Lance Zaal's portfolio reads like an American horror syllabus: the Lizzie Borden house in Massachusetts ($1.6 million, purchased 2021), the Villisca Axe Murder House in Iowa, the Welty House at Gettysburg, and the LaLaurie Mansion in New Orleans, where he now lives. Each property is tied to violent death, unsolved crime, or systemic cruelty. Each was deteriorating when he acquired it. Zaal's origin story is familiar startup fare — laid off from a tech consulting job, pivoted to food tours, discovered ghost tours had stronger demand, scaled across multiple cities through his company US Ghost Adventures. The Borden purchase was the jump from services to real estate, from touring past buildings to owning them. The logic is vertical integration: control the asset, control the narrative, capture the full margin. What Zaal found inside the Borden house was not ectoplasm but rot. Doors so decayed a hand could punch through them. A toxic workplace culture among existing staff. The property had been milked as a cash cow with no reinvestment — a pattern he says is endemic to historic properties. This is the more interesting claim buried in a ghost story: that America's stock of historically significant buildings is being strip-mined by owners who extract tourist revenue while letting the structures decay. Zaal's counter-model is to invest in restoration and broaden the visitor base beyond ghost hunters. At the Borden house, programming now includes the history of early crime-scene photography and the gender dynamics of the 1892 trial. At the LaLaurie Mansion, visitors learn about the enslaved people tortured by Delphine LaLaurie and the building's later role as one of the South's earliest desegregated schools. The business pitch: wider audience equals more durable revenue. The extraction question is layered. On one level, Zaal is doing something modestly generative — preserving buildings, creating jobs, making difficult history accessible. On another level, this is still a business built on monetizing sites of suffering. The enslaved people tortured at LaLaurie, the murder victims at Borden and Villisca — their stories become content for a tourism company. Whether that constitutes honoring or commodifying depends on execution, and the article offers Zaal's framing without much independent verification. The structural question for this niche is sustainability. Heritage tourism tied to dark history is inherently limited in scale — there are only so many famous murder houses. Zaal's company also runs ghost tours in partnership with Walmart, suggesting the real growth engine is the tour operation, not the properties themselves. The properties function as brand anchors: owning the Borden house gives US Ghost Adventures a legitimacy that competitors renting public sidewalks cannot match. Twenty years out, this model either professionalizes a neglected corner of historic preservation or becomes another layer of extraction — famous buildings serving as props for an entertainment brand while the hard work of genuine historical scholarship stays unfunded. The angel decorations on the LaLaurie crown molding have watched since 1832. They'll watch this too.
