The Hermitage Hotel

A baby cries from Room 912 at the 1910 hotel where Tennessee cast the deciding vote on women's suffrage. Edwardian ghost on the upper floors.

The crying-baby reports from Room 912 at the Hermitage Hotel have been surfacing in Nashville ghost accounts for decades. Guests check in for a wedding or a Predators game, wake up around 3 a.m. to a child sobbing on the other side of the wall, and are told at checkout that the room above theirs was empty. Hotel lore ties the sound to a story about a child who fell from the window and died on the sidewalk below, a detail that gets repeated on every Nashville ghost walk but doesn't turn up in newspaper archives searched so far.

The Hermitage opened in 1910 as Nashville's first million-dollar hotel, designed by J. Edwin Carpenter, a Tennessee-born architect best remembered now for a run of early-20th-century hotels in the South. The Beaux-Arts lobby with the stained-glass ceiling, the marble floors, and the interlocking HH logo set into everything are all original. The hotel sits directly across the street from the Tennessee State Capitol, which is the reason it became the headquarters for the most consequential political fight in the building's history.

In August 1920, Tennessee was the deciding state for the Nineteenth Amendment. Both sides moved into the Hermitage. Carrie Chapman Catt ran the pro-suffrage operation. Josephine Pearson ran the anti. The suffragists took the eighth floor because it had a clean sight line to the Capitol steps, so they could watch which legislators were arriving and which had already been pulled into back-room meetings. The eighth-floor suite earned the nickname the "Jack Daniels suite" because of how much whiskey was being delivered to it during Prohibition. The amendment passed by a single vote on August 18, 1920. Tennessee made the difference.

That history is the reason a lot of the haunting gets attributed to women in shirtwaist-and-long-skirt silhouettes. Staff and guests have described a Lady in White on the upper floors in ankle-length skirts, blamed for doors opening on their own, elevators going to floors no one called, and small objects falling off shelves with no one near them. The lobby mirror keeps coming up too, an enormous ornate piece on the wall, which guests have watched crack across in front of them while they're standing there, then look back a minute later to find the glass intact.

There are phantom bellhops too. Multiple guests over the years have described being met at the elevator by a uniformed man who took their bags and then wasn't there when they turned around in the room. The hotel's own concierge desk fields the question often enough that they have a stock answer about staff schedules.

The Oak Bar is where the alcohol stories pile up. During Prohibition the bartenders served liquor in teapots until a raid finally caught the legislators drinking in there, and during the suffrage fight both pro- and anti-suffrage men were drinking in the same room with a small pass-through window where their wives, who weren't allowed in the bar, could be handed cocktails. Minnesota Fats lived at the hotel in the 1980s and ran a pool table on the mezzanine where he hustled guests who didn't know who he was. The bar is heavy with the people who drank in it.

The Hermitage is a Forbes Five-Star property and a heavily decorated historic landmark, with the Capitol Grille downstairs and a gorgeously restored 1910 men's restroom in the basement that's a tourist destination on its own. The ghost stories are quieter and travel by word of mouth from staff. The crying baby on the ninth floor. The Edwardian woman on the upper floors in her long skirt. The mirror that splits in half and then doesn't.

The mirror account is the one that lingers. Guests standing in the marble lobby of a hotel where nineteen states' worth of political pressure was brokered in August 1920, watching a fracture walk across a century-old piece of glass for a beat, then looking again to find it whole.