Detroit Masonic Temple

The Detroit Masonic Temple is the largest Masonic building in the world — 16 stories, over 1,000 rooms, and roughly 12 million cubic feet, built for the Freemasons starting in 1920 with a cornerstone laid using the same trowel George Washington used at the U.S. Capitol. Architect George D. Mason designed it in a neo-Gothic style that’s unusual for Masonic architecture, and inside it holds three theaters (one never finished, since construction ran through the Depression), two ballrooms, a 17,500-square-foot drill hall, a chapel modeled on Westminster Abbey in miniature, and seven Craft Lodge Rooms each done in a different historical style.

It’s also got real rock and roll credibility: Jack White quietly paid off $142,000 of the temple’s back taxes in 2013 after learning it once gave his mother a job as a theater usher, and the Masonic Temple Association renamed its Scottish Rite cathedral the Jack White Theater in his honor. White later got engaged there too, in 2022.

On our radar for the sheer scale and strangeness of the place, or for catching a concert in one of the most storied theater spaces in the city.

The building shows up on just about every “most haunted in Detroit” list, complete with reports of footsteps on empty staircases and cold spots in the lower levels. The most-repeated version of the story claims architect George D. Mason went bankrupt, was abandoned by his wife, and jumped from the roof to his death — but Detroit Historical Society records tell a less dramatic truth: Mason died peacefully at home in 1948 at 91, debt-free and still married. The mystery of the Freemasons themselves seems to be doing most of the haunting here.