Henry B. Plant Museum

The Henry B. Plant Museum in Tampa, Florida keeps a hotel that no longer takes guests. Inside its preserved 1890s rooms, the staging method is called the Historic House Museum: rococo bronzes, antique clocks, a vase given by the Emperor of Japan, all laid out as if the Victorian guest had just stepped out and would be back any minute. The conceit is the whole point. The place is staged mid-occupancy, waiting on someone who isn't coming.

Someone, by some accounts, did.

The museum is the south wing of the old Tampa Bay Hotel, a Moorish landmark of minarets and domes that Henry B. Plant built between 1888 and 1891 for over $2 million. It opened February 5, 1891 with more than 500 rooms, electricity, telephones, and private baths. By 1933 the hotel had gone dark and the wing was set aside as a museum to preserve what Plant and his wife had collected on their European buying trips. It was renamed for him in 1974.

On the staircase landing closest to the museum, people keep meeting a man who fits the period. A female student saw him on the second-floor landing in a three-piece suit; when she called out, his eyes flared bright red. Another student found him sitting in a corner of the same landing, drinking what looked like a cup of tea, before he vanished. They call him the Brown Man, and the story most often told is that he's Plant himself, back among the rooms kept in his honor. Longtime staff have one rule for newcomers: don't make eye contact, and he'll leave you alone.

The museum doesn't argue with any of it. Every October it stages "An Eerie Evening at the Tampa Bay Hotel," walking visitors through thirteen rooms themed on 19th-century death rituals, mourning, and spiritualism. A house museum built to look as if its guests might return, leaning a little harder into the idea than it needs to.