Fainting Goat Island Inn

The Fainting Goat Island Inn in Nichols has been voted America's #1 haunted hotel three times by USA Today readers, with guests regularly reporting tea-drinking ghost women, a spectral little boy, and sheets pulled off beds in the night. The 1850 building has been an ice house, post office, railroad hotel, foundry, and brothel before becoming a five-room B&B with fainting goats and a pig named Porkchop.

Two women sit in the Fainting Room drinking tea. Guests see them clearly enough to describe the scene. Then the women vanish. This happens regularly.

The Fainting Goat Island Inn in Nichols, New York, was voted the #1 Best Haunted Hotel in America by USA Today readers three times (2022, 2023, and 2025), which is remarkable for a five-room bed and breakfast on the banks of the Susquehanna River in Tioga County, population not very many.

Owner Marnie Streit found the building by accident. She was floating down the Susquehanna and spotted an abandoned structure on the riverbank. The building dates to 1850 and has been, in order: an ice house where the community came to get blocks of ice, a town post office, a railroad hotel for the Erie-Lackawanna Railroad, a foundry, and a brothel. It has lived several lives, and apparently some of those lives left people behind.

Each of the five guest rooms is named after a goat breed, and each has its own reported activity. The Fainting Room is the most active. Besides the tea-drinking women, guests have encountered a little boy who is considered the inn's most famous ghost. He's been seen and heard frequently enough that returning guests ask about him by reputation. The Nubian Room has a child-sized chair that moves on its own, repositioning itself beside the bed overnight. In the Angora Room, guests have reported the sensation of someone sitting on the edge of their bed, sheets being pulled off them, and the feeling of being physically pinned down.

Then there are the sounds. Doors slamming when no doors are open. Footsteps on a staircase that no longer exists (the original stairs were removed during renovations, but the footsteps continue on the route they used to follow). Trumpet music in the middle of the night with no identifiable source. Women's voices drifting through rooms. Eyes looking back from mirrors. That last one shows up in multiple guest accounts.

Streit, who is also a health and physical education teacher at Sayre High School, gets up at 4 a.m. daily to run the inn. She lives on the first floor with her partner Bill. The property includes a 17-acre island visible from the grounds (the "Island" in the name), along with a rotating cast of animals: fainting goats, a pot-bellied pig named Porkchop, Great Pyrenees dogs named Stanley, Bertha, Archie, and Fiona, several cats including one named Esther, and ducks. The fainting goats were originally supposed to roam the island, but they're afraid of water.

The Travel Channel featured the inn on an episode of Hotel Paranormal. Empirical Paranormal has investigated the property. The investigations tend to confirm what guests already report: consistent activity across multiple rooms, concentrated in the Fainting Room, with the ghost boy as the most frequently encountered presence.

What sets this place apart from most haunted hotels is the combination of specificity and charm. The ghosts aren't aggressive. The tea-drinking women are polite. The boy is curious. The overall vibe is more odd than frightening, which might explain why people keep voting it #1. Rooms start at $115 a night, which is a bargain if you want to share a bed with something that pulls your sheets off.

Porkchop, for the record, is not haunted. He just looks like he might be.