Balsam Mountain Inn

A man named Sheriff died in Room 205 in 1928. Guests still wake up to sheets being yanked off. The owner stopped being a skeptic.

Former employees of Balsam Mountain Inn tell the same story about closing the place for winter. You shut the rooms one by one, flip the breakers, lock the front door, drive down the mountain. At the bottom of the hill you glance back, and every window on all three floors is lit up.

The inn sits in a gap between the Plott Balsams and Richland Balsam at 3,500 feet, a rambling wooden hotel built between 1905 and 1908. Brothers-in-law Walter Christy and Joseph Kenney started it as a boarding house for fishermen and hunters. The Balsam Gap railroad stop a few hundred yards away was briefly the busiest passenger station in the eastern United States, and the inn filled up on the strength of that traffic alone. Then the last passenger train through Balsam ran on July 4, 1948. The hotel drifted through decades as a rooming house, a private residence, and briefly a clinic during a local smallpox outbreak, before the county health department shut it down in 1988 and left it to rot in the mountain fog.

Room 205 is the reason people drive up here. In 1928, a local man named Sheriff was shot outside the inn, carried inside fatally wounded, and died in that room. His name isn't a title, it's his last name, and the ambiguity has let the story mutate over the years, but the death is real. Room 207 next door catches most of the overflow activity. The inn keeps a guestbook in each room and the entries stack up fast: footsteps pacing the wood floor above a bed for hours, giggling in the hallway at three a.m., bedsheets yanked off sleeping guests by hands they can't see.

Owner Marzena Wyszynska bought the inn in December 2017 as a skeptic. That changed one night when her own sheets came off her bed in one pull with nothing in the room that could have pulled them. She stopped arguing with the building after that. Small iron signs reading "welcome" now hang above the doorframes of rooms the staff considers occupied, a kind of cheerful surrender.

People around here call the place the Stanley Hotel of the South. The comparison is lazy in most ways, the inn is a third the size and a quarter as grand, but the phrase has stuck because both buildings generate the same kind of story from people who work there. Paranormal groups have filmed overnight segments. A documentary crew spent months inside it. None of the footage settles the question, which is probably the point.

The inn closed again in 2020, went up for sale during the pandemic, and reopened under new ownership around 2024 under its original name. The natural spring that fed the kitchen in 1908 still does. Whatever arrived in Room 205 in 1928 apparently signed the same lease.