In Brief
The Governor Calvert House in Annapolis, Maryland has a glass floor in its sitting room, set there to show off an ancient brick furnace buried underneath. Guests who sit above it report unfamiliar faces looking back up, and reflections of people who aren't in the room.
The Full Story
The sitting room at the Governor Calvert House in Annapolis, Maryland has a glass floor, and the story goes that the faces looking up through it aren't always your own. Guests describe unfamiliar faces in the glass, reflections of people who aren't standing anywhere in the room.
What's actually under the glass is real, and stranger than the ghosts. In the early 1980s, University of Maryland archaeologists digging beneath the house uncovered a brick hypocaust, a Roman-style underground furnace that pushed hot air through channels in the floor. It sits roughly 10 feet square and a foot and a half deep, a barrel-vaulted brick channel with an ash box and a sloping runway. It's believed to be the oldest one of its kind in North America. It had heated an orangery, a citrus greenhouse the Calvert governors kept as a quiet display of wealth. The same dig pulled thousands of artifacts from the ground, among them a golden Hand of Fatima pendant thought to have belonged to an enslaved Muslim African. The hotel set plexiglass over the excavation so guests could look down into all of it.
This was the house of Captain Charles Calvert, governor of Maryland from 1720 to 1727, who stood at 58 State Circle beside the State House. The original structure was a low gambrel-roofed building until fire took most of it in 1764. What survived was rebuilt into a two-story Georgian house and served as state barracks until 1784, then passed through a century of other lives, a printing office, a mayor's home, apartments, before a developer turned it into an inn in the 1970s.
The named ghost here is Dominic. Ghost-tour accounts say he worked in the building and never left, that he told a medium he knows he's dead and lingers anyway, and that he watches guests undress. No one reports seeing him. His presence is only ever felt. Staff and ghost directories also tell of a woman from the 1940s, said to have died by her own hand, wandering the halls after dark, and a man in 18th-century dress taken for a former occupant.
The strangest account comes from a single guest review. A couple booked room 3202 in August 2020 — moved there from 3203 after a keycard failed — and described a night of shared nightmares, a burnt-oily smell only the husband could place, and the sense of someone in the room with them. They wrote that they don't believe in ghosts. Then they wrote that they were less sure of that than they'd been the day before.
