Congress Plaza Hotel

At the Congress Plaza Hotel in Chicago, the front desk gets more calls from Room 441 than from any other room in the building. Guests on the fourth floor of the South Tower report the same thing: a shadowy woman standing at the foot of the bed, hovering, tugging at the covers. They call down. Sometimes they ask to be moved.

The hotel opened in 1893 at 520 S. Michigan Avenue, facing Grant Park, built for visitors to the World's Columbian Exposition. It calls itself the most haunted hotel in Chicago, and a lot of that turns out to be invented. A Chicago historian named Adam Selzer went through the legends one by one and threw out the crowd-pleasers. Al Capone never lived here. There is no sealed Room 666; Selzer admits that one started as a joke of his that "snowballed into urban legend."

Two deaths survived the cull. He confirmed both.

In 1900, an Army captain named Louis Ostheim, a Spanish-American War veteran, checked in alone the night before his wedding. They found him on April 8 with a bullet in his right temple and a new revolver under his body. No note. In his room were two wedding rings, inscribed for a marriage set for the next day. Guests and staff call the figure they see the "Shadow Man."

The other is harder to read. In 1939, Adele Langer, a Jewish mother who had fled Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia on an expiring visa, took her two small sons — six and four — out a high window to their deaths, then went out after them. Accounts differ on whether it was the 12th floor or the 13th. A coroner ruled her insane from the strain of what she'd fled.

A security guard of 30 years said he once saw a small boy running the upstairs halls. He told him to stop. "Hey, you're not supposed to be up here running around!" The boy grinned, the guard said, and faded.

Which leaves Room 441, and the woman at the foot of the bed that nobody downstairs has ever found a way to move out.