In Brief
A ghost-tour guide in Aiken, South Carolina used to point his groups at two corner windows of Hotel Aiken that were never lit the same way two nights running. As he told it, the ghost migrated in from a grand resort that burned down the road in 1898.
The Full Story
For years, a ghost-tour guide named Kent Cubbage would stop his groups outside Hotel Aiken, in downtown Aiken, South Carolina, and point up at the second-floor windows on the northeast corner. They were never lit the same way two nights running.
"Something in those windows was different every single night," he said. "There would be a light and then there would be no light. There would be a red light and then there would be a green light." Drapes one evening, bare glass the next.
The ghost he was pointing at, though, didn't start at Hotel Aiken. As Cubbage tells it, it came from a block away and a century back.
A grand wooden resort called the Highland Park Hotel opened nearby in 1870, catering to the wealthy Northerners who wintered in Aiken. A woman from New York, dying of tuberculosis, was turned away from it — refused a room even after she offered to rent the entire hotel. In 1898, the Highland Park burned to the ground. Nobody proved she set it, but she was never seen again, and, as Cubbage puts it, "the legend grew that she had made the Highland Park Hotel her funeral pyre."
The resort was rebuilt on the same spot, and that second hotel was torn down too. The story goes that when it was finally gone, the woman's spirit moved down the road, into the building that had become the Holley House and is now Hotel Aiken.
Guests began reporting the ordinary disturbances and a few stranger ones. A television in one room that switches on by itself while the room sits empty. Maid carts that relocate when no one is watching. Cubbage describes guests woken "by all this banging and clanging, this cacophony in the hallway," with no one out there to make it.
Aiken's city manager, Stuart Bedenbaugh, doesn't buy any of it. "I don't know specific examples," he said, "and nobody has described to me what they may have witnessed."
But that is the shape of this ghost: it leaves no body, no name, no building behind. It outlived the Highland Park that burned in 1898, the hotel that replaced it and came down anyway, the Holley House, and now it has outlived Hotel Aiken too. The place has been closed and vacant for years, waiting on a slow restoration. Whatever the town spent all those nights watching in the corner windows, it is watching an empty building now.
