Inn at Carnall Hall

Guests at the Inn at Carnall Hall in Fayetteville, Arkansas keep seeing a woman in the halls. She wears a long gown and seems to float, calm, like she belongs there. Some describe her whole. Others say she appears only from the shoulders to the waist — no head, no feet, just a torso in a dress drifting past the doors.

The staff have a name for her. They call her Ella — after the teacher the building itself was named for.

Ella Howison Carnall taught English and modern languages at the University of Arkansas until typhoid fever killed her in 1894. She was 32. The building — the first women's dormitory on the campus, the second-oldest thing standing there after Old Main — didn't open until more than a decade later. It was named for a teacher who died before it existed, built for women she would never teach. She never set foot in it.

By the accounts that have followed the place for years, she moved in anyway.

The dorm closed in the late 1960s. After that the building cycled through everything: a fraternity, faculty offices, then years sitting empty, slated for demolition before preservationists pulled it back. It reopened in 2003 as a hotel of about 50 rooms with a restaurant called Ella's. Through all four lives, the same woman kept turning up.

Guests today report lights coming on by themselves. Reflections in photographs of the furniture. And the strangest, quietest one: indentations pressed into the beds in rooms no one has checked into, as if someone has just sat down on them.

They say she's gentle. Helpful, even. The tourism office and the staff describe her the same way — calm, friendly, watching over the place.

Which is its own kind of unsettling. The woman drifting the halls without a head, settling onto beds in empty rooms, is supposed to be the kind one. She was here before the hotel, before the dorm even closed. The building was only ever named after her — and everyone seems to agree she's the one who actually moved in.