In Brief
The Balsam Mountain Inn sits in a mountain gap in Balsam, North Carolina. Former staff tell of locking it for winter, driving down the hill, and looking back to find every window lit. Inside, the owners hang iron welcome signs over the doors their ghosts prefer.
The Full Story
The Balsam Mountain Inn, a rambling wooden hotel in the mountains of Balsam, North Carolina, doesn't try to scare its ghosts off. It hangs little iron "welcome" signs over the doors of the rooms they're said to occupy, and keeps a blank journal in every room for guests to write down what happens to them. The owner says there are 200 to 300 of those journals now, filled and replaced.
Former employees tell a stranger story. When the inn closed for winter, the ritual was to shut the rooms one by one, flip the breakers, lock the front door, and drive down the mountain. The story goes that if you glanced back from the bottom of the hill, every window on all three floors was lit.
The most-written room is 205, a southwest corner room, and the man it belongs to has a name: Sheriff. In 1928, the lore holds, he was shot outside the building, carried in fatally wounded, and laid in 205, where he died. Staff describe him as a handsome man and a womanizer, more likely to make himself known when only women are in the room. Next door, 207 fills its journals too.
What the journals tend to hold is small and steady. Phantom footsteps down the wide hallways. Blankets pulled off beds. Names whispered in the middle of the night, and giggling with no guests nearby. In August 2020, a crew filmed three nights inside for a documentary called "Balsam: A Paranormal Investigation," among them Kane Hodder, the actor who played Jason Voorhees. One investigator said there were two moments during filming when she was beside herself, just freaked out.
The inn was built between 1905 and 1908 for railroad travelers, its hallways a full 10 feet wide so passengers' steamer trunks could pass. Four trains ran daily up to the highest railroad station east of the Rockies. The last passenger train came through on July 4, 1948, and the inn's first golden age ended with it.
Owner Marzena Wyszynska bought the place in 2017 as a skeptic. She changed her mind after a blanket was pulled off her bed by nothing she could see, then heard nails scratching an empty wall. She called a priest from Sylva and brought in investigators. What she settled on isn't fear.
"I am very happy," she said of the spirits, "and we are one large family. They don't scare me."
