Admiral Fell Inn

An elderly woman ghost sits on guests' beds and shushes them back to sleep at this Fells Point hotel built from eight 1770s-era buildings. The former sailor boarding house turned YMCA turned vinegar factory has a murdered guest in Room 413, a spirit named Emma who identified herself via EVP, and hurricane-night parties thrown by nobody alive. Forbes ranked it among America's top 25 haunted hotels.

An elderly woman walks into your room uninvited, sits on the edge of your bed, and waits for you to wake up. When you do, she presses a finger to her lips and whispers: go back to sleep. This has happened to multiple guests at the Admiral Fell Inn in Baltimore's Fells Point neighborhood, and nobody on staff can explain it.

The building at 888 South Broadway has been absorbing death since the 1770s. Seven connected buildings make up the hotel, and most of them predate the country. Founded in 1892, the Port Mission Women's Auxiliary established a Christian boarding house for sailors called The Anchorage, which moved to the corner of Broadway and Thames Street by 1900. It could hold 152 seamen at a time, offering clean beds and Sunday Mass as an alternative to the neighborhood's saloons, gambling halls, and brothels. When the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic overwhelmed Baltimore's hospitals, The Anchorage became a makeshift infirmary. A lot of those sailors never recovered.

The YMCA took over in 1929 and expanded the facility to 105 rooms, each so small the place earned the nickname "the doghouse." More than 50,000 sailors passed through before it closed in 1955. As managing director Ted Jabara told the Baltimore Sun: "A lot of them would not be very healthy. The women would care for them and try and get them better. Given how advanced medicine was back then, some of the sailors checked in and never checked out." At least one sailor shot himself on the property. The building spent years as a vinegar bottling factory before reopening as the Admiral Fell Inn in 1985. (In 2025, the owners rebranded it as The William Fell, a Tapestry Collection by Hilton property. The ghosts stayed.)

Guests see sailors in dirty white clothing floating where fire escape stairs used to be. A ghost dog plays in the hallways. Phantom butlers knock on doors and vanish. Jovial singing echoes through empty corridors, sometimes accompanied by clinking glasses and bouncing footsteps. The mystery woman who shushes guests back to sleep remains unidentified.

Room 413 is different. On June 29, 1999, pharmaceutical salesman Christopher William Jones, 37, was attending a convention in Baltimore when Gary William Mick followed him to his room and beat him with a hammer claw nine times. It was a hate crime. Mick told police he considered gay men "evil." He was sentenced to two life terms plus 30 years. Housekeepers now report sudden chills in Room 413, shadows at the edge of their vision, and the sensation of icy hands pressing on their shoulders. Some refuse to enter. During investigations, EVP recordings captured a voice saying "murder" and "head."

A spirit named Emma introduced herself during a Ghost N'at investigation in the hotel's basement Stone Room. When an investigator asked if there were any "ladies of the night" present, the EVP device picked up a woman's voice: "My name is Emma." A male voice immediately followed: "That whore!" When asked in the same room whether any spirits liked to play cards, the answer came back: "my whole life."

Hurricanes bring out the party. In 2003, when Hurricane Isabel forced a full evacuation, workers boarding up windows heard loud music blaring from the second floor, footsteps bouncing across the ceiling, glasses clinking, and people laughing. The hotel was completely empty. A general manager reported the same thing during an earlier hurricane evacuation. Whatever is upstairs, it doesn't need a guest list.

One skeptical guest reported seeing a woman with a medical chart standing at the foot of his bed. He later recognized her in a historic lobby photograph as a Port Mission volunteer. Staff at the basement bar pass around a photograph they believe shows a ghost in a white nurse's cap. A bartender named Steve G. Mavronis says hanging bulb lights flicker before activity spikes, and he once photographed what he believes is a woman's ghost outside the tavern window.

Forbes ranked the Admiral Fell Inn among America's top 25 haunted hotels. TripAdvisor named it one of the Top 10 Haunted Hotels in America, the only Maryland property on the list. The Ghost Detectives TV show investigated in 2012, with lead investigator Bob Christopher calling it "clearly something going on" and characterizing the activity as residual haunting, "kind of like a tape recorder playing over and over again." The inn runs complimentary ghost tours on Friday and Saturday evenings through its seven connected buildings, and guests keep adding new stories.