DeSoto House Hotel

At the DeSoto House Hotel in Galena, Illinois, the staff have watched the same woman for over a hundred years. She wears a black Victorian dress. She comes down a staircase, crosses to a wall, and walks into it, and she's gone. They call her the Lady in Black.

For generations there was no explaining it. A solid wall is a solid wall. Then in 2011 the building flooded, and workers tearing out water-damaged drywall in the lower level found something sealed up behind it: a doorway, bricked over, sitting in the exact spot where the woman always disappeared. She hadn't been walking through a wall. She'd been walking through a door that existed in her time. Instead of sealing it back up, the hotel set a plexiglass panel over the opening, so you can stand there and look at the way out she still uses.

The DeSoto House opened in April 1855, billed as the largest hotel in the West, five stories of it after the railroad reached this steamboat town. Lincoln spoke from its Main Street balcony in 1856; Stephen Douglas spoke from the same spot two years later; Grant ran a presidential campaign out of rooms 209 and 211. Then Galena's money drained away with the river trade, and by 1880 the top two floors were taken off the building entirely.

Which makes the most reported haunting here a strange one. Guests on the upper floors describe footsteps overhead, and party sounds — music, laughter, glasses clinking — coming from directly above them. There is nothing above them. Those floors were demolished in 1880.

The room accounts pile up below that. A guest in Room 301 felt someone sit on the edge of his bed near 2 a.m. A guest in Room 326 smelled flowered perfume, then cigar smoke, in a building where no one has smoked in decades. The manager doesn't fight any of it. "People don't just come to Galena for the history," he says, "but also for the ghost history."