Gratz Park Inn

A Lexington boutique hotel built on a 1920s clinic morgue with three named ghosts, a third-floor girl playing jacks, and a guest ledger.

The Gratz Park Inn keeps a paranormal ledger at the front desk. Guests who see or hear something are invited to write it down. Decades of entries describe the same three ghosts.

The building sits at the corner of Second and Upper Streets in Lexington's Gratz Park historic district. Three physicians commissioned it in 1916. It opened in July 1920 as the Lexington Clinic, one of the city's first group medical practices, and grew to nine doctors before the clinic moved out in the 1950s. An engineering firm used it next. In 1988 it was converted into a boutique hotel, which has cycled through names and is currently The Sire. Some of the scuppers from the old basement morgue are still visible. The drainage slots are where blood and fluids used to run off during autopsies.

Clinics leave ghosts behind. This one left three.

John is the one people mention first. Staff describe him as having a sense of humor, which in practice means he plays with the electronics. Televisions switch on by themselves, turn off by themselves, and sometimes change channels with the remote on the dresser and nobody holding it. A melancholy-looking male figure has also been spotted on the bottom level near the old morgue area, which may or may not be the same entity.

Little Annie lives on the third floor. She shows up playing with a doll, running in the hallway, or playing jacks in the corridor. One of the clearest guest accounts in the ledger came from a guest who, around 9 a.m., heard a child's footsteps running in the third-floor hall, then slow to a walk, then approach the bed. When the guest pulled off a sleep mask, the footsteps went "quickly running out, just like a child's."

The Lady in White is the most frequently reported. She wears a white Victorian dress and a matching hat and glides through the second-floor hallways, always looking for something, never noticing anyone alive. Her identity isn't known. The best guess is a former patient, though the clinic records don't pin her down.

Guests also hear parties from an era that isn't theirs. Laughter. Clinking glasses. Muffled conversation through walls that should be silent. The sounds come from rooms that are empty when anyone opens the door to check.

The Blue Grass Trust for Historic Preservation includes the inn on its Gratz Park Ghost Tails and Tours. MK Paranormal runs separate walks through the surrounding district, where seven documented spirit locations sit within a three-block radius. For a boutique hotel built on top of a morgue, the inn is refreshingly upfront about the situation. The ledger stays at the desk. New entries keep coming.