In Brief
On the sixth floor of the Hotel Baker in St. Charles, Illinois — the floor where the chambermaids once lived — guests say the bedding gets pulled off them in the night by hands they can't see. The maid blamed for it walked down to the Fox River and didn't come back.
The Full Story
The Hotel Baker sits on the bank of the Fox River in St. Charles, Illinois, and the floor people talk about is the sixth. Stay up there and the story goes that the bedding gets pulled off you in the dark — slid off the mattress by hands no one can see. Guests report strange voices on that floor, and a low moaning near the old storage room.
The sixth floor is where the chambermaids used to live. And the chambermaid is who the story is about.
She worked here and was engaged to a man who also worked at the hotel, and he left her. Some say she was jilted at the altar. Others say he walked out after a night of poker. Either way she went down to the Fox River, the same water that runs past the building, and drowned herself. She never really left. Nobody can give you her name or the year it happened, and the people who repeat it will tell you so themselves.
Colonel Edward J. Baker built the hotel in 1928 and wanted it to be "the world's finest small hotel." He spent something close to a million dollars on it — a Spanish Revival landmark with its own hydroelectric plant on the river and a ballroom called the Rainbow Room, whose glass dance floor lit up from beneath with 2,620 colored lights. Louis Armstrong and Tommy Dorsey played it. Baker lived in the penthouse until he died in 1959.
He isn't the one guests report. Some say his wife, Harriet, keeps to the top balcony. But the floor that unsettles people is the one above all the grandeur — the cramped staff quarters where the help once slept, now storage. The hotel marks no room as haunted. The river is still right there, running past the windows, the same water she is said to have walked into.
