Cigar smoke drifts through the Blennerhassett Hotel in Parkersburg, West Virginia with no smoker anywhere in the building. Staff say it belongs to William Nelson Chancellor, who built the place in 1889 and once sat down on a guest's bed to say so.
The most-reported ghost at the Blennerhassett Hotel in Parkersburg, West Virginia arrives as a smell. Cigar smoke, in a building where nobody has lit one in years, and then a man in a fine gray three-piece suit standing where he wasn't a second ago. He gets blamed for the elevator too, which opens and closes on nobody, a figure in dark clothes glimpsed in the hall as the doors part and gone by the time anyone steps out.
Staff take him for William Nelson Chancellor. Chancellor was a Parkersburg oil man and two-time mayor who built the hotel and opened it in 1889 for the barons of the gas and oil boom, and it is the oldest hotel in West Virginia. He died in 1908. In 2003 a guest switched off his bedside lamp and felt a weight settle onto the foot of the bed. He turned the light back on, and Chancellor was sitting there. "I was here first!" the ghost said, and was gone.
Chancellor's commissioned portrait has hung in the hotel on loan since the 1986 restoration. A haunted-hotel guide's account of the place has it that the picture was taken down from the library during a renovation, that the disturbances got worse the longer it stayed down, and that they eased once it was back on the wall. People who stand in front of it report rings of smoke rising off the canvas and the smell of cigars with nobody smoking. Whether Chancellor smoked in life isn't recorded anywhere, not in the genealogical record and not in the hotel's own history of him. The habit belongs entirely to the ghost.
He isn't the only one working the building. When the hotel absorbed the Kaltenecker Building next door during the 1985 renovation, staff say it came with a man in a bowler hat, seen down in the basement dry storage and in Room 409 a few floors directly above it. 409 is the only two-story suite in the place. Guests there report furniture moving at night, and one woman said he tried to hold her down in bed by her neck.
Adam Dotson, the hotel's guest services specialist, booked Room 407 next door on purpose once, because that end of the hotel is the quiet side. He woke to what sounded like a party going on in 409, and was told the next morning that he'd been the only person on that end of that floor.
Sherry Stevens, the hotel's human resources manager, was on the sidewalk across the street one afternoon when something flashed and made her look. A woman was looking back through the glass of the Fourth Street door: white, expressionless face, bright red hair, light blue dress with a tall frilly collar and a brooch. She saw her twice in one week. That door serves no purpose now. In 1889 it was the entrance to the gentlemen's cigar stand and smoking room.
