In Brief
Children at the Golden Lamb in Lebanon, Ohio keep pointing out a little girl on the stairs their parents can't see. Staff call her Sarah Stubbs, who grew up at the inn and lived to 79, yet always appears about 5, the age she was when her father died.
The Full Story
The little girl on the stairs at the Golden Lamb in Lebanon, Ohio is usually pointed out by another child. A small visitor will stop on the steps, point, and say there's a girl in a white dress just ahead — and the parents look up at an empty staircase. The accounts keep the same shapes. One guest felt a little hand tug at her fur coat and turned to find no one behind her. Another, after tripping in the hallway outside his room, heard a girl laughing somewhere down the empty corridor.
The staff think they know her. They call her Sarah Stubbs. She came to the building in 1882, when it was the Lebanon House, after her father died and she lost her home, and she was 5 years old. She was the innkeeper's niece, and she grew up in these halls. She lived to 79. But the girl people report is always about 5.
Historian John Zimkus has a word for that — an imprint, a spirit returning at the age its worst loss struck. "When she's five, her dad dies and she loses her home," he says. "Even though she was 79 when she died, she could be a 5-year-old girl walking through the halls." The inn's own ghost page leaves room for another name, suggesting the child might instead be Eliza Clay, a statesman's daughter who fell ill and died at the inn in 1825.
The Golden Lamb has been open since 1803 and calls itself the oldest continuously operating business in Ohio, and Sarah is not its most famous death. That belongs to Clement Vallandigham, a defense attorney who, one evening in June 1871, picked up a pistol he believed was empty to show how a man could shoot himself by accident while rising from a crouch. The pistol was loaded. It fired into his stomach, and he died the next morning. The demonstration worked anyway: his client, Thomas McGehan, walked free, then was shot dead in his own saloon four years later. Vallandigham's room is on the second floor, and a man matching his description is reported at the inn's windows, looking out.
But the ghost guests actually report is the one frozen at 5. On the fourth floor, the inn keeps a small museum room set up as a child's bedroom — a replica of Sarah's. The room she actually slept in was somewhere else in the building. She lived a long life and died an old woman. The Golden Lamb keeps her as a 5-year-old anyway.
