me out."
Claudia Schiffer
Former residents seem to have trouble letting go of the Tudor mansion the model and her family call home. "We had a medium go around, and she told us that actually all the ghosts in the house are lovely. No one needs to be scared," she told Architectural Digest. "We welcome all the ghosts, basically ... We hear creaking noises and strange things happen sometimes, like the music comes on."
Alyson Hannigan
"I have a ghost in my house. I saw him a couple of months ago," Hannigan once told the San Francisco Gate. "I don't think he died there because there's a law in L.A. that when you buy a house, if somebody's died there they have to disclose that. And nobody did. So I don't know why he's there. But he's very friendly. My friend saw him first one night. She said, 'I don't mean to alarm you but I just saw a man follow us out of the house.' And I said, 'Well, at least he's gentlemanly, he let us go first.' Later that night, I saw this silhouette of a man standing in the bathroom doorway. I was like, 'Sweetie, what are you doing?' I thought it was [now-husband] Alexis [Denisof]. But then I looked and Alexis was asleep next to me."