Mini Pines - The Hahn House

The House Made of the Hill: The Wilbur-Hahn House

At the end of a dead-end road on Spokane’s South Hill sits a century-old house built directly into the basalt beneath it. It’s beautiful, historically significant, privately owned—and by local reputation, one of the most haunted houses in Spokane.

But the documented history of the Wilbur-Hahn House is stranger than most of the legends.

Built in 1916 as an elaborate “love cottage,” the house passed from mining wealth and a marriage that lasted barely two years into the hands of Rudolph Hahn, the man newspapers would eventually call the “Mad Doctor of the South Hill.” His years there brought enormous parties, illegal liquor, radio towers, Jimmy Doolittle performing aerial stunts overhead, gunfire inside the house, the death of his wife Sylvia, a manslaughter conviction, and eventually Hahn’s own violent death.

Then the house sat vacant for years, and Spokane supplied the rest: a woman seen on the staircase, screams from the basement, slamming doors, arguing voices, shadow figures, disappearing bloodstains, secret tunnels and stories of money hidden somewhere on the property. Some of those claims have roots in documented history. Others fall apart once you look closely.

This episode separates the history from the haunting and the people who actually lived and died there from the legends that grew around them.

The House Made of the Hill: The Wilbur-Hahn House.