Historic Roads Hotel

Three Roads family deaths and a murdered brothel worker named Sarah. Her doll room throws things, and an EVP caught her answering "you wish."

Everett Roads was eighteen when tuberculosis confined him to a room in his parents' hotel. He died there in 1909. The hotel didn't close. His mother Clara kept running it, and after her husband Newton died in the building in January 1926, she kept running it alone, through Prohibition, when the hotel quietly added a speakeasy and a brothel to its rail-traveler trade. She died in the building herself in 1941. Three confirmed deaths in one house, all of them the family that ran it.

When the central Indiana natural gas boom collapsed, the Roads Hotel had to become something else. It did. During Prohibition it added hidden rooms and trick doors and a local reputation that involved liquor, women, and a rotating cast of serious criminals. John Dillinger and Al Capone are both rumored to have stopped here. The rumor is enduring and unprovable, which is basically the definition of a good hotel rumor. The building itself is a twenty-two-room Queen Anne in the small town of Atlanta, Indiana, put up in 1893 by a contractor named Abraham Kauffman after Newton and Clara Roads commissioned it to cash in on the gas boom while it lasted. Atlanta had rail access and not much else.

Sarah is the Roads Hotel's fourth ghost. She worked at the hotel during the brothel years and was killed in the 1930s, according to haunted-location sources, after an encounter with a customer that turned violent. The sources are vague on specifics, which may be the nature of a death that happened inside an illegal establishment nearly a century ago. Her room contains a collection of old dolls that move on their own and occasionally get thrown. An EVP captured in that room by multiple independent investigators caught a female voice answering a challenge with the words "you wish." Visitors in the room have had their hair pulled and their clothes tugged. One of them, according to staff, got gripped by the arm hard enough to bruise.

Newton and Clara stayed too. A dark shape patrols the first-floor living room on night vision footage; staff call it Newton, checking on his hotel. Clara, the one who kept the lights on through two husbands' deaths and a federal liquor ban, is the one credited with the more physical contact. Everett mostly stays in the room where he died, which is what sick eighteen-year-olds who get locked in a room tend to do.

The hotel isn't a hotel anymore. The current owner is Crystal Couch, and her brother Mike runs the tours. They host public and private paranormal investigations, and the proceeds go to the Lost Limbs Foundation, the owner's charity that helps amputee children pay for prosthetics. It's a fitting charity for a building this full of loss. Ghost Hunters filmed here. So have other paranormal shows. The building is on several "most haunted in Indiana" lists, which tells you less about the ghosts than it does about how hard Mike has worked to make this place known.

Standing in Sarah's doll room, the first thing you hear after the tour guide steps out is your own breathing. The second thing, if you're lucky or unlucky, is a doll hitting the floor from a shelf nobody was near.