In Brief
The Roads Hotel in Atlanta, Indiana keeps a second-floor room behind the stairs full of old dolls said to move on their own. An investigator sat on the bed there and dared a ghost named Sarah to touch him. A voice answered him on tape with two words.
The Full Story
There's a room behind the stairs on the second floor of the Roads Hotel in Atlanta, Indiana, and it is full of old dolls. People who run the building say the dolls move on their own, and sometimes get thrown across the room. They blame a woman named Sarah.
One night an investigator sat on the bed in that room and asked Sarah to come up and touch him. A recorder caught a feminine voice answering him: "you wish." Investigators keep pulling EVPs out of that room. Visitors say worse happens there too, that hair gets pulled and clothes get tugged, and one person came out claiming they'd been gripped hard enough to bruise.
Who Sarah was, no record can say. The story has her working at the hotel during its brothel years and murdered in the 1930s, after a customer turned on her. There is no death record, no documented name beyond Sarah. The vagueness is part of the telling, since whatever happened to her happened inside an illegal house that kept no books. Everything about her comes from the stories the place has collected.
The people who can be documented are the Roads family. Newton and Clara Roads had the 22-room Queen Anne built in 1893, betting on the natural gas boom that was filling central Indiana with money and rail traffic. Their 18-year-old son Everett caught tuberculosis and died in one of the rooms in 1909. Newton died in the building in January 1926. Clara, left alone, kept the doors open through Prohibition by quietly running it as a speakeasy and brothel for the rail trade. She died there in 1941. Three of the family that built it, all gone inside its walls.
The hotel stopped taking guests long ago, and the National Register listed the building in 1987 for its architecture rather than any of this. Crystal Couch owns it now, and her brother Mike runs monthly Saturday investigations, the proceeds going to a charity he founded after losing his own leg. The place has drawn paranormal TV crews, including "Ghost Hunters," and the Booth brothers filmed it for a 2018 video.
What the visitors report is steady. Apparitions of men, women, and children. Footsteps on the staircase over an empty house. Lights and doors working on their own. On night-vision footage, a dark shadow figure has been caught patrolling the first-floor living room, and the staff think that one is Newton, still walking the place he built.
The dolls in Sarah's room are the only thing nobody attributes to a Roads. And she's the one who answers back.
