DeSoto House Hotel

When flood workers tore out drywall in 2011, they found a bricked-up doorway in the exact spot where staff had watched the Lady in Black walk through the wall and vanish for years. This 1855 Galena hotel, where Lincoln spoke from the balcony and Grant held his Civil War homecoming, has active hauntings concentrated on the third floor, where guests hear footsteps from floors that were removed decades ago.

During the 2011 Galena flood, workers tearing out damaged drywall in the lower level of the DeSoto House Hotel found a bricked-up doorway. It was in the exact spot where staff had watched a woman in black period clothing walk through the wall and vanish, over and over, for years. Instead of covering it back up, management installed a plexiglass panel so visitors could see the hidden passage for themselves.

The DeSoto House opened in 1855 as the finest hotel west of New York. Abraham Lincoln spoke from its balcony in 1856. Ulysses S. Grant's welcome-home reception after the Civil War was held in its dining room. The hotel was a five-story showpiece, built for the steamboat era when Galena was one of the wealthiest towns in the Midwest.

Then everything went wrong. A fire tore through the building. Ten years later, a boiler explosion ripped out more of the interior. Railroads replaced steamboats, and Galena's economy collapsed. The hotel survived, barely, losing its top two floors in a later renovation that left it a shadow of the original.

The Lady in Black is the best-known ghost. She descends the main staircase in dark period attire, reaches the lower level, and walks directly into the wall where that bricked-up doorway was hiding. Staff saw this dozens of times before the flood exposed the doorway. The plexiglass is still there, with a sign explaining the story.

The third floor is the most active. Guests in Room 301 (the Schuyler Colfax room) have reported intense tingling on alternating sides of their body. One guest in March 2019 felt someone sit near his waist around 2:00 a.m. A desk clerk working late experienced an icy chill followed by a bright ball of light that zoomed past her face.

Room 326 (the Bayard Taylor room) has its own signature. Guests have walked in to find the room smelling of flowered perfume, which fades and is replaced by cigar smoke. One couple's fitness tracker activated at 3:00 a.m. with no corresponding notification on the paired phone. Room 328 produces scratching sounds above the television set and cold air that rushes past guests sitting on the bed.

Guests on the third floor complain about footsteps and noise from the floor above. There is no floor above. The original fourth and fifth stories were removed decades ago.

In the ladies' restroom on the first floor, multiple visitors have heard an infant crying and a woman shushing it. They were alone in the room every time.

A January 2019 visitor encountered a concentrated pocket of men's cologne in a four-foot section of hallway near the staircase. The scent didn't drift or dissipate. It sat in one spot like an invisible wall.

In 2012, a guest on the second floor reached for a lamp and it turned off before her hand touched the switch. In 2015, another guest watched a light move slowly across the coffered ceiling of their room, and a third had their television turn itself back on twice after being manually shut off.

The hotel leans into its reputation. The rooms are named after historical guests, the plexiglass over the Lady in Black's doorway is a point of pride, and the front desk has heard enough stories to fill a book. Whether that's smart marketing or an honest response to 170 years of strange reports depends on how seriously you take the two Marines' worth of evidence that keeps piling up at the oldest operating hotel in Illinois.