The Golden Lamb

Ohio's oldest business (open since 1803) is haunted by Sarah Stubbs, a former innkeeper's niece who appears as a five-year-old pulling at guests' coats and laughing in empty hallways. A defense attorney also accidentally killed himself here in 1871 while demonstrating how a shooting victim could have shot himself.

In 1871, defense attorney Clement Vallandigham was staying at the Golden Lamb in Lebanon, Ohio, preparing to prove that his client's murder victim had actually shot himself. He grabbed what he thought was an unloaded pistol, put it in his coat pocket, and demonstrated how a man could accidentally discharge a weapon while standing up from a kneeling position. The gun was loaded. It went off into his stomach. Vallandigham died the next morning. His client was acquitted.

The Golden Lamb has been open since 1803, making it the oldest continuously operating business in Ohio. Jonas Seaman opened it as a "house of Public Entertainment," hanging a golden lamb sign outside so even people who couldn't read could find the place. The current building went up in 1815. It was a stagecoach stop on the route between Cincinnati and the National Road (now U.S. 40), and the guest list over two centuries reads like an American history textbook: twelve U.S. presidents, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Vallandigham's ghost doesn't get reported much, oddly enough. The inn's best-known spirit is a little girl named Sarah Stubbs.

Sarah was the niece of a former innkeeper and spent much of her childhood at the Golden Lamb during the late 1800s. She died at 79, but the ghost appears as a five-year-old, the age she was when her father died and she lost her home. Historian John Zimkus suggests "a traumatic event can lead spirits to return to Earth at an earlier age."

Sarah shows up throughout the building. A guest once felt a child pulling at her fur coat; when she turned to tell the girl to stop, no one was there. Another guest tripped outside his room and heard a young girl laughing from the empty hallway. Parents have reported their children asking to play with "a little girl on the stairs" when no child was visible. The inn keeps a replica of Sarah's room on display for visitors.

Charles R. Sherman, an Ohio Supreme Court Justice, died at the Golden Lamb in 1829 while riding the circuit and holding court in Lebanon. His ghost reportedly roams the hallways, leaving the smell of cigar smoke in his wake. (His son, William Tecumseh Sherman, would later become the Union general who burned Atlanta, though that's a different kind of haunting.)

Sarah is the one who seems to mind change. Guests and staff report pictures being moved, objects rearranged, and small disturbances that line up with renovations. Zimkus notes that "children and animals can sense and see things that adults can't," which may explain why the youngest visitors tend to notice her first.

Food Network named the Golden Lamb the most haunted restaurant in Ohio in 2019. The dining room is the main draw for most visitors, with guest rooms named after famous guests upstairs. The building sits at 27 S. Broadway in Lebanon, looking almost exactly the way it did when Vallandigham pulled the wrong gun out of his pocket.