This is the final chapter in my little series on the most haunted hotels in the world. This last post includes a hotel in the home of one of the most famous murders in history, a newspaper-reading and coffee-thieving railroad tycoon, a mischievous doctor who likes to play pranks from beyond the grave, and the former home of a fake doctor who autopsied the bodies of the patients he killed.
Lizzie Borden Bed and Breakfast, Massachusetts: In 1892 Andrew and Abby Borden were found brutally murdered in their home. They were both killed with a hatchet, Abby while she was kneeling down making a bed, and Andrew while he was asleep on the sofa in the living room. Their eldest daughter Lizzie was accused of killing them, but was never found guilty and the case has remained unresolved. Guests staying at this macabre B & B have reported hearing a child's laughter and seeing faint outlines of what appear to be faces in th women's jackets eir photos.
Jekyll Island Club Hotel, Georgia: I find this story particularly frightening. Samuel Spencer was what you would call a railroad tycoon, or perhaps a railroad magnate. Every morning he would read the newspaper over coffee at the exclusive hunt club. In a fit of supreme irony he was killed in a train accident in 1906. To this day guests and club members continue to find their newspapers shuffled or disturbed and, most horrifying of all, their coffee cups sipped on ever since. What? I think it's scary. But then, we all know how I feel about coffee...
Carolina Inn: This hotel seems to be haunted by the spectre of one of their long-time residents, one Dr. William Jacocks, who made the Inn his home for nearly 20 years. Guests frequent tell stories of being followed by a man who disappears as they turn to face him. Staff and guests also tell of a large heavy set man, dressed in a black suit wearing a knit hat and a long blue parker-style coat, who wanders the halls checking to find any open doors.
This ghost moves methodically down the hall. From room to room. Jiggling the door knobs trying to get in. He has been reported many times to the staff, sometimes from guests in the rooms saying their doors are opening on their own, other times from guests witnessing him move throughout the halls. However, no one matching the description has ever been found.
Guests who stay in the second-floor room that was once the home of Dr. Jacocks often find themselves locked out. At one time, the room's door had to be completely removed from its hinges because it wouldn't budge. Paranormal researchers have collected an abundance of video and audio proof of ghostly happenings in this hotel, including piano notes, softly spoken words, and an orb-like object floating in the air.
Crescent Hotel, Arkansas: The Crescent Hotel is quite proud of their ghosts stories, so much so that they run a ghost tour year round. One story involves a mason worker who plunged to his death in Room 218 during the initial construction of the hotel. Other ghost stories from the hotel include a false doctor's hospital/morgue he ran in the basement of the bulding. I put a couple of the spookier stories here, but there is about sixteen different videos on YouTube. Just run a search for Crescent Hotel, and you find some.
Shibley, 42, says that while sleeping in a double bed with her mother there in April of 2009, something held down her legs and arms and began suffocating her.
"It was like a great force of intense pressure pressing down over my whole body, and I couldn't breathe," Shibley, who works as a graphic artist, says of the 2 a.m. experience. Shibley says her heart was pounding and, in desperation, she tapped her mother. The suffocating feeling stopped, she says, and she could move again. But there was a bad smell in the air, like a mixture of sulfur and the smell of earth and sweat after working in a garden. About 30 minutes later, something grabbed her ankles and pulled her halfway down the bed under the blankets, she says. Bill Ott, the hotel's director of marketing and communications since 1997, has never seen a ghost but says he doesn't understand what happened there one night several years ago. He and two staff members of the Deal Or No Deal TV show were alone in the hotel's dining room. They heard three or four people laughing in the room for 25 to 30 seconds, though no one else was in the room or in an adjacent lobby and kitchen, Ott says. Josh Silberman, a former producer for the TV show, was there and confirms the incident.
"It freaks me out to think about it," Silberman says. "The place was creepy. When you walk up stairs, it feels like you're being chased."
At the Crescent, paranormal researchers Jason Hawes and Grant Wilson, stars of the Ghost Hunters show, say they caught on a thermal-imaging camera "the Holy Grail" of paranormal investigation: "a full-body apparition" wearing a hat and nodding.
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