Cassadaga Hotel

You smell him before you see anything. The guest who never checks out at the Cassadaga Hotel in Florida announces himself with cigars and gin, the story goes — a whiff of smoke drifting through a hallway where no one is smoking. They call him Arthur. He keeps to Room 22 on the second floor, where he lived in the 1930s, back before air conditioning, and where guests still report a tap on the shoulder and a presence by the window he used to sit at.

Who Arthur was depends on who's telling it. Some say an Irish tenor, others a New York opera singer. The hotel leans into the legend rather than pinning it down.

Most haunted hotels would deny the cold spots and comp you a quieter room before admitting 22 is occupied. The Cassadaga puts the spirits in the brochure. The front desk sells seances as an add-on to your stay. There are group readings, ghost tours off the porch, a haunted attraction near Halloween. The hotel's own website invites you to "embrace the energy of the many spirits who reside in this Enchanted Inn."

The building has reason to feel lived-in. The original wood-frame hotel burned around Christmas of 1926, blamed on faulty wiring, and the Spiritualist camp that runs the place hired an architect to raise a fireproof masonry replacement. The hotel dates itself to 1927; construction actually finished and the doors opened in 1928. The owner has refused to modernize the roaring-twenties bones ever since. "It's certainly not the Hyatt Regency," longtime owner Diana Morn said, "but if I changed things, the spirits wouldn't like it."

A guest named Colleen stepped onto the porch to smoke. The empty chair at her table started rocking on its own.

Morn doesn't frame any of it as a problem. "But this is their home," she said. "We are just visitors."