Afton House Inn

The Afton House Inn sits on the St. Croix River in Afton, Minnesota, and there is one trick the staff have learned to expect. In Room 23, housekeepers make the bed and ready the room at night for guests arriving the next day. By morning, the bed has been shoved against the wall. It happens over and over.

It's the most reliable of the things the staff describe at Minnesota's oldest continuously operating inn. A visiting psychic told them the man upstairs is named Charlie. She said she could smell the sweetness of a vanilla cigar in the hallway, and that Charlie liked to hang around up there, looking for his wife. Who Charlie was in life, no record says. No death or tragedy at the inn explains him. The cigar smell is the only thing that arrives with him.

The building is the old Cushing Hotel, raised in 1867 by Charles Cushing on the limestone foundation of an earlier hotel that had burned down six years before. Two stories of locally milled white pine, originally just 24 feet square, sheathed in clapboard and expanded twice in its first five years. When Cushing died in 1876 his widow kept it running for travelers and summer tourists. In 1907 a woman named Mary Pennington bought it and ran it as a restaurant, famous for the Sunday chicken dinners she served motorists, until she died there in 1945. The Jarvis family has owned and run it since 1976.

The rest of the activity stays small and strange. In the main dining room, a waitress kept finding forks turned over at tables where no one had sat the night before. "Over and over and over again," she said. One afternoon a framed picture of the old Afton House flew partway across that same dining room in the middle of the day, with every window and door closed. "None of the windows were open," a staff member said. "There were no doors open." Guests walking to their rooms at night have reported a baby crying somewhere in the hallways; one mother and daughter heard it the whole way down the hall.

Various accounts name others — a woman called Margaret, a young boy in old-fashioned breeches, a farmer who turns up in the rooms. No two tellings name the same set, and none of them is written down anywhere but in the staff's stories. The people who work there don't sound afraid of any of them. They call the spirits playful, and the general manager will tell you the inn gets quite a few reports that something is going on.

Nobody has ever found out what Charlie is looking for. He keeps the hallway, and the staff keep remaking the bed in Room 23.