Long Island's Gold Coast earned its name honestly: a string of North Shore estates built by some of the wealthiest families in American history, financiers, retailers, industrialists, all competing to build the grandest possible weekend home along the Long Island Sound. A century later, several of those mansions have a second reputation to go with the first. Staff, guests and paranormal investigators alike describe some of the Gold Coast's grandest houses as still, quite literally, occupied by the people who built them.

None carries a bigger story, in every sense, than Oheka Castle in Huntington's West Hills. Built between 1914 and 1919 by investment banker Otto Hermann Kahn, the estate comprises 127 rooms across more than 109,000 square feet, making it the largest private home ever built in New York and the second-largest in the country. Kahn built it, in part, out of frustration: after being barred from clubs and golf courses in Morristown, New Jersey, because he was Jewish, he set out to build something no one could exclude him from. When a fire destroyed his previous estate in 1905, he made sure Oheka would never suffer the same fate, hiring architects Delano and Aldrich to construct it almost entirely from steel and concrete, one of the first fully fireproof residences in the country. Kahn died in 1934, and the estate passed through several owners, including a stretch as Eastern Military Academy, before its restoration into today's 32-room hotel. Guests and staff have reported apparitions in 1920s formal wear drifting through the halls, the faint sound of long-over parties, and statues whose eyes seem to track visitors across the room. Many believe the wanderer is Kahn himself, still keeping watch over the house he built to prove a point.

Roughly 20 miles away in Glen Cove, Winfield Hall carries a quieter but darker story. Frank Winfield Woolworth, who built his fortune on five-and-dime stores across the country, commissioned the 56-room, 48,000-square-foot mansion after a 1916 fire destroyed the estate previously standing on the property. Woolworth spared no expense, reportedly spending nine million dollars on the house, with the marble grand staircase alone costing two million. He got little time to enjoy it. On May 2, 1917, his daughter Edna took her own life at the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan while Woolworth was hosting a party back at Winfield Hall. According to the story passed down with the house, the family crest on display that night, bearing painted portraits of his three daughters, cracked at that exact moment, directly across Edna's face. Woolworth died two years later, and the ghost said to linger in Winfield Hall's halls today is hers.

Not every Gold Coast haunting carries that kind of tragedy. At the Glen Cove Mansion Hotel, staff describe a recurring guest who never checked in: a man in a dark brown suit, believed to be former owner John Pratt, spotted in the main hallways. His wife, by most accounts, prefers the pub, where she has reportedly been known to play the jukebox and switch the lobby television over to CSI, which staff say seems to be her favorite show.

Whether or not any of it holds up to scrutiny, the stories persist for a reason. These were homes built to be unforgettable, filled with money, ambition and, in more than one case, real loss, and it turns out that kind of history has a way of sticking around long after the family that built it is gone.