Broadway Hotel and Tavern

A 1992 Ouija session named the Broadway Hotel's first-floor ghost: Charles Morgan, Chicago bootlegger shot during Prohibition.

The most persistent ghost at the Broadway Hotel and Tavern has a name, a rap sheet, and a Ouija board to thank for both. Local lore says a new owner in 1992 ran a session in the dining room and walked away convinced the shadow in a 1920s suit they kept seeing was Charles Morgan, a Chicago bootlegger shot on the premises during Prohibition over a bad deal with the mob. There's no paper trail for any Charles Morgan matching that biography. That hasn't stopped the name from sticking for thirty years.

Virginia Dyer Jorgensen gave the hotel a full chapter in her book Ghosts of Madison, Indiana. WAVE 3 News out of Louisville ran a segment on the place in November 2018. That's more media attention than most small-town hauntings ever get. The tavern has been pouring drinks here since the 1830s per local history, which the current owners bill as one of Indiana's oldest continuously-operating bars.

Morgan, or whoever the shadow actually is, tends to stick to the tavern and main dining room on the first floor. Staff describe him wearing a dark suit from the 1920s and moving with purpose, not drifting. One commenter on Haunted Places in October 2018, writing only as "sadie," claimed she'd been shoved by a man in the dining room and then "possessed" by him. Take that one however you want. Other accounts are more ordinary: figure standing near a table, figure gone by the time you look twice.

The second ghost is the one that actually ruins guests' nights. Upstairs in the bed and breakfast rooms, between dusk and dawn, a woman cries for help. The voice is desperate. It carries through the hallways like someone is being attacked in the next room. Staff have run down every hallway chasing it and found nothing. Nobody has ever seen her. Decades of guests describe the same experience almost word for word. That's hard to dismiss.

Glasses slide across the bar. Doors open on their own. A woman in white has been spotted in the older sections. A man in a 1920s three-piece suit appears in the tavern and vanishes when someone says hello. Footsteps in empty corridors. Conversations in empty rooms that cut off the second a staff member walks in.

Not everyone buys it. A former resident named Mark Taflinger, whose family lived in the hotel from 1967 to 1977, posted publicly that he experienced nothing paranormal in a full decade there. That's worth noting. Ten quiet years inside a building that's supposedly crawling with ghosts is a real data point, even if it doesn't square with what guests and staff have been reporting since.

Madison runs with its haunted reputation. The town sits on the Ohio River, was a major frontier waystation, and has enough ghost lore to fill a small library. The Broadway Hotel is the anchor. The upstairs cry is the one that costs you sleep. Guests have been hearing it for forty years and nobody's ever found the woman.