French Lick Springs Hotel

Thomas Taggart still checks the sixth floor at French Lick Springs Hotel. He's been dead since 1929. The cigar smoke in the hallways is his.

Housekeepers on the sixth floor of French Lick Springs Hotel keep smelling cigar smoke where nobody's smoking one. The smoke moves. It drifts through service corridors, settles near the freight elevator, and thickens on busy weekends when the hotel is running close to full. The tobacco belongs to Thomas Taggart, who ran the place like a small empire and has been dead since March 6, 1929. He apparently never quite clocked out.

The hotel itself is older than the ghost. Dr. William Bowles opened it in 1845 on 1,500 acres of Orange County farmland, built around the sulfur springs that southern Indiana farmers had been drinking out of for generations. It was modest at first. Taggart, the former mayor of Indianapolis and longtime chairman of the Democratic National Committee, pulled together a group of investors to buy it in 1901 and bought out his partners a few years later. By the 1920s he'd turned French Lick Springs into one of the most profitable resorts in the country, making more than two million dollars a year off a guest list of senators, governors, baseball players, and gangsters. The architect William Homer Floyd gave the main wing a Mediterranean Revival spin, long covered porches, and a buff-colored brick face that reads as yellow or pink depending on the light. (Don't confuse it with the domed White House-looking resort down the road. That's West Baden Springs Hotel, one mile away. Taggart didn't own that one.)

The hotel had a mineral-water side business called Pluto Water, marketed with the slogan "If Nature Won't, Pluto Will," a genteel way to say industrial-strength laxative. A lot of the sixth-floor activity is tied to Taggart's era. Staff report cigar and pipe smoke drifting through empty hallways. Phantom parties. Music and clinking glasses coming from the ballroom after it's been locked for the night. One common account has Taggart riding a horse down the sixth-floor corridor, which sounds ridiculous until you remember that Gilded Age resort owners actually did ride horses in hotels. That part he did in life, too.

A bellhop named Charlie shows up almost as often. Accounts disagree on the details. One version has him dying in an elevator shaft; another puts the fall in the 1970s. Nobody has produced a confirmed record of his death, which is a real problem for the story, but the sightings describe the same thing over and over: a uniformed figure moving purposefully through the hallways, appearing near luggage carts that guests swear they didn't leave out, and responding to paranormal investigators' EVP devices when asked about Charlie. In the hotel's restored theater, actors rehearsing alone have described lines being fed to them from the empty seats. That ghost also goes by Charlie.

The rest of the property has its own cast. A man in a black suit who steps out of a bathroom and disappears into a closet. A woman in white seen standing at the foot of occupied beds. Red stains that show up in empty bathtubs without a source. Phantom phone calls to the front desk at night, where the phone rings and no one's on the line. These are standard hotel-ghost reports and would be easy to dismiss at a smaller, less-documented property. French Lick keeps generating them for a reason: the staff turnover here is low, and the same people keep reporting the same things.

The Cook Group bought the place in 2005 and reopened it on November 3, 2006 after a $382 million restoration that added a casino, a spa, and two golf courses. None of the renovations made the activity stop. If anything, the sixth floor got busier.

In June 1931, Franklin D. Roosevelt came to French Lick for a Democratic governors' conference to lock up support for his 1932 presidential run. He got what he came for. Taggart was already two years dead by then, but plenty of staff were convinced the former boss was still in the room.