{"id":2102,"slug":"copper-king-mansion-butte-montana","story":[{"heading":null,"paragraphs":["Copper King Mansion is the house a half-day's income built. W.A. Clark — one of Butte's three Copper Kings, worth somewhere between $50 and $200 million in a town on 'the richest hill on earth' — spent $250,000 on the 34-room Romanesque pile on West Granite Street, 1884 to 1888, the imported woodwork and frescoed ceilings amounting to roughly twelve hours of his take. He'd come to Montana in 1863 with a wagon and a loan business; by the time the mansion rose he owned mines, smelters, newspapers, railroads, and the water company.","Clark's real palace was the Fifth Avenue mansion he built later across from Central Park — the Butte house was the boomtown base, the place where the senator who'd bought his seat entertained the associates. The Cote family bought it in 1953 and still lives in it, running the bed-and-breakfast through rooms that never left 1888 — the gas-and-electric chandeliers, the hand-carved wood, the frescoes the copper paid for.","The haunting is the mansion's gentle register — the hazy apparition in the basement and first-floor hall, the cold presence in the game room, the doors that open themselves, the attic trunk that unlocked itself once. The file keeps the house's true anomaly: a robber baron's mansion that stayed in one family for seventy years, still furnished with the copper king's own things, still sheltering guests under the ceilings his money bought.","Copper King Mansion is the archive's Copper King file — W.A. Clark's 1888 Romanesque mansion on the richest hill on earth, still owned by the family that bought it in 1953, its ghost as gentle as the fortune that built it was vast."]},{"heading":"Why this file matters","paragraphs":["Copper King Mansion is the archive's robber-baron file — the Butte mansion a copper king built for half a day's income, preserved by the family that has kept it since 1953, its mild haunting under ceilings that cost more than most towns.","A mansion built in a day keeps its rooms — the file's suggestion being that the Copper King's hold is the continuity: the same family in the same frescoed rooms for seventy years, the ghost in the hall, and the Gilded Age fortune still visible in every carved panel."]}],"name":"Copper King Mansion","aliases":[],"type":"HISTORIC_MANSION","type_label":"Historic Mansion","cats":["FRONTIER_HISTORY","LOCAL_FOLKLORE","HISTORIC_MANSION"],"groups":["historic-sites","legends"],"desc":"W.A. Clark’s 1888 mansion—Copper King lore in the \"richest hill.\"","full_desc":"Copper King Mansion is a historic mansion in Butte, Montana, built in 1888. W.A. Clark’s 1888 mansion—Copper King lore in the \"richest hill.\". HauntHunt files it with historic mansions, frontier history and local folklore. The dossier holds 1 reported claim and 1 documented fact — documented record and retelling kept side by side. The site is open to visitors.","address":null,"city":"Butte","county":null,"state":"Montana","postal":null,"region":"West","lat":46.0108,"lon":-112.5381,"coord_kind":"EXACT","status":"ACTIVE","access":"PUBLIC","access_notes":null,"ownership":null,"website":null,"phone":null,"year_built":1888,"year_opened":null,"year_closed":null,"year_demolished":null,"designation":null,"current_use":null,"research_notes":"New record from encyclopedia/official-source pass; VERIFY task auto-queued for primary-source corroboration.","stage":"SOURCE_RESEARCH","quality":{"level":"MEDIUM","score":70,"dims":{"location_confidence":0.75,"identity_confidence":0.65,"historical_confidence":0.8,"source_quality":0.3999999999999999,"paranormal_claim_provenance":0.8,"coordinate_confidence":0.85,"current_access_confidence":0.7,"freshness":0.65}},"claims":[{"id":1349,"type":"REPORTED_ANOMALIES","description":"Guests report a woman’s presence and footsteps in the upstairs rooms. Copper King Mansion's file is thin on proof and long on persistence — the standard profile of American place-lore. Witness accounts, no evidence file: the claim is anecdotal and stays that way. The pattern of small anomalies is itself the claim — none dramatic alone, persistent together.","evidence":"ANECDOTAL","evidence_label":"Anecdotal","entity":null,"where":null,"first_report":null,"approx_date":null,"confidence":0.8,"conflict_notes":null,"source":{"name":"Copper King Mansion","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copper_King_Mansion","publisher":"Wikipedia","type":"ENCYCLOPEDIA","authority":4},"conflicting_source":null,"variants":[]}],"history":[{"description":"Built in 1888 for Copper King W.A. Clark. Copper King Mansion's past is on record — the entry belongs to the verified layer beneath whatever lore attaches. This belongs to the verified spine of the entry, the layer everything else is measured against. Sources including 'Copper King Mansion' carry the record. The date is part of the site's documented spine.","evidence":"HISTORICALLY_VERIFIED","date_start":"1888","date_end":null,"confidence":null,"source":{"name":"Copper King Mansion","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copper_King_Mansion","publisher":"Wikipedia","type":"ENCYCLOPEDIA","authority":4}}],"legends":[],"entities":[],"events":[],"investigations":[],"encounters":[],"media":[],"persons":[],"visitor":{"tour_availability":"Verify before visiting","notes":"Site access varies; verify before visiting.","last_verified_at":"2026-09-18 11:32:55","source":{"name":"HauntHunt generic access guidance","url":"https://haunthunt.com/about#access-guidance","publisher":"HauntHunt editorial","type":"DIRECTORY","authority":2}},"sources":[{"name":"Copper King Mansion","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copper_King_Mansion","publisher":"Wikipedia","type":"ENCYCLOPEDIA","authority":4}],"conflicts":[],"wiki":{"title":"Copper King Mansion","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copper_King_Mansion","desc":"Historic house in Montana, United States","extract":"The Copper King Mansion, also known as the W. A. Clark Mansion, is a 34-room residence of Romanesque Revival Victorian architecture that was built from 1884 to 1888 as the Butte, Montana, residence of William Andrews Clark, one of Montana's three famous Copper Kings. The home features fresco painted ceilings, elegant parquets of rare imported wood, gas and electric chandeliers, ornate hand-carved fireplaces and stairways, and stained-glass windows. The mansion was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1970.","img":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9f/Copper_King_Mansion_%28Butte%29_2002-05.jpg/330px-Copper_King_Mansion_%28Butte%29_2002-05.jpg?utm_source=en.wikipedia.org&utm_campaign=api&utm_content=thumbnail","score":108,"lat":46.01444444,"lon":-112.53916667},"counts":{"claims":1,"history":1,"legends":0,"entities":0,"sources":1}}