Inn at Carnall Hall

Built in 1905 as Arkansas's first women's dormitory and named for English professor Ella Carnall, who died of typhoid fever before seeing the building. Guests at the 50-room hotel describe a headless woman in a white gown drifting through hallways and unexplained indentations on beds in empty rooms.

Carnall Hall cost $35,000 to build in 1905, funded by the Arkansas State Legislature. It was the first women's dormitory in the state, designed by Little Rock architects Charles L. Thompson and O.L. Gates in Colonial Revival style. The building was named for Ella Howison Carnall, a University of Arkansas English professor who graduated from the school in 1881 and taught there until she died of typhoid fever in 1895. She never saw the building that carries her name. According to guests and staff, she found it anyway.

The three-story red brick building had 44 bedrooms, ten piano practice rooms on the third floor, its own kitchen and dining room, and an independent steam heating plant. It housed women students from 1906 until 1967. Then Phi Gamma Delta fraternity moved in from 1969 to 1977. Academic departments occupied it after that until the building went empty in 1991. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982.

In 2001, the Carnall Inn Development Company took on a 17-month renovation and reopened the building in 2003 as the Inn at Carnall Hall, a 50-room hotel with Ella's Restaurant on the ground floor. The ghost stories started long before the renovation, during the dormitory years, and followed the building through every transformation.

The most frequently described phenomenon is a woman in a white gown floating through hallways, visible from the waist to the shoulders but missing her head and feet. Multiple guests across different years have described the same figure. Bed indentations appear in unoccupied rooms, pressed down as if someone is sitting on the edge. Lights switch on by themselves. Photographs taken in rooms with polished furniture show reflections that don't match anything visible to the photographer.

Staff and paranormal enthusiasts attribute the activity to Ella Carnall. The logic is straightforward: she dedicated her career to the university, died before the dormitory named in her honor was completed, and her spirit moved in to the building she never got to see in life. The description of the ghost as calm, friendly, and helpful fits the profile of a beloved professor rather than someone with unfinished grievances.

The inn sits on the University of Arkansas campus near the intersection of Arkansas Avenue and Maple Street, surrounded by Greek houses. It operates as a working hotel. Guests book rooms, eat at the restaurant, and occasionally wake up to find the impression of someone sitting on the foot of their bed with no one there. The building has been a dormitory, a fraternity house, an academic office, and a hotel over its 120 years. Through all of it, the ghost in the white gown has stayed put.