Hotel Aiken

Hotel Aiken in South Carolina is haunted by multiple spirits, including a man who jumped from Room 302's window and possibly a tuberculosis-stricken New York woman whose grudge against the original Highland Park Hotel may have followed the property. Ghost tour guide Kent Cubbage watched the second-floor windows change nightly, and staff documented self-flushing toilets, rolling maid carts, and phantom phone calls.

The TV in Room 225 turns itself on when nobody is staying there. Staff at Hotel Aiken got used to it, the way you get used to a coworker who microwaves fish. It happens, you deal with it, you move on. Room 302 has a worse reputation. A man jumped from the window there, and guests in that room have seen a stooped elderly woman standing near the bed, watching them sleep.

Hotel Aiken sits at 235 Richland Avenue West, and its ghost stories are tangled up with a building that no longer exists. The original Highland Park Hotel opened in 1870 as a massive wooden resort catering to wealthy Northerners who wintered in Aiken during the town's "Winter Colony" era. In 1898, a fire leveled it. The story goes that a wealthy woman from New York with tuberculosis had been turned away from the Highland Park, and the fire happened almost immediately after. People talked. Nobody proved anything, but the rumor stuck for over a century.

A new Highland Park Hotel, this one a Spanish Colonial Revival building, opened on the same site in 1915 with 80 rooms. It lasted until 1940 when it was demolished. Around that time, staff at what would become Hotel Aiken started noticing things. The theory, passed along by Aiken ghost tour guide Kent Cubbage, is that the spirit of the New York woman migrated from the Highland Park site to the new hotel down the road. It doesn't quite line up as a story, and nobody seems to care. It is the story Aiken tells.

Cubbage has led ghost tours past the hotel for years and has seen things he can't explain. The windows on the second floor, northeast corner, never looked the same twice. "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. There would be drapes and then there would be no drapes."

The hotel is closed now, but the list of phenomena that the longtime bartenders and regulars cataloged over the years is long. Toilets flushing on their own. Doors swinging open in empty hallways. Maid carts rolling to new positions when left unattended. Crying, whispering, and screaming from rooms with no guests. One visitor heard an old-fashioned phone ringing faintly between 1 and 2 a.m., along with a music box and muffled conversation, in a room that had no phone.

The building has been through several names and identities. It was the Holley House before it was Hotel Aiken. The ghosts, if they care about the nameplate out front, haven't said so. They seem more interested in the windows, the hallways, and Room 302, where someone chose to leave in the most permanent way possible.