In Brief
In the Fainting Room of a five-room bed-and-breakfast in Nichols, New York, guests report two women sitting and drinking tea. They see the scene clearly enough to describe it. Then the women are gone. Readers voted the place America's best haunted hotel three times.
The Full Story
The Fainting Goat Island Inn is a five-room bed-and-breakfast on the Susquehanna River in Nichols, New York, and the room it's named for keeps two women who drink tea. Guests describe them sitting together, mid-conversation, close enough to make out the scene. Then the women are gone, and the room is empty.
That room, the Fainting Room, is the most active of the five. The others are named for goat breeds too, Alpine and Angora and Nubian and Toggenburg, because the owner keeps actual fainting goats out front. The Nubian Room has a child-sized chair that moves on its own, repositioning itself beside the bed. The Angora Room, opened in 2019, draws the physical reports: guests feel someone sit on the edge of the mattress, the sheets pulled off, the sensation of being held down.
The most-encountered spirit isn't the women at all. It's a little boy, believed to have died at the property long ago, and returning guests ask after him by now. Nobody found a name for him, or a date, or any record he was here. Elsewhere people report gumballs spilling across the floor of an empty hall, eyes looking back from mirrors, and footsteps climbing a staircase that was torn out in renovations. The stairs are gone. The route up them stayed. On the haunted tour, the owners tell of a doll and a knife found inside the ceiling.
None of it reads as terror. The goats out front are afraid of water, so they never colonized the island they were named to roam. There's a pot-bellied pig called Porkchop, Great Pyrenees dogs, cats, and ducks. The rooms hold period furnishings down to working phonographs. The whole thing leans odd and warm, a charming riverside house that happens to be full of polite company.
Owner Marnie Streit, a high school PE teacher, found the abandoned building while floating down the river and bought it. "I bought it myself," she said. "It was my house." Over its life it had been an ice house, a post office, a railroad hotel, a foundry, and a brothel, the owners say, though no deed or archive was found to pin the sequence down.
A paranormal group led by Gina Caprari has investigated the place. "We don't like to go into an investigation thinking that everything is paranormal," she said. "We like to explain things away if we can." USA TODAY's readers were less cautious. They voted the inn the best haunted hotel in the country three separate times, the last in 2025, for a tiny riverside house where the most famous resident is a little boy nobody can place.
