In Brief
Guests at the Buxton Inn in Granville, Ohio keep meeting the Lady in Blue, a former innkeeper named Bonnie Bounell. A perfume of gardenia and rose arrives before she does. She has been seen for decades in the rooms where she once lived.
The Full Story
In the mid-1980s, a nurse staying in Room 7 of the Buxton Inn in Granville, Ohio woke to a woman standing in her doorway. The woman wore an old-fashioned dress with puffed sleeves. "You can't sleep, can you?" she said, then turned and walked away. Weeks later, staff showed the nurse a newspaper photograph, and she recognized the face at once: Ethel "Bonnie" Bounell, who ran the inn from 1934 until her death in 1960.
Guests call her the Lady in Blue. Born in Newark, Ohio in 1888, she sang with a light-opera company in her youth before she bought the inn in 1934. She appears in a blue dress, the color said to have been her favorite, with dark curly hair, and the story goes that a gardenia-and-rose perfume arrives in a room before she does. She lived in what are now Rooms 9 and 10, and those rooms are where people report her most. During the 1970s, workers reported a figure in blue and afterward refused to come inside after dark.
In 1989, two women in Room 9 felt something land on the bed in the dark and got up to find no cat in the room. The inn had kept one years before: a 15-pound house cat named Major Buxton, which shared its name with the man whose name is on the building. "Major" was Horton Buxton's first name, not a rank; he bought the inn in 1865 and died in 1902, and his portrait still hangs inside. Guests and staff report cigar smoke drifting through the kitchen and dining room of an inn that no longer allows it. Orrin Granger, the Massachusetts pioneer who built the place in 1812, is said to turn up too, an old man in white breeches blamed for making off with freshly baked pies from the downstairs pantry.
The Buxton has been open continuously since 1812, 25 rooms across five connected houses, and the sightings run nearly as deep. The first written account ran in a Denison University student paper on May 10, 1932. A woman named Kristina Wertman worked at the inn for about 20 years and started out skeptical. "The spirits are not performers," she has said. "Not everyone sees or hears or smells something."
But Bonnie, the one most often seen in the rooms where she lived, never died in them. On May 4, 1960, she fell ill on the road back from Columbus, was admitted to a hospital in Newark that morning, and died there that evening. Of everyone the inn could have kept, it kept the woman who left it.
