Riordan Mansion

Timothy and Michael Riordan ran the lumber company that built early Flagstaff, and in 1904 the brothers built themselves a shared mansion: two 6,000 square foot wings joined by a common hall, log-slab siding over Arts and Crafts bones, forty rooms in all. Their families lived there for most of a century before the house became an Arizona state park.

A house that held one family for that long keeps its own archive: original furniture, photographs, and the kind of family stories that never made the newspapers.

The quietest ghost story in Flagstaff is the one the Riordans told themselves: family accounts describe a recurring presence in the house, spoken of matter-of-factly across the years. Park guides field the question often and answer it carefully, which is the correct way to treat a family’s own telling.