In Brief
The Capital Hotel in Little Rock won't claim its ghosts, and staff are told not to discuss them. But the housekeepers still won't clean the fourth floor alone — where a laborer who fell building the place and a woman who fell from an upper floor are both said to have stayed.
The Full Story
The Capital Hotel in Little Rock will not tell you it is haunted. Ask, and you get the same careful line every time: "We have no official word." Staff are told not to discuss it. And yet the housekeepers will not clean the fourth floor alone.
They have their reasons, and the reasons are specific. The story that circulates among staff fixes on one room up there — the lights that flick on by themselves, a radio that turns itself on and plays music off the station it's tuned to, a vacuum that unplugs mid-pull, voices through the wall. A staff member is said to have watched a man walk into a fourth-floor bathroom and not come out.
Two figures turn up in every version. The first is a laborer, said to have fallen to his death while the building was going up and never to have left it. No record of that death exists — a paranormal investigator who went looking wrote it plainly: "I could find no mention of anyone dying while working on the construction of the Capital Hotel." The story holds anyway, passed floor to floor, a man no one can prove was ever here.
The second is a young woman who fell from one of the upper floors. The stories don't agree on how she fell, and they don't try hard to. What they agree on is what she does now: she turns up in the guest rooms and moves the luggage, setting it down somewhere other than where it was left, and a scream has been heard traveling the halls that belongs to no guest anyone can find.
It got louder, they say, after the renovation. The hotel closed for a long restoration and reopened in November 2007, and that is when the reports picked up — guests describing big-band music in the dead middle of the night, drifting through a hotel where the staff had never said a word.
The hotel won't confirm any of it. It won't deny it either. The fourth floor is up there, and the housekeepers, who know the building better than any guest will, still don't go up alone.
